Auto Racing: Hero with a Hot Shoe

(See Cover) “Moteurs!”

The command rang out at 3 p.m., and for one long moment last week, all the klaxons of hell seemed concentrated at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne Mountains of France. Electric starters whined. Engines coughed, belched smoke, bellowed and shrieked defiance at the wind. Yelling officials rushed wildly about, collaring reluctant mechanics and dragging them to the safety of the pits. The Tricolor flag fell. Gears crashed, tires squealed, and to a roar from 50,000 spectators, 17 Formula 1 racing cars hurtled off the starting grid for lap 1 of the French Grand Prix—oldest auto race in the world.

Gradually, as the howling machines disappeared into the hills, a hypnotic hush came over Clermont-Ferrand. In the pits, the loudest sound was the ticking of stop watches as mechanics and managers paced nervously to and fro. Even the public-address announcer stopped his chatter. The grandstand crowd sat in silence—eyes riveted on a spot 400 ft. below, where the winding asphalt track curled like a thin, black snake between two green hills. There, any second now, the leading car would appear. The noise came first: the rising nasal whine of a V-8 engine echoing off the hills; the gastric grunts as its driver worked down through the gears from fourth to second for a 60-m.p.h. curve; the throaty snarl as he stepped on the throttle, flashed into the open at 90 m.p.h. and vanished around still another bend.

Who was it? The car was green. No. 6. Driver wearing a blue helmet. Who else? “Clark!” somebody shouted, and suddenly the crowd was chanting: “Clark! Clark! Clark!” Sure enough, just 3 min. 29 sec. after it had left the starting grid, Jim Clark’s Lotus-Climax swept around the last left-hand bend into full view of the cheering stands. “C’est formidable!” gasped one awed Frenchman. Sighed another: “C’est termine”—It’s all over.

And so it was. After just one lap, Clark was already 2 sec.—or 100 yds. —ahead of his nearest pursuer. But for 39 more laps, he coolly, relentlessly poured it on until he had lapped all but three of his rivals, smashed the official lap record (82.39 m.p.h.) three times in succession and 15 times in all—eventually raising it to a fantastic 90.59 m.p.h. He did it on a course that he had never even seen until two days before the race, a course that ranks as one of the toughest in the world: 51 curves and 102 gear changes per five-mile lap, an average of one gear change every 2 sec. And he did it in a four-year-old “training car” instead of the new, 32-valve model he wrecked in practice when the suspension snapped at 80 m.p.h. (“a bit breathtaking, that”). When he finally coasted under the checkered flag, he was far enough ahead (26 sec.) that the only thing he could see in his rearview mirror was his own face.

Any Race, Anywhere. The victory was worth $1,820—a pittance compared to the $168,500 Clark won at Indianapolis on May 31 (TIME, June 11). It was also worth nine points toward his second Grand Prix championship, boosted his 1965 total so far to 27—ten more than his closest competitor. And it proved, for the nth time, that James Clark, O.B.F., of Edington Mains, Chirnside, Berwickshire, Scotland, is the world’s quickest man on wheels. It was only nine years ago that Clark drove in his first auto race, only five years ago that he sat behind the wheel of a Grand Prix car for the first time in his life. Today, at 29, he is the man to beat in any kind of race, in any kind of car, on any kind of track, anywhere.

Clark has raced and won in rearengined cars, front-engined cars, sports cars, grand-touring cars, saloons and Formula Juniors; on asphalt in South Africa, on dirt in Australia, on concrete in England. In 1963 Clark became the youngest Grand Prix champion in the history of motor racing, set another record by winning seven out of the ten events that counted toward the title. His 1965 record so far is even more impressive: three Grand Prix entered, three Grand Prix won. In five short, incredible years, Clark has won 16 world championship Grand Prix races—more than anybody else, including Britain’s fabled Stirling Moss, who spent eight years winning 14, and Argentina’s five-time World Champion Juan Manuel Fangio, who had 16 when he quit racing at the age of 47. Says Moss: “In terms of sheer native ability, Jim probably has more than any champion in history.” Lotus Designer Colin Chapman puts it even more emphatically: “Jim Clark is the greatest racing driver the world has ever seen.”

