Clark · 1965
Jim Clark wins the Indianapolis 500
On the late afternoon of Memorial Day, Monday the thirty-first of May 1965, on the two-and-a-half-mile rectangular oval of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the central-Indiana farm-country outside Indianapolis, in front of a capacity Memorial Day crowd of approximately three hundred and fifty thousand spectators on the IMS grandstand-and-infield, the twenty-nine-year-old Berwickshire-born Scottish Formula One driver Jim Clark, the reigning 1963 Formula One World Champion and the central single Lotus-Climax driver of the Colin Chapman Lotus team, drove the small Lotus-Ford Type 38 rear-engined mid-engined monocoque-chassis racing-car (the Chapman-Lotus single-seater specifically designed for the Indianapolis 500 across the 1963 to 1964 development programme) to the checkered-flag victory at the forty-ninth running of the Indianapolis 500, the central single American single-seater motor race of the year and the foundational race of the American Memorial Day weekend, at a race-average-speed of 150.686 miles per hour and a winning-margin of approximately two laps over the runner-up Parnelli Jones. The Clark victory was the first non-American victory at the Indianapolis 500 since the 1916 victory of the Italian-immigrant-American Dario Resta (a forty-nine-year drought in the American single-seater motor-racing record), the first victory at the Indianapolis 500 by a rear-engined mid-engined chassis (the Lotus-Chapman rear-engined Lotus 38 displaced the front-engined American Watson-Offenhauser roadster configuration that had dominated the IMS race from 1953 to 1964), and was the central single foundational moment of the modern transformation of the Indianapolis 500 from the American front-engined-roadster-tradition to the modern international rear-engined-mid-engined-monocoque single-seater format. Clark took the 1965 Formula One World Championship the same year on the strength of his six-Grand-Prix-victory record across the 1965 season, became the only driver in the modern era to win the Indianapolis 500 and the Formula One World Championship in the same season, and stands at the central single position of the modern motor-racing all-time-great-driver-rankings.
A race is rarely won by the first non-American driver in forty-nine years at the central single American motor-racing tradition. The Indianapolis 500 across the 1953-to-1964 American front-engined-Offenhauser-roadster era had been the closed-shop American-driver-American-chassis tradition of the United States Auto Club professional sanctioning body. The Colin Chapman Lotus team's three-year commercial assault on the IMS (the 1963-1965 Chapman-Lotus campaign across the American USAC-and-Indianapolis-Speedway sanctioning) was the central single international challenge to the American tradition. Clark took the IMS race on Memorial Day 1965 in the central single demonstration of the international Chapman-Lotus engineering-and-driving programme.
THE BORDERS BOY
James Clark Junior was born at Kilmany House in the small parish of Kilmany in north Fife on the fourth of March 1936, fifth and youngest child of James Clark Senior, a substantial mid-Fife tenant-farmer of approximately twelve hundred acres at Kilmany and Hertfordshire, and Helen Niven. The family moved to the Edington Mains farm at Chirnside in eastern Berwickshire on the 1942-tenant-farm-acquisition arrangement when Jim was six, and he was raised in the Berwickshire farming-country on the 1940s-and-1950s Scottish-Borders agricultural-life. He was schooled at Loretto School at Musselburgh outside Edinburgh from 1949 to 1952, left the school at sixteen to take up the family farming-tenant-responsibility at Edington Mains on the Scottish-tenant-farming inheritance-and-succession-arrangement, and through the early 1950s took up the Berwickshire-amateur-motor-racing-club competitive driving on the local-club Sunday-meetings at the small Charterhall and Crail Scottish-Borders-motor-racing-circuits.
THE LOTUS-CLIMAX PROGRAMME
He was identified as a junior motor-racing prospect by the Lotus team-manager Colin Chapman at the 1958 Boxing-Day Brands Hatch meeting on the strength of his Berwickshire-amateur-club racing results, was offered the junior-Lotus-Climax development-driver contract for the 1959 Formula Two championship, was promoted to the senior Lotus-Climax Formula One team in 1960 in his twenty-fourth year on Chapman's recommendation, and across the next ten seasons drove for the Lotus team continuously to his death in April 1968. He took the 1962 Formula One World Championship runner-up position on the Lotus 25 monocoque-chassis programme (the Chapman-Lotus monocoque-chassis revolution that displaced the space-frame chassis tradition of the 1950s Formula One), took the 1963 Formula One World Championship on the same Lotus 25 programme (the seven-Grand-Prix-victory 1963 record that was the dominant single-season performance of the 1.5-litre Formula One era), and took the 1965 Formula One World Championship on the Lotus 33 (the Chapman-Lotus 33 was the direct development of the 1963 Lotus 25).
THE INDIANAPOLIS PROGRAMME
Chapman opened the Lotus Indianapolis 500 campaign in 1963 on the commercial logic that the American single-seater-Indianapolis-USAC-circuit was the central single American commercial motor-racing market and that the Lotus rear-engined-mid-engined-monocoque chassis would be technologically competitive against the American front-engined-Offenhauser-roadster tradition. The Lotus 29 (the 1963 Indianapolis specification, with the Ford-Indy V8 mid-engined configuration) took the second-place finish at the 1963 Indianapolis 500 behind the Parnelli Jones front-engined Watson-Offenhauser victory; the Lotus 34 (the 1964 Indianapolis specification) took the seventh place at the 1964 Indianapolis 500 on the fourth-lap puncture-and-suspension failure. The Lotus 38 (the 1965 Indianapolis specification, with the further mid-engined Ford-Indy V8 development) was the central single 1965 Indianapolis design.
THE THIRTY-FIRST OF MAY
The forty-ninth Indianapolis 500 opened on the morning of Memorial Day, Monday the thirty-first of May 1965, with the 33-car-starting-grid configuration on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval. Clark started from the second pole-position-row on the strength of his 158.828-miles-per-hour qualifying-speed (the second-fastest qualifying-speed of the 1965 field behind the 160.973-miles-per-hour qualifying of A.J. Foyt). The race opened at the 11-AM Memorial Day start-time under the IMS-pace-car-rolling-start protocol.
Clark took the race-lead on the second lap of the 200-lap race-distance on the strength of his Lotus-Ford superior cornering-and-acceleration-pattern over the American front-engined-Offenhauser roadsters. He held the lead across the remaining 198 laps of the race (with the brief Foyt-Lotus pit-lane lead-change-pattern across the two-pit-stop refuelling sequence), and crossed the checkered-flag at the 3.19 PM Memorial Day finish-time at the race-average of 150.686 miles per hour with the winning-margin of approximately two laps over the runner-up Parnelli Jones (Jones in the Hurst Floor Shifter Special). The third-place was Mario Andretti in the Dean Van Lines Special (Andretti's first Indianapolis 500 podium finish, the foundational moment of his subsequent thirty