THE LAST SPIN : It Was 20 Years Ago Today That Scotland’s Jimmy Clark, Perhaps the Best Driver Ever, Chose to Run on Wrong Track

When Jimmy Clark died in his race car 20 years ago today--at age 32--he was probably the world’s best driver.

Some people in racing still call him the best of all time.

It can’t be proved. In the different eras of auto racing, there have been too many other great drivers, starting with Tazio Nuvolari and Barney Oldfield.

A.J. Foyt and Al Unser Sr. have won the Indianapolis 500 four times. Juan Manuel Fangio won five world championships in four kinds of cars. Jackie Stewart eventually broke most of Clark’s records before climbing out at 34, when he had the wit to stay out.

Clark, the famous Flying Scot, could have retired, too. He talked about it. He had done everything; he had everything.

He was heir to two sizable, prosperous farms in Scotland. And he was happy. His timekeeper and constant companion was Sally Stokes, a London model. She was small, blonde and outgoing. He was small, dark and introverted. They, at one time, were engaged to be married.

Even so, he couldn’t bring himself to give up racing.

Instead, Clark:

--Became the first Grand Prix driver to win 25 world championship races.

--Won the world driving title in 1963 and again in 1965, and at 29, in the midst of the 1965 season, he became the first to double as the winner of the Indy 500.

--Helped to end the Offenhauser monopoly at Indianapolis by starting the industry’s rear-engine revolution when he won in a Ford-powered Lotus.

And he did it all so fast. He was, comparatively, so young.

Most Indy drivers are over 32. Fangio was 38 when he began his spectacular European career.

At 27, Clark had become the youngest Grand Prix world champion. Five years later, on the last day of his life, he was out on another race track, this one at Hockenheim, West Germany.

It was a Formula Two race, his first ride at Hockenheim. It was a gloomy day, rainy, foreboding. And nearing a bend in the road, Clark, running eighth with 16 laps to go, was all by himself.

The bend is known as Shrimps Head Curve. It’s a long, flat-out turn, and Clark, the first to average 150 m.p.h. as an Indianapolis winner, was going 170 m.p.h. when he approached it. He apparently never let up, and never got through.

“Suddenly, Jim’s car broke out,” said the nearest driver, Chris Irwin of Britain, who was sprinting along 250 yards behind. “It looked like something mechanical.”

To those who investigated the accident, it still does.

Losing control, Clark zigged, zagged and somersaulted broadside into the forest that bordered the autodrome, wrapping the car’s front end one way around a tree and the rear end the other way. Wreckage rained over a 140-yard radius. Clark died instantly.

What was the reaction?

Some pointed to the irony of a champion’s end in a Formula Two race. Others focused on the need for the safety measures, some of which are now in place, that might have saved Clark. Still others talked of the tragedy of his death in his youth, at the time one of the world’s most eligible bachelors.

“I won’t make her a widow,” he had said of Sally Stokes the summer before they broke up. “It isn’t right, I tell you. I won’t wed and drive.”

That was a promise he kept.

Formula Two racing is to Formula One what the minor leagues are to the majors in baseball. Clark at Hockenheim on a free day was like Pedro Guerrero at Albuquerque, N.M., on a day off, only there was somewhat more danger.

Clark, however, was a team player, as well as the ace of the Lotus staff, and that year the factory had a shot at the world Formula Two championship. He was obliging the factory that spring day at Hockenheim, then a new track.

But this wasn’t entirely Lotus’ fault. There were plenty of Formula Two sites in Britain.

It was Clark’s fault that he passed them all up.

A Redondo Beach admirer, Deke Houlgate, said: “It was the only mistake Jimmy ever made in eight years as a driver.”

The mistake was in not accepting a more agreeable Formula Two course closer to home.

Two features of the Hockenheim track made it more dangerous than some others in the ‘60s--the nearby forest and the absence of adequate roadside barricades. Either the trees or the track shouldn’t have been there. Barricades should.

Moreover, at the time, there were relatively few safety features on a Lotus, not even a roll bar. Seat belts had only recently seemed necessary, and the helmets of the ‘60s weren’t much protection.

Clark’s car was shattered, leaving no trace of the accident’s cause.

Six years later after the accident, after reviewing all the evidence for the “Encyclopedia of Auto Racing Greats,” Robert Cutter and Bob Fendell wrote: “Exactly what happened is not known. But the consensus seems to rest on mechanical failure rather than driver error or (the rainy track).”

With or without evidence, no one who knew Clark could have concluded otherwise.

THE MAN

Dan Gurney was the American driver who had been closest to Clark, although a Glasgow taxi driver didn’t recognize him when Gurney landed in Scotland 20 years ago this week.

“Chirnside,” Gurney said as he stepped into the cab.

“Chirnside!” the taxi driver repeated, stunned. “That’s clean across the country.”

“Please take me there,” Gurney said. “I have to say goodby to a friend.”

He was in time. Of many who attended Clark’s funeral, Gurney had come the farthest, traveling 6,000 miles.

“Jimmy was a person who inspired that kind of devotion,” said Mrs. Edouard Swart of Palos Verdes.

She is the former Sally Stokes of Woodford, Essex and London, who years ago married another race driver from Britain. He is now a businessman in the United States.

“Everyone who was around Jimmy very much says the same things about him,” she said. “He was kind, loyal and lots of fun. Strangers didn’t always see that because he was a very private person. Few knew him well. I could count on one hand the ones he knew well.”

Times arts critic Charles Champlin, who as a Time magazine reporter met Clark 25 years ago, said, “He didn’t say two words if one would do, and wouldn’t say one if he could get by with silence.”

Champlin remembers that the Flying Scot had only one change of expression: “He sometimes looked even more solemn than at other times.”

Clark was, however, an inspiring figure to other race drivers.

“Jimmy was a great inspiration to me,” said Mario Andretti, the Indianapolis rookie of the year in 1965 when Clark won. “There are still times I ask myself how he would have tackled this or that problem.”

Clark was the first to successfully move back and forth from Formula One to Indy car racing, setting the example for a select few, Andretti among them.

“The way he performed from continent to continent has always given me strength,” Andretti said. “In his quiet way, he moved a lot of people.”

In fact, he still moves one follower at Hockenheim, where the race track--minus the trees that once made it a snare--is now the site of the German Grand Prix. On the day of the race there each year, an impressive wreath of fresh flowers always appears on the embankment where Clark’s car somersaulted into the forest.

“They tell me that a German girl puts them there,” Andretti said. “They say she is Utta Fausel, the photographer. I’ve won at Hockenheim. I’ve seen the flowers. Such devotion!--after all these years.”

In Scotland, too, they still remember. They still drop by the churchyard in the Berwickshire village of Chirnside where Clark was buried on an April day in 1968. He had been born nearby at his father’s farm, Edington Mains, on March 4, 1936.

The Clark place is a 1,500-acre sheep farm, itself a little old village of barns and cottages. The dominating structure, Gurney said, is the great, gray stone mansion where Clark, youngest of five children, lived with his parents and four sisters when he was beginning life as a shepherd.

At 8 he was in a tractor, at 10 he was racing around the farm in a jalopy, and at 17 he began to race his own cars, even though he always seemed too frail and sensitive for the hot, raucous machinery.

A nonsmoker and light drinker, Clark was always in a shirt and tie when he wasn’t in a car. His favorite pronoun was we, not I. Or he would say, as he did after winning at Indianapolis, “I was just one link in a chain.”

To Gurney, Clark was the link. “Jimmy dominated his era,” Gurney said. “He could rise to any challenge, and he was consistently tough. He could beat you in any kind of car. He was the standard.”

And so, 20 years ago, Gurney canceled all his appointments and flew to Scotland for the funeral.

“I lost a great deal personally,” Gurney said of Clark’s death. “Jimmy had made racing worthwhile to me. If you couldn’t beat the best, winning was never a lot of fun. I didn’t get much kick out of any win if there wasn’t a driver of that class in the race.”

Gurney, who heads a Toyota team today, is the only active racing figure who has succeeded single-handedly in Formula One. As a driver, he won the 1967 Belgian Grand Prix with a car and engine he designed and produced himself.

But he would chuck it all to have Clark’s skills.

“Jimmy was the top of the line,” Gurney said. “At Chirnside, I met his father for the first time after the funeral, when he pulled me aside, and said: ‘So you’re Dan Gurney. I just want you to know one thing. My son told me that you’re the only driver he ever feared.’

“It’s the greatest compliment I’ve had in racing. Tragic to hear in those circumstances--but I’ll never forget it.”

THE TEAM

Big-screen, closed-circuit television was the new thing in the ‘60s when, for a few years, much of America saw the Indianapolis 500 live at theaters and arenas in most cities.

Thus Clark’s radical new race car, the rear-engine Lotus, made an instant national impact when the Flying Scot finished first at Indy.

In his most famous head start, riding in the front row between Foyt and Gurney, Clark came out of the pace lap with a breathtaking rush.

And as his sleek little Lotus screamed into the first turn far in front, the collective oooooh here at the Sports Arena, where thousands saw it on theater-size screens, dissolved into a roar.

“What a car,” the fans shouted.

Shortly thereafter, when Clark skidded into a 360-degree spin and sped on, they shouted, “What a driver.”

It was true. As a combination, the car and the driver, both imports, were to make U.S. history.

The car had been designed and built by a former British race driver named Colin Chapman, a genius type who had two unconcealed beliefs. He believed in himself and he believed that conventional race cars were much too heavy. So he kept asking, where can I lose weight?

There only one place, and it seemed ridiculous to consider cutting there. Cars need frames, don’t they?

At first, Chapman agreed. But the more he thought about it, the more he wondered. And in the end, he built a monocoque car. The word means that the car’s body was itself the frame.

Keeping an eye on American rules, Chapman was able to bring an Indy car in at 1,270 pounds--a bare 10 pounds over the minimum.

Only a very talented jockey could handle a steed so frail, the designer knew, and he had one of those, too.

Much earlier when Chapman was about 30 and going nowhere as a driver, he had finished first at a track in the South of England though he was aware that he had run an indifferent race.

A rookie named Jimmy Clark, then about 22, finished a close second that day driving a beautiful race in an indifferent car. Chapman realized it. He had built the winning car himself.

Immediately, he understood that if he could put Clark in his seat, they’d have something. A fuel-injected Ford V-8 racing plant completed the package.

“Those two made a unique combination--Colin with his ingenuity and Jimmy with his skills,” Andretti said. “They quieted all the skeptics. The new technology, that car, that driver, were (an Indy) turning point.”

Dan Gurney, however, is one of those who have concluded that Chapman’s new technology was too much--that his cars were too light.

Discussing Clark’s fatal accident at Hockenheim, he said: “That was typical of what Jimmy had to put up with on that team. (The Lotus cars) had more than their share of design or mechanical failures.”

It is Gurney’s view that Chapman, who died of a heart attack at 54 in 1982, sometimes sacrificed safety for speed.

“(Chapman) was in charge at Lotus,” he said. “Their designs all had his approval--and they did get a faster car. But they paid a price for it, and the price was a more fragile (car).

“They found a way to go faster--with lighter machines. The trouble was, those cars didn’t have an extra margin of strength.”

It had been no problem for Clark, who drove Chapman’s swift vehicles for seven years.

“Jimmy had so much talent,” Gurney said, “that he didn’t need that extra margin.”

Until one April in the rain.

Times staff writer Doug Conner contributed to this story.