In other words, Brabham was never a chattering media monkey in the way that Hill was perceived to be. Viewed purely reductively, he did all the right things for a surprisingly long time but still managed to quit driving before he became an embarrassment. He wasn’t Mr Motor Racing, or the Sport’s Ambassador, or any of the other soubriquets Hill attracted. Nor did he cavort with strippers, judge the Miss World contest (yes) or appear with shameless frequency on TV, being droll and curiously eel-like. Hill, on the other hand, did all these things, was an indefatigable toiler who stayed on far too long, played up the Loveable Card act rather too much and would apparently do anything to be the centre of attention.
And where was his beautiful race for 1962, his Championship year? Where was his Moss at Monaco? Apart from being on the telly, what did he do better than anyone else on the track? Where was the defining victory?
It was just a little bit too showbiz.
9
JIM CLARK, COLIN CHAPMAN AND SELLING YOUR SOUL
By 1963, Cooper was starting to fade on the Grand Prix scene. Brabham had taken back-to-back Championships in ’59 and ’60, driving Coopers, and had scared the life out of the dotards at Indianapolis in 1961 in a tweaked version of the Cooper T53 F1 car – the first rear-engined car to compete there effectively, running as high as third place, before finishing ninth. But after Cooper came Ferrari with Phil Hill; and after Ferrari came BRM with Graham Hill. And after that, it was down to the apotheosis of the garagiste, Colin Chapman with his Lotus 18, 21, and then, the delicious Lotus-Climax 25, with which Clark savaged the opposition (BRM, Ferrari, Brabham – making his own cars, now – and Cooper) right through the ’63 season.
The tide was turning, again. Cooper may have had the single biggest idea of the modern Formula One age, by putting the engine at the back and making it work. But Chapman more than matched him with the sheer brilliance and fecundity of his innovations. The Big Idea with the Lotus 25? The monocoque chassis. Instead of building a cage-like space-frame, cladding it in metal, cradling the engine at the rear and sticking a driver in the middle, Chapman and chassis genius Mike Costin had devised a stupendously effective allin-one structure for the 1962 season: discarding the space frame entirely, welding sections of sheet metal together for the sides and tanks, with steel bulkheads front and back to hang the suspension on. It was vastly stiffer than the old spaceframes, much, much lighter, too, and, being generally a neater exploitation of resources, smaller and with a reduced frontal area, therefore good for wind resistance.
If the whole package wasn’t quite as earth-shattering as Cooper’s original insight (and pre-war, there had been one or two attempts at competition monococque construction; while Lancia’s inspirational Lambda touring car dated back to 1922), it ran it pretty close. Allegedly, Cooper took a look at the Lotus-Climax 25 at the Belgium GP at Spa, and asked where the chassis was. He then watched Hill take the ’62 title in a conventional spaceframe BRM.
But there were no such difficulties for 1963. Suddenly, we were in the Promised Land. There was Jim Clark, who had seamlessly taken over Moss’s title as The Most Gifted Driver in Formula One, driving for the most exciting team in motor racing, in a car which was not only brilliant in design and execution, but which looked terrific – sleek, purposeful, free of clutter, like a 1950s jet fighter. Clark won a preposterous seven out of ten Grandes Épreuves in ’63, with seven pole positions, and six fastest laps. And there was Chapman, Il Miglior Fabbro, at his right hand.
In fact, the dynamic relationship between driver and constructor reached some kind of perfection at this point. One of Clark’s mechanics observed that his ‘technical ability and feel for what the car was doing were phenomenal. It was uncanny. Unique. He knew when something was wrong. He’d feel a slight vibration in the rear and we’d pull the car about and find nothing. He’d insist something was still amiss and later we’d discover a wheel bearing was going.’ But this hyper-awareness was, in turn, predicated on Clark’s capacity to penetrate the essence of whatever car Chapman gave him. Not everyone could get the best out of a Lotus. You had to know how to access its tricksy little soul; and Clark could.
And then, just to make it even more special, there was the fact that Clark and Lotus were both so very flaky: both teetering on the brink of disaster, personal and financial, on an almost daily basis, for years.