That covers an awful lot of drivers and an awful lot of races. Auto racing is as old as the second automobile. The first organized race was exactly 71 years ago, in 1894, and it was won by a bowler-hatted French nobleman named Count de Dion (later to be immortalized by having a racing rear axle named after him), who drove his steamer from Paris to Rouen, a distance of 79 miles, at an average speed of 12.6 m.p.h. Daredevil De Dion could not possibly have guessed the contagion he was spreading. Other races followed quickly—to Bordeaux, Marseille, Dieppe, Nice, Trouville, all the way across the Continent to Vienna. The British were a little late joining the fun: in the early days, by law, British motorists had to be preceded by men on foot crying their approach. But by 1903, on the Continent, 3,000,000 fans were turning out to watch a road race from Paris to Madrid. In the U.S. a year later, a Dearborn, Mich., farmer’s son was advertising his Ford as “the fastest car in the world”—and proving it by clocking 91.37 m.p.h. on the cinder-covered ice of Lake St. Clair. And it was not long before an enchanted U.S. public was thrilling to the exploits of a whole new set of heroes—Barney Oldfield, Ralph De Palma, and the mysterious “Baron von Rickenbacher*—helmeted hotspurs who risked life and limb in the glorious pursuit of speed.

“Wanna Drag, Mister?” The pursuit has never ceased; the sport has never slowed. Engines swelled in size from one to two, to four, six, eight, even to twelve cylinders, and speeds soared. In 1924, California’s Peter DePaolo “cracked a ton”—averaging 101.13 m.p.h. at the Indianapolis 500—and Europe’s dark genius, Ettore Bugatti, explained why he equipped his fantastically quick and costly cars with fantastically worthless brakes: “Automobiles are meant to go, not to stop.”

Racing supremacy became a matter of national pride. First the French, then the Italians dominated the Grand Prix circuit. In the late ’30s, the megalomania of Hitler gave the world the most awesome racing cars it has ever known: the Mercedes and Auto Unions. They were great, growling 600-h.p. monsters that could hit 200 m.p.h. on a straight —if they found one straight enough. Two world wars did their share to help, producing generations of youngsters thirsty for thrills. The terror of Thurber’s aunt, who tried vainly to conquer a car and wound up pleading, “Somebody take this goddamn thing away from me,” gave way to something the psychologists called “locomotor philia”: the teen-ager in his chromed and channeled-down hot-rod who leaned out at stop lights and sneered: “Wanna drag, mister?”

Today, auto racing is the third biggest spectator sport in the U.S. (after basketball and horse racing). In 1964, according to the National Hot Rod Association, 284,043 Americans competed in 1,904 drag-racing events, and they were watched by another 3,312,-542 Americans. Illinois’ Meadowdale Raceway, which attracted 50,000 paying customers in all of 1962, almost equaled that in one weekend last year; and California’s Riverside Raceway, site of the Grand Prix for Sports Cars, reports that attendance this year is running 14% ahead of 1964 (200,500) and that 1964 was 21% over 1963.

The biggest one-day sports attraction in the U.S. is the Indianapolis 500. Estimated attendance last May 31: anywhere from 250,000 to 300,000. By some countries’ standards, that’s a fair-to-middling crowd. Germany’s top sports-car race, the 1,000 kilometers of Nurburgring, regularly attracts more than 300,000 fans, and smaller weekly events at “the Ring” draw 30,000 to 50,000. Japan staged its first-ever “grand prix” race in 1963. Promoters were stunned when no fewer than 360 would-be Jimmy Clarks signed up to compete and 300,000 enthusiastic spectators turned out to cheer them on.

Chores & Concentration. The racing fan is more than a single spectator: he considers himself an active competitor, to one degree or another, in the world’s biggest participant sport. Nearly everyone who drives a car thinks, at one time or another, about beating the “hot shoe” in the next lane. Auto companies do their best to enhance the illusion: naming cars “Le Mans,” “Monza,” “G.T.O.,” “Grand Prix”; equipping them with bucket seats, tachometers, four-speed transmissions, and speedometers thoughtfully calibrated up to 160 m.p.h.—85 m.p.h. above the highest legal speed limit in the U.S.

But just because a fellow goes vroom-vroom, slides around the streets, breaks the speed limit and scares people, doesn’t mean that he is a racing driver. Racing isn’t all noise and speed and excitement. It is tedious little chores: counting revs, gauging distances, plotting trajectories. It is absolute concentration—the kind it takes to flick through a corner in driving rain at the limit of tire adhesion, the point at which one more mile-per-hour will send the car hurtling off the road. It is good driving at its best.

