Others on Jim Clark - From Autocar 8 April 1978

Trevor Taylor – Lotus teammate. "You could always learn so much from Jimmy. You had to ask him the right question, mind, but I remember that if you were following him he often did things with the car that made you wonder. And when you questioned him about them he'd have a perfectly logical explanation. 'Well this is an understeer sort of corner,' he'd say, 'and you've got to drive it like that to get the power on early coming out.' He was a complete natural, was Jimmy, a complete, born natural. Even in formula Junior it was obvious. We had some pretty close races in those days, with me in a privately-entered Lotus 18 and Jimmy in the works cars, but whenever I was racing with him it always seemed to me that nothing was an effort for him. He was never in trouble, he was always in control. Me, I had to work much harder to go just as fast. Which is why I was so stunned when I heard about the accident at Hockenheim. You couldn't believe that anything would ever happen to Jimmy, he was that good."

Alec Maskell, Dunlop tyre engineer who worked closely with Clark in the mid-1960s. Maskell was able to appreciate, first hand, Clark's genius as a driver. Dunlop, indeed, had living proof of Clark's superiority: Tyre wear figures showed that most drivers wore some tyres quicker than others. Jack Brabham used his rears more than he did his fronts; the converse was true of Dan Gurney and John Surtees. The astonishing thing about Clark was that his tyre wear rate was the same on the four corners of the car, and that he used substantially less rubber than anyone else. In other words, he seemed to use all four tyres equally. Clark couldn't explain why, and nor could Dunlop. But the figures went some way towards highlighting his exceptional qualities.

If I have any memories of Clark in action, they are of this amazing ability to slide the car as a whole. You rarely saw under- or oversteer with Clark: his corrections were so small, so perfect, that, from a distance, he appeared to be cornering on rails. Clark himself goes some way towards describing this in his autobiography:

". . . I know I am inclined to go into a corner earlier than most people. By that I mean that most people run deep into a corner before turning the wheels to go round. In this way you can complete all your braking in a straight line, as everyone recommends you do, before setting the car up for the corner; but I prefer to cut into the corner early and even with my brakes still on to set up the car earlier. In this way, I almost make a false apex because I get the power on early and try to drift the car through the true apex and continue with this sliding until I am set up for the next bit of straight."

In any event, Maskell remembers Clark as being so naturally good that he was something of an "awkward" test driver. "I think Chapman is right when he says that Clark used to adapt to a car's handling rather than criticise it," says Maskell, "because he just seemed to have this ability to knock half-a-second off his times whenever he felt like it. We'd test tyres all day, select the best one from his comments, and then find that he could go just as quickly, if not quicker, on the control tyres. With that, he'd smile sheepishly and make out that he didn't really know which was the better tyre, or why he'd gone quicker.

"I think he had something that I've never seen in another driver. With Rindt, for instance, you knew there would be another half second as soon as he got worked up; but Jimmy, he never drove like a tiger - he was just automatically and naturally quick. I never remember him looking untidy on the track and, of course, he was always better on tyre wear and temperatures - always run cooler than Graham Hill for instance."

Andrew Ferguson Lotus team manager from 1960-1969,

"He was the best driver I've worked with in every way," he remembers. "And the funny thing is that whenever Jimmy had a little moan or he was a bit upset about something, he used to say, 'you know, you won't miss me till I’m gone. I'm such a beauty, you'll only miss me then.' And, of course, he was absolutely right: Because you've got no idea just how easy he was."

"He was so free and easy", says Ferguson. "And, of course, he made the team the same way. Things happened in such a relaxed manner that I can't remember any time when he was really uptight. He never took you to one side and gave you a blast, or even hinted at it. It was a case of 'I wonder if you could do this, if it's not too much trouble?' And you'd get lulled into it all; and, after he'd gone, you realized that you'd been living in paradise."

Like the time that Jimmy won the Belgian Grand Prix in pouring rain, at Spa, 1965, He flew straight to Indianapolis, practised, then returned to Europe. Ferguson was in the seat next to him. "It was the first time we'd had a chance to talk about Spa, so I said, 'that was great, wasn't it?' I mean, after all, he'd made the rest of the field look stupid.

"' 'Yeah,' said Jimmy, still biting his fingernails. 'But it was a bit tricky, you know. I was quite lucky, actually.' He was biting away, because I think we were waiting for some food or something. 'How do you mean?' I asked him, because it was obvious that he was trying to tell me something.

" 'Well,' said Jimmy, 'for three-quarters of the distance the gear lever kept popping out, and I was having to drive the thing one-handed. It was a very tiring race.' "

'" 'That's the trouble with you,' I said. 'No-one will ever know about that. In Fangio's time, Fangio used to tell a little story about how the car had fallen to pieces and how he'd only had three wheels, this sort of thing. It wouldn't half improve your image,' I said, 'if we could put out press releases about your problems.'

"' 'Oh no,' said Jimmy, 'Don't do that. We don't want to upset Colin. We could never do that.' "

Ferguson says that Jim was "completely mesmerised" by Chapman. "We all followed Chapman, and so did Jimmy", he says.  "For a long time Jimmy and Colin always shared a twin-bedded room at races. You imagine that. A team manager sharing the same room with his Number One driver. That'd never happen these days. Yet Jimmy and Colin always used to share the same room. Colin used to take a lot of interest in the drivers, dashing about and making sure that they were all in bed. At Indy, he always used to have the keys to all our rooms, and he'd walk in at any time. You'd have a hell of a job trying to fit a different lock to your door....