Jim Clark first. On-track, he drove with the kind of effortless fluency that defied categorisation, whatever the car. Off-track, he was barely able to get dressed in the mornings. He had trouble picking a tie to wear; he couldn’t decide where to eat lunch; he chewed his nails to the quick, fretting; he never knew which girl to stick with. His longest-serving girlfriend, Sally Stokes, noted with stoical understatement, ‘When he stepped out of the car – that was a sign for this indecisiveness to take over.’ Ditto, from Peter Warr, of Team Lotus: ‘He could get befuddled through this extraordinary indeciveness.’
Actually, he was even capable of freezing up at the wheel, provided he was away from the racetrack. Despite setting some kind of unofficial speed record from his home in the Scottish Borders to the Team Lotus HQ in Cheshunt, he was repeatedly flummoxed by a particular fork in the road about two-thirds of the way along the route. Either side of this fork was usable, but the imposition of choice so threw him that, more than once, he simply ploughed on into the grass in the middle. Or again, sitting in a rented car at a single-track level crossing in Florida, with Jackie Stewart, Clark stared for minutes at the lone railroad track, stretching for miles in either direction, empty of trains. According to Stewart, ‘He glanced at me warily and said, “Well, what do you think?” I thought I must have missed something. So I looked left and right and saw again that there was nothing within miles of us. He was still sitting there in a quandry. “I think it’s safe to go, Jim,” I said. “OK”, he said, and we continued on our way.’
He discovered, once he made it to the big time of Grand Prix racing, that he could get girls with dependable ease; but then got into an ethical tangle with the precepts engendered by his Scottish upbringing. He would sit in his motorhome at the track, while women wandered around outside; all he had to do was ‘smile or make a little move, and one would come, and he would take her out for dinner and then she would be his’. But then he’d be struck by the paralysing terror that his clean-living, buttoned-up, Scottish farmer relations would find out about this laxity and give him hell. As the – highly respectable – Sally Stokes, observed, ‘If he was being photographed, I was careful to keep out of it. He told me he did not want his parents to get the wrong idea.’ Or, as Jackie Stewart put it, ‘He was really insecure.’
Nor was he even quite sure whether he liked to race for its own sake – pure and simple, the twenty-eight-year-old Clark haring blithely around one afternoon in April, ’64, driving a Lotus 19, followed by an Elan, followed by a Lotus Cortina, all at the same meeting, winning every race he entered – or whether he really wanted the kind of deliciously burdensome wealth a race like Indianapolis brought with it.
In 1963, he went to the Brickyard with Lotus for the first time. There was a sweltering controversy with the ultimate winner, Parnelli Jones, but second-placed Clark not only managed not to get caught up in the fight, but also congratulated himself on how much he had earned, notwithstanding: $56,000 for, as he put it, ‘turning left 800 times’. When he won, two years later, the deal was that he got paid $150 for every lap he led. He led for 190 out of the 200 laps. ‘It was so funny,’ he observed. ‘I was like a cash register. I kept going around thinking, click, click, $150, $150.’
It’s tempting to see these inner frictions as the product of a childhood spent in the farming communities of the Scottish Borders, with four protective sisters, an upright and doughty mother, education at the smart and socially conservative Loretto School just outside Edinburgh, followed by admission into an adult world of livestock auctions and rural decencies and cups of tea. The only things to disturb these timeless verities would have been occasional
, delightfully amateur saloon car escapades with a team known as the Border Reivers. These would in turn generate a burst of disapproval from the family, who regarded such things with deep distaste and wished Jim would give them up. It was an essentially genteel existence, one whose interior values Clark could never quite leave behind, and which became more and more of a contradiction, the more successful and worldly he became.