If a car addict is really serious about racing, he can enter one of the 9,000 stock-car or 2,000 sports-car races held in the U.S. each year. For $1,000, he can even take a one-week course in competition driving from Racer-Designer (Ford-Cobra) Carroll Shelby. For the really successful racing driver, the rewards are great. Fred Lorenzen has already won $63,675 on the stock-car circuit this year, and A. J. Foyt, who is equally adept in stock cars, sports cars and Indianapolis roadsters, won $250,000 in 1964. Another field is that led by Art Arfons, who hit 600 m.p.h. in his jet-powered Green Monster at Bonneville last October, now has his sights set on breaking the sound barrier—on land. Arfons has his hero too—Jimmy Clark—and at the Indianapolis 500, he was right there, one of the first in the line of well-wishers waiting to greet Clark after his victory. “How do you like that!” said the puzzled Scot. “This chap goes 600 m.p.h. and he congratulates me!”

“Wee Bit Slippery.” Handsome, hazel-eyed Jimmy Clark is the perfect pro driver. At 5 ft. 7¾ in. and 150 Ibs., he is even the perfect size: small enough to squeeze into the 2-ft.-wide cockpit of a 1,000-lb. Formula I car, big enough to see over its bonnet. He has the hands and arms of a jockey; his eyesight is phenomenal. His reflexes are so fast that he could probably pluck a fly out of midair. Clark’s business adviser, John Stephenson, remembers a midwinter ride in a sedan with Jim two years ago. “The road was wet and frosty,” says Stephenson. “Suddenly we were going into a tight downhill lefthander. I figured it as a 70-m.p.h. corner—but there we were doing 90. The tail started to go, and I thought, this is a shunt for sure. Then Jim made a tiny correction with the steering wheel,” and we were through the corner. All he said was, ‘Wee bit slippery back there.’ ”

What’s more, Clark loves his work. Not many Grand Prix drivers do. “This cruel sport,” the U.S.’s Dan Gurney calls it. In the last 20 years, 50-odd drivers have been killed in Grand Prix racing, and the circuit has its share of men who soothe their jangled nerves with alcohol and drugs. Clark’s nerves are fine. “When I’m going flat out, drifting through a corner, I’m not driving a car, really,” says Jim. “I’m putting myself through that corner. The car happens to be under me and I’m driving it, but I’m part of it and it’s part of me.” Ford Motor Co.’s Don Frey worked closely with Clark at Indianapolis, calls him “the epitome” of a racing driver. “His greatest asset,” says Frey, “is his imperturbability. When he was five or ten years old, a gyro began spinning somewhere inside him and he became his own standard maker. He’s inner-directed. He lives in his own world.”

On the Sly. Jim Clark has been “inner-directed” ever since he was nine and studied every move his father made as he drove the family Austin Seven around the fields of Edington Mains, the Clarks’ 1,200-acre Berwickshire farm. One evening Mama Clark glanced out the window to find the Austin rolling merrily across a field—apparently with nobody at the wheel. “Jim was told he must never do that again,” says Mrs. Clark. “But you can’t watch an active boy all the time, can you?” Shipped off to private school, Jim learned all about rugby, cricket, field hockey, golf—and not much else. So he quit at 16 and went home. “Normally there were two shepherds on the farm,” he recalls, “but one of them had left just about the time I came home. My father bought me a dog and a stick and said, ‘Right. Now get on with it.’ ”

Jimmy was running Edington Mains himself by the time he was 18; his father had taken over another farm 25 miles away. He had his own car, a vintage Sunbeam Talbot, and he began competing in local rallies, driving from point to point around the countryside in precisely the allotted time. “Father said it was a waste of time—and he wanted to know why my car cost five times as much to keep up as his did.” He kept on rallying, mostly on the sly. One night, driving his mother to a sister’s house to baby-sit, he worked up the courage to spring his big surprise. “I’m going to start motor racing,” he said. “Oh no you’re not,” said Mrs. Clark. Thereupon, Jim angrily kicked the throttle, gave the steering wheel a flick, and sent the car hurtling through a curve at 70 m.p.h. in a perfectly controlled drift. His mother said nothing more.

In 1958, Clark joined the Border Reivers, a Scottish auto-racing club—whose dark blue crash helmet he still wears today. From the start, recalls Fellow Border Reiver Ian Scott Wat son, “Jim drove so fast that most people were scared stiff to sit next to him.” Among the 150-odd trophies lying around the 500-year-old farmhouse at Edington Mains is a block of black wood with three toy cars (a Porsche, a Triumph, a Jaguar) mounted on top, along with the inscription:

PRESENTED BY THE BORDER REIVERS 1958 RACING SEASON

JIM CLARK 41 ENTRIES 35 AWARDS 20 FIRSTS

Curiously, Clark’s most important contest in 1958 was one he lost. On Boxing Day, Dec. 26, he drove the Reivers’ Lotus Elite in a ten-lap race at Brands Hatch, found himself involved in “a whale of a dice” with another Elite driven by a persistent, mustachioed fellow who bore a striking resemblance to Actor David Niven. His competitor, it later turned out, was Colin Chapman —a young, prematurely grey engineer who had graduated from London University in 1948, set up shop in 1952 as Lotus Cars, Ltd. For eight of the ten laps, Jim managed to stay in front. Then an Austin-Healey Sprite grazed his Lotus on a corner. Jim had all he could do to avoid plowing head-on into an embankment, and in the confusion Chapman nipped past to win. “Oh dear, nasty,” sighs Clark. “Anyhow, that was how I got to know Colin Chapman.”

