Jim Clark was born in Fife in 1936, the only son among five children of a farming family, and grew up on a farm near Duns in the Scottish Borders. He began racing in local events in his own Sunbeam, against the wishes of his parents, and was soon driving for the Border Reivers team. Colin Chapman saw him race in 1958 and signed him to Lotus. He stayed there for the rest of his life.
The partnership changed Formula One. Chapman built the lightest and cleverest cars on the grid — the monocoque Lotus 25 of 1962, the Lotus 49 with its engine as part of the structure — and Clark drove them with a smoothness that made his speed hard to see. He won the world title in 1963, taking seven of the ten rounds, and again in 1965.
In 1965 he also went to Indianapolis with a rear-engined Lotus 38 and won the 500, leading nearly every lap — the first rear-engined car and the first non-American driver to win there in almost fifty years. He remains the only driver to have won the Indianapolis 500 and the Formula One title in the same year.
The Lotus Elan in this catalogue came out of the same small works in 1962, the year Clark won his first Grand Prix for Chapman: the road car from the firm whose racing cars he made famous.
On 7 April 1968 he was killed at Hockenheim, in a minor Formula Two race he did not need to enter, when his car left the track at high speed on a wet straight and struck the trees. He had won twenty-five Grands Prix from seventy-two starts. Chris Amon spoke for most of the grid: if it could happen to Jimmy, what chance did the rest of them have?
Foto: Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
The cars
Cars in the catalog he drove, won in, or that were named after him.