Did Clark eventually start to believe in his own myth? It was no use asking him, for instance, how he managed to drive the way he did. He wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say. Some mixture of reflexes, eyesight, supreme balance, fitness (he had forearms like a navvy) and precision accounted for it – but that would have been true for any number of his fellow drivers. All anyone could come up with, was that he possessed something so special that even an unsentimentalist like Denis Jenkinson (who had fearlessly navigated Moss’s Merc in the Mille Miglia) could say that Clark racing in the wet was as deft and fastidious as ‘a cat on a shelf full of china’. And as time went on, and the head-turning adulation and the money and the fame and the girls all expanded to fill his available space, he changed – evolving from a modest, smiling, tea-drinking, cardigan-wearing Scotsman into a gourmet, a wine connoisseur, used to living abroad more than in Britain, serious, keen to avoid income tax, increasingly conscious of his own worth. His mate Jabby Crombac observed around about this time that Clark ‘could be a complete bastard if you stepped upon his toes’, and there was no question that with age and celebrity came a gradual extinction of that happy innocence with which he had regarded the world at the end of the 1950s.
How much of this was then down to Colin Chapman? The two cannot be parted, even after death. Find a picture of Jim Clark in his heyday, and the odds are that Chapman will be in the same shot, crouching down beside the car in which Clark sits, explaining a point about the setup; or rapt in conversation somewhere on the pit wall; or, as often as not, with both of them grinning ecstatically after a win, Chapman sometimes riding on the rear suspension as Clark tools round the track, always there, always at Clark’s shoulder. For Heaven’s sake, Chapman was there at the very start of Clark’s racing career: the Border Reivers wanted to acquire a Formula 2 Lotus for Clark to drive, but the sight of a wheel dropping off Graham Hill’s similar machine made Clark decide, like so many drivers, that any Lotus was too dubious to risk, and that he would stick to sports cars for the time being. A year later, and after a fundamental revision of opinion, he was signed to Chapman’s team.
Which made Chapman what, exactly? Clark’s brother-in-arms, one half of the Likely Lads, his soul mate? Or his smiling exploiter, a worldly, even Mephistophelean, genius, who spotted Clark’s driving talent, battened on to him and drained him dry?
Chapman was some eight years older than Clark. He grew up in an immediately post-war London, went to University College to read engineering and did his bit for the economy – while still a teenager – by flogging old cars in Warren Street, before starting to make his own sporting Lotus specials in a lockup in Hornsey.
You had to hand it to him: the boy had flair. It only took a few years before his Mark Eleven sports cars were winning races, while his Mark Thirteen performed magnificently at Le Mans in 1957, winning the Index of Performance. What he didn’t do, of course, was move the engine from the front to the back. While Cooper was turning out the ‘bob-tailed’ mid-engined sports cars of the mid-1950s, Lotus was still doing it the traditional way, engine first, with the 11s and the 13s. However brilliant Chapman was, that one transforming insight had not come to him.
Unsurprisingly, he referred to John Cooper as ‘that bloody blacksmith’. Cooper – who had great respect for Chapman’s ideas, if not his methods – retaliated by calling Lotus ‘that crazy lot from Hornsey’, and suggesting that every Lotus sold should come with a free welding kit. But it didn’t take Chapman long to adapt to the new dispensation and, by 1960, he had his first Grand Prix win with Moss in the Lotus 18: the legendary giant-killing of Monaco. In the same year, Clark, who had already been driving Lotus in junior formulae, got his first F1 drive, still with Lotus, at the Dutch Grand Prix. The connection was made.
It was, in fact, Chapman’s great good fortune, as the new king of the garagistes, to be active at a time when conditions in Britain were such that clever and inventive and gifted people were happy not to go into large-scale (and increasingly moribund) manufacturing industry, but take their chances in the compact and fast-moving world of racing car construction. It was a peculiarly British thing: we couldn’t do the big stuff particularly well, but where driving talent met ingenuity plus craft skills, and had a seasoning of back-to-the-wall, small-time improvisation about it, we were in our element.