The Full 10%. It was the start of a lasting friendship. “The formula for a champion race driver,” says Chapman, “is 10% natural ability, 90% experience and dedication.” His own dice with Clark at Brands Hatch had convinced him that Jim “had the 10% in full.” Already hard at work on a revolutionary Grand-Prix-car design—a “monocoque” body shell that needed no tubular skeleton, was actually little more than a steerable gas tank on wheels—Chapman decided that Clark was just the man to drive it. If he could get him.

Clark had already contracted to drive a Grand Prix car for Aston Martin, but Aston Martin never got around to building it. So for most of two years, Clark putted around in Formula Juniors and sports cars, until finally, in the middle of the 1960 season, Aston Martin gave him a break, loaned him to Lotus in time for the Dutch Grand Prix.

Some break. Chapman’s new monocoque Lotuses had proved to be a sensation all right. Stirling Moss had crashed in one and nearly been killed; Mike Taylor had crashed in one and nearly been killed; Allen Stacey had crashed in one and been killed. “I wouldn’t drive a car like that,” growled the U.S.’s Phil Hill. “You never know what piece is going to break off next.” In the Dutch Grand Prix, Clark’s gearbox broke; in the British Grand Prix, it was his suspension. In 1961, Jim finally was able to sign full time with Lotus, but even that didn’t change his luck. “I can keep up with the other drivers,” he said. “I just can’t keep up with their cars.”

Exactly 135 & Six. With all the Lotus’ ailments, it was only natural that Clark should become a pretty good sidewalk mechanic. So good, in fact, that he could turn a practice lap, whisk back into the pit, and announce: “We’ve got to jiggle the gear ratios—25, 27 maybe. Even with a good tow, I’m not getting the revs.” At the same time, he was polishing his driving skills to the point where he could say: “When I gointo a corner, I can tell you instantly whether I’m inches too far out or in from where I want to be. If I plan to head in at 135 m.p.h. and leave six inches, that’s it—exactly 135 and six.”

Nothing, though, could have prepared him for what happened at Monza midway through the 1961 season, when the Ferrari of Germany’s flamboyant Wolfgang von Trips swerved suddenly, with Jimmy’s Lotus directly behind. For one horrible instant, the two cars touched at 150 m.p.h. The Ferrari hurtled up an embankment, ricocheted off a steel guardrail, sheared through a wire fence, and spun end over end, back onto the track. Clark leaped out of his crumpled Lotus and pushed Trips’s car off the road. There was nothing he could do for Trips—or for 17 spectators who had been leaning on the fence. “When a thing like that happens,” says Jim, “you vow that you will never drive in a race again. But then your mind begins to function, and everyday things begin to crowd their way back. Three days later, you are packing your bags for another race. I am lucky to have been blessed with a short memory.”

In 1962 it looked like the same story all over again. Jimmy was leading the Dutch Grand Prix when he lost three of his five gears. At Monaco he was running second when his engine blew up. Before the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, mechanics worked all night to install a new engine and gearbox in Clark’s Lotus. Then next day Jimmy worked his way into the lead on the first lap—and ran away with the race for his first Grand Prix victory. Before the year was out, he had won two more, heard himself hailed as “the new Stirling Moss.” All that praise was flattering, but Jim would have preferred to win the championship that went instead to Britain’s Graham Hill. He would have had it, too, if “one bloody little runt of a screw” had not fallen off the distributor shaft and let loose his oil while he was leading in the South African Grand Prix.

Oil & Grapes. After that, it suddenly got easier to count Clark’s losses than his victories. In 1963, he lost Monaco altogether (frozen gearbox while leading by 10 sec.), had to settle for a second in the German Grand Prix (seven cylinders instead of eight) and a third in the U.S. (dead battery on the starting grid). But he won in The Netherlands with the wrong tires and in France with a rough engine, steered to victory in Belgium with one hand, using the other to hold his slipping shift lever safely in fifth. All told, Jim won seven Grand Prix, equalling Alberto Ascari’s 13-year-old record. He would have won the Indianapolis 500 besides, if officials had followed their own rules and black-flagged Parnelli Jones, whose Offenhauser was leaking oil all over the track.

Jim got untracked in 1964—at Indianapolis as well as on the Grand Prix circuit. Last year’s Indy 500 was the bloodiest in years, with two drivers dead, five injured in a fiery crash on the second lap. Clark missed that by being ahead of the pack. But speed did him no good when the tread peeled off a tire at 150 m.p.h. and the left rear wheel of his Lotus collapsed. Old Indy hands had to admire the way the “sporty-car” driver from Scotland held his bucking car steady and braked it to a stop on the infield grass (“Of course,” added Rodger Ward, “if he didn’t, his tail would’ve been a grape”). The same evil luck dogged Clark in Europe all summer: he won three out of his first five Grand Prix, seemed well on his way to a second straight championship when all sorts of little things started going wrong. In France it was a hole in a piston, in Germany a broken valve. Clark did not win another race, but still he lost the championship to Ferrari’s John Surtees only because his sump ran dry on the last lap of the last race, the Mexican Grand Prix.

This year it’s different. In his smashing victory at Indianapolis last May 31, he led for all but ten of the 200 laps, became the first foreigner to win the Indy 500 since Dario Resta in 1916. There was nothing remotely close, either, about South Africa: wearing a corset to ease the pain from a slipped disk in his back (souvenir of an Alpine snowball fight), he became the first man ever to top 100 m.p.h. on East London’s tricky, twisting track, coasted home a comfortable 31 sec. in front. At Spa last month, thunderstorms made the trip a little dicier than Jim expected (“It was damn dangerous out there”), but he still scored his fourth-straight victory in the Belgian Grand Prix and left the rest of the field strung out 1½ miles behind.

Little Compensations. The trouble with being a hero is living up to it, which for Clark means living on a dead trot. After his triumphant win at Clermont-Ferrand last week, Jim flew directly to London, spent most of a day processing requests for autographed photographs from U.S. fans. Then it was off to Reims for a business appointment, back to England for a day of test driving at Silverstone, and back to Reims again—this time to practice for a July 4 Formula II race. Ahead on the schedule: a Ford junket to Switzerland, a race in Britain, a trip to Rouen, a movie filming in Scotland, and the Dutch Grand Prix. This frantic life has its little compensations. Fortune, for one: his income from racing this year will top $230,000, and Edington Mains is busily in the black too, producing barley for Scotch-whisky distillers, sheep for wool, and cattle for slaughter. He has his Scottish sheep dog, Sweep, who pines for him while he is away—and his flaxen-haired girl friend, Sally Stokes, who travels with him and tends a stop watch in the pits.

Finally, there is fame. Jim Clark is already the most famous Scot since Robert Burns. Pretty girls strain against police barricades pleading for his attention; small boys dog his footsteps, clutching at his clothes. (At Indianapolis last year, the crowds were so insistent that Jim nervously warned a strolling companion: “Look, when we get to the paddock I’ve got to take off. If I walk, I’m in real trouble.”) The Queen of England invites Jim to garden parties. His fan mail runs to 100 or more letters a week: propositions from businessmen that he tears up angrily (“I don’t want to be bandied about like some blooming soap powder”), laboriously printed missives on lined paper that start out: “Mummy asked me yesterday what I want to be when I grow up, and I told her. You should have heard what mummy said.” A day’s mail may even bring a poem penned by a Scottish millworker:

A proven champion of the world,

O’er tricky tracks you’ve screeched and skirled.

And mony a braw held you’ve uncurled

Wi’ fear and fright,

As roond the hairpin bends you whirled,

Like Hell gane gyte.

Jim Clark still bites his nails (“It’s better than smoking,” he insists defensively). He still is shy: “If you’re a Scot, you don’t push yourself forward. That’s the way I was brought up.” He can’t quite get it through his head that he is a celebrity. “That bloke over there,” he asks, “why is he staring at me?” And his idea of a great old swinging time is to tug on his black mesh driving gloves, climb into his little Lotus Elan and go blasting through the countryside at 100 m.p.h.—eyes on the road, hands in the prescribed “10 minutes to 2” position—until he gets exhausted and turns back for home. “Actually,” says Jim Clark, “the only time I’m relaxed is when I’m behind the wheel.”

*Who later changed the spelling of his last name, became the U.S. ace of aces by shooting down 22 German planes in World War I, and is still known around the world as Eddie Ricken backer.