lark could drive anything, anywhere – often winning in a wide variety of cars on the same day. And his experiences ranged from mud-plugging Mini Moke to wallowing ‘Yank Tank’, from 200mph Indycar on a twisting Swiss mountain road to two-stroke and three-wheeling saloons, and from the Lister-Jaguar ‘Flat Iron’ to a flat-over-crest rally car.

His performance on the 1966 RAC Rally was astounding, matching the Scandinavians in the forests after a single day’s testing in Kent woodland. Experienced Brian Melia’s disappointment at losing his Lotus Cortina drive to Clark was quickly subsumed by admiration as he viewed from the co-driver’s seat the Scot’s rapid adaptation and rare speed: here was a potential champion.

Even the eventual accident was a “proper job”, leaping a Scottish ditch, digging in and rolling: “We tripped over the Border!” joked Clark, clearly happy to be home for a time and having fun. Not wanting it to end, he insisted that they stay on to spectate. The team, wary to begin with, loved him.

Rallying had also provided him with his first 100mph experience when he took the wheel of a ‘Big Healey’ on the 1955 Scottish Rally. Car owner, co-driver and cousin Bill Potts’ urgings of caution also quickly gave way to admiration: this 19-year-old had the situation entirely under control.

Not that Clark always felt so. Having recorded the first 100mph sports car lap of a British circuit – at Yorkshire’s Full Sutton in Border Reivers’ Jaguar D-type in April 1958 – he had his parameters reset a few months later when the Lister-Jags of Masten Gregory and Archie Scott Brown, dicing for the lead of the Spa GP, scratched past when lapping him. Clark, whose first experience of a Continental road circuit this was, considered stopping racing there and then – even before a pall of smoke signalled compatriot Scott Brown’s last moments.

Just over a year later Clark would be faster than Gregory as they shared Ecurie Ecosse’s Tojeiro-Jaguar in the RAC Tourist Trophy at Goodwood. Hey, he could do this.

But he would still have considered himself an amateur when in June 1960 he was third at Le Mans, aboard an Aston Martin in which he more than matched co-driver Roy Salvadori, winner the previous year in a sister car. (Clark had also beaten power-packed Moss in the public display of anticipation, agility and co-ordination that was the run-and-jump start. Here was a rival to be reckoned with on every level.)

Clark’s sports car opportunities as a professional would, however, be limited not only by Chapman’s continued refusal to attend Le Mans, which he considered a race between the French and a bunch of other mugs, but also his inability to provide a competitive ‘big banger’ with which to contest the lucrative Can-Am series: Chapman had a blind spot over the Lotus 30, which looked unmanageable even in Clark’s hands.

But there was that time his 95bhp Lotus 23 whistled into view with a 28sec lead after the greasy opening lap of the 1962 Nürburgring 1000km. Clark would still be leading 12 laps later when he slid into a ditch, overcome by exhaust fumes. The extraordinary could be expected whenever he took a start.

Chapman had spotted that special something from the moment of their hectic dice in, ahem, matching Elites – it’s likely that the Guv’nor’s factory car was superior to any production/privateer version – at Boxing Day Brands Hatch in 1958. Chapman, a fast and experienced driver, and hardly lacking self-confidence, got the better of it when a backmarker got in the way – but his ‘discovery’ of Clark was the more important result that day. His combining of this Next Big Thing with his Next Giant Leap would regularly reshape the sport.

They would become its dominant force, in fact, global names and faces; front men to a brand of burgeoning worth in need of protection. The mercurial Chapman, though he would eventually overstretch himself on several fronts, was (mainly) in his element; Clark was (decreasingly) less so.

But whenever those demands beyond his control became too irksome verging on stressful, he could shrink himself into a cockpit, be swallowed by a cabin, and thrill to his skill – just as he had when flinging the familial Sunbeam saloon around an autotest’s cones, or when good friend Iain Scott Watson secretly entered him and loaned him a car for his first race, in June 1956.

The windswept Crimond airfield in north Aberdeenshire was most definitively an outpost of motor racing. And Clark would finish last in that smoking, ring-a-ding-ding DKW; the only car he had passed was coasting into retirement. But he had been considerably quicker than the car’s owner. Thus Scott Watson was the first but far from the last to wonder exactly how Clark was going so quickly.