So if Clark was being tipped for greatness by this stage, Chapman, too, was acquiring a reputation; partly for extreme cleverness, partly for excessive daring. Keep it light was the guiding belief, but as Keith Duckworth (of the Ford-Cosworth DFV engine) noted, ‘Colin was a brilliant conceptual engineer, but he had no idea of limits and fit, the details.’ In practice, this led to Stirling Moss having to have his car welded up on the Monaco grid; it led the hapless Innes Ireland to complain bitterly about the failure rates of the Lotuses he had to drive, shortly before being ignominiously sacked as team leader in favour of Clark; it was a Lotus which folded up around Moss in his catastrophic ’62 crash. When Jackie Stewart briefly drove a Lotus in a non-Championship Formula One race, one driveshaft snapped in two, while the other buckled irretrievably: ‘Jackie decided that Chapman made unsafe cars and never again drove a Lotus.’ Or, as Graham Hill would later put it, ‘If one of my rear tyres overtakes me, I know I’m in a Lotus.’
The cars were light to the point of frailty; as were Chapman’s finances. ‘The history of Lotus was littered with scams,’ was one way of putting it; and it was a combustible mix, what with Chapman paring down the engineering at the same time as he was shuffling slivers of money from one dark corner of the Lotus empire to another. The Norfolk HQ was suffused with a perpetual atmosphere of mild commercial panic, old racing models being sold off as soon as they looked even slightly dubious, partly to make room at the works, partly to keep the cashflow from breaking down. In some ways, it was an East Anglian version of life among the Ferraris at Modena, the crucial difference being that Enzo Ferrari had relatively little to do with the actual design of his Grand Prix cars; nor with the racing – other than to impose his idea of team orders on whoever he employed. As a brooding, totemic presence, he wrote his personality everywhere and on everything, but often kept himself at one remove from the action, actually staying away from the track on race day.
Chapman, conversely, was ubiquitous: designing the cars, overseeing their construction, scurrying off to test tracks and race meetings, blagging components, signing dodgy cheques, and all the time hustling Jim Clark – a terminal ditherer wrapped in a world of purposeful chaos – to new and greater achievements.
In this febrile environment, not unnaturally, Chapman took quite a lot of pills, just to stay upright. Ron Hickman, one of Chapman’s lieutenants, remarked that ‘Colin was completely open about his use of uppers and downers. His use was brought on not only by the incredibly long days he worked, and the broken sleep, but also by his often crossing twenty time zones in a few days. Most of us were more understanding than horrified.’ He then turned his pilled-up charms on his workforce, his drivers, his creditors, his sponsors, in order to get exactly what he wanted. He was ‘charismatic, which meant that he could get the best out of people right to the time he wore them down. He would drain every last ounce from a person.’ He was wired and endlessly competitive even when it came to bread-throwing contests in restaurants. Chapman ‘would be the first to start throwing rolls’, declaring loudly that Team Lotus were the best roll-throwers in the business, while at the same time making sure ‘that you first dipped your bread roll in wine’, in order to splatter the opposition a bit more effectively.
There was team-building, there was soggy-bread-roll-
throwing, and there was living in each other’s pockets, for at least half the year. Team Lotus finances were so tight that not only did the team swap first-class plane tickets (when they got them off organisers or sponsors) for economy class, pocketing the difference, they also shared hotel rooms on a regular basis. At Indianapolis, 1963, Clark and Chapman had one room, twin beds. One night, Clark went on the prowl, got himself a girl, brought his conquest back to that same hotel room. Finding Chapman already in bed, asleep, Clark and the girl had a noisy shower together, before jumping into Clark’s (American, king-size) bed. Chapman was now wide awake, grimly pretending to be unconscious. The girl said, ‘What about him’ – pointing to Chapman – ‘won’t we wake him up?’ To which Clark replied, ‘Don’t worry about him – the silly bugger never wakes up!’ At breakfast the following morning, a red-eyed Chapman groaned to a Lotus co-worker, ‘God knows what time I got to sleep.’
That was just how things were. In the days before Formula One discovered big-money sponsorship, quite a few teams obliged their staff and drivers to share digs – getting on well or badly, depending on team politics at any given moment. What was remarkable about Clark and Chapman was that, now matter how much time they spent together, no matter what pressures Chapman put on Clark, no matter what nervous disorientations Clark was suffering from, they rarely fell out. According to Rob Walker, ‘Jim was probably the only driver that Chapman was really fond of. I never saw them have a row.’
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 7
