What was Jim Clark really like?

Despite the ever-present risk of retreating into rosy-glow nostalgia, the Monday morning after this year’s Goodwood Revival meeting leaves me with a pressing need. Anyone with half a heart who saw the Jim Clark tribute supported by 50-odd sheep – in honour of that extraordinary sportsman’s wool-farming background – storming towards Madgwick Corner ‘50 wide’ must surely have been impressed.

The biggest Jim Clark fan I know is Dario Franchitti, the three-time Indy 500 race winner (2007, ’10, ’12) and four-time IndyCar champion (2007, 2009-11). He had been sitting in Jimmy’s 1965 race-winning Lotus-Ford 38, having a quiet moment imagining what the great man himself must have been thinking on the Brickyard’s startline just before their rolling lap, 60 years ago. “Then I suddenly came to, and sheep are streaming past the car! I was totally disorientated. That was just surreal – it was as if fandom had at last just blown my mind..!”.

Back when two-thirds of the world atlas was coloured red for the British Empire, schoolboys here learned to expect the archetypal British sportsman to be modest, magnanimous and unassuming in triumph; cheerful, philosophical and sporting in defeat. As decades passed that’s how double-World Champion Jim Clark is largely viewed today; although retiring by nature he remained a friendly and approachable person. That day in April 1968, when Jimmy died in that piddling little Formula 2 race at Hockenheim, the loss of the Border farmer-turned-World Champion racing driver typified so many traditional values it all still hurts. From 1960 to that fateful day he raced cars lacking a Lotus badge barely 20 times, and 15 of those involved Scottish Border Reivers and Essex Racing Stable Aston Martins within only the first four seasons of that span.

“As a driver he was a genius. Do you know, I doubt if he ever fully realised it”

One day in 1978 I was in Colin Chapman’s office at Ketteringham Hall and showed him an old photograph of Jimmy gazing up at him from the cockpit of one of their Formula 1 Lotuses. Colin gazed at it intently, silent for at least 10 seconds – by the frenetic standards of ‘Chunky’, an age. He eventually broke the spell, glanced up, caught my eye, and blinked as if startled awake from a brief daydream. Never given to display private emotion, he just tapped his right index finger against the print, then said slowly “He was the finest man I ever knew. As a driver he was a complete genius…

“And do you know, I doubt if he ever fully realised it…”

Cricket fans will know that Sir Jack Hobbs was similarly regarded in the then white-flannelled game – an almost God-like figure. But of course in reality, Jim certainly had his failings. Outside the cockpit of a racing car he could be almost terminally indecisive. Jackie Stewart recalls when the pair of them were sharing a road car in rural New Zealand, driving from one Tasman Championship race to another. Different-team rivals sharing the same hire car – imagine that. On the Canterbury Plains they came upon an unmanned level crossing – straight (and deserted) railway track in clear sight for miles either way. But Jim sat there, gazing from side to side, before turning to Jackie and asking plaintively “Well…what do you think?”.

Of course the Team Lotus boys adored the Scot, though long-time team manager Andrew Ferguson recalled one occasion Jim became genuinely upset with them. Through 1961-63 he wore a peakless crash helmet. Early pioneering space flights had sent monkeys into orbit. Some wag had pinned a photograph of Jimmy in his peakless helmet behind the door of Andrew’s tiny office in the old Cheshunt factory. It was captioned: “Next time you go into orbit, we’ll hold your banana”.

Jim spotted it. In those early days he was quite strait-laced and earnest. He immediately took immense offence to what he’d seen. Andrew vividly recalled him snapping “The trouble with you people is that you just take me for granted. I’m such a treasure, you’ll miss me when I’m gone”. Tragically, Andrew would have reason to confess “When I think about that now, he was absolutely right”.

On vanishingly rare occasions, like the most saintly of gentleman drivers, even he could vent at his mechanics. Far more typically, after losing time at the start of the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring in 1962 he hunted down the leaders, his progress apparently fantastic to behold. Then suddenly the gap grew, and Lotus chief mechanic Jim Endruweit realised he’d backed off.

“After he finished we asked him why.  It was most unlike Jimmy to say anything vulgar, but I remember he just said ‘Nothing wrong with the car. I just frightened myself fartless and settled for fourth…’ ”.

Boy oh boy – such a rare occasion. But worth remembering, 60 years after he won not only the 1965 Indy 500 but also that season’s Tasman, F1 Drivers’ and both British and French F2 titles.