Sheep Farmer Becomes Formula One Champion – James Clark born March 4, 1936.

James Clark – the indecisive farmer who was transformed behind a wheel- (born March 4, 1936, Kilmany, Fife, Scot.—died April 7, 1968, Hockenheim, W.Ger.) was a Scottish automobile racer who became the world driving champion in 1963, when he won a record 7 of 10 title events, and in 1965, when he won 6 of 10 as well as the Indianapolis 500-mile race. Both years he drove rear-engined Lotus-Fords. Clark, who began racing in 1956, made his first tour of the international circuit in 1960 as a member of the Lotus team. He was killed in a racing accident.

The Scottish Formula One double world champion was modest and unpretentious but a supreme competitor on the track. Jim Clark was almost certainly the only Formula One world champion as comfortable with a shepherd’s crook as with a steering wheel. Had he not been killed in Germany 50 years ago this coming weekend, his family’s farm in the Scottish borders is the place to which he would have returned when his days on the globe’s racetracks were done.

Jim Clark represented for many people everything that is good about motor racing, and what one would call the “good life.” He was polite, he was modest, he was kind‐hearted, and calm to the point of wandering almost as if in a dream through the motor racing scene. Yet he was so talented as a driver, and that talent shone through to even the least interested spectator. The more one looks into Jim Clark’s life, the more one realizes that he was a very ordinary human being who had the good fortune to discover his true vocation in life.

Throughout his career, Jim Clark was a farmer who spent most of his time wrestling with the accounts and cursing the government over subsidies. It has often been said that his rural upbringing gave him something solid to fall back en, and an attitude toward life that allowed him to put his subsequent motor racing career into the correct perspective. He never failed to be amazed at the most ordinary things, and went through life with a wide‐eyed fascination for almost everything around him.

Perhaps the most enigmatic area of Clark’s life centered around his relationships with people. To some he appeared shy when, in fact, a better description would have been “reserved.” In the last years of his, life he was visibly opening out more and had learned to be more relaxed with people he might previously have thought of as his social superiors.

Personal Note: As a young boy, I made a model of Clark’s Ford Lotus. Now, decades later. as an old man, I made a blog post.

Jim Clark was not as fierce as many will make out and certainly not as shy and timid as others suspect. In short, he was a human being who has done something he likes doing to the best of an incredible ability and yet has remained similar to the person he was when he started.

SOURCE: Britania, NYT, Guardian, Road and Track