Jim Clark - Legacy

Legacy

Clark achieved 33 pole positions and won 25 races from his 72 Grands Prix starts in championship races. He is remembered for his ability to drive and win in all types of cars and series, including a Lotus-Cortina, with which he won the 1964 British Touring Car Championship; IndyCar; NASCAR, driving a Ford Galaxie for the Holman Moody team; Rallying, where he took part in the 1966 RAC Rally of Great Britain in a Lotus Cortina; and sports cars. He competed in the Le Mans 24 Hour race in 1959, 1960 and 1961, finishing second in class in 1959 driving a Lotus Elite, and finishing third overall in 1960, driving an Aston Martin DBR1. He also competed in American NASCAR stock cars, driving a 7 litre Holman Moody Ford on the banked speedway at Rockingham, North Carolina on 29 October 1967. During his time in Formula One, he only had four major accidents from 1960-1968 which is perhaps the fewest ever of his generation of drivers.

He was also able to master difficult Lotus sportscar prototypes such as the Lotus 30 and 40. Clark had an uncanny ability to adapt to whichever car he was driving. Whilst other drivers would struggle to find a good car setup, Clark would usually set competitive lap times with whatever setup was provided and ask for the car to be left as it was.

Sir Jackie Stewart on what made Clark such a good driver:

He was so smooth, he was so clean, he drove with such finesse. He never bullied a racing car, he sort of caressed it into doing the things he wanted it to do.

He apparently had difficulty understanding why other drivers were not as quick as himself. After Clark's death, his father told Dan Gurney that he was the only driver Clark ever feared. When Clark died, fellow driver Chris Amon was quoted as saying, "If it could happen to him, what chance do the rest of us have? I think we all felt that. It seemed like we'd lost our leader."

Jim Clark is buried in the village of Chirnside in Berwickshire. A memorial stone can be found at the Hockenheimring circuit, moved from the site of his crash to a location closer to the current track and a life size statue of him in racing overalls stands by the bridge over a small stream in the village of his birth, Kilmany in Fife. A small museum, which is known as The Jim Clark Room, can be found in Duns.

He was an inaugural inductee into the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame in 2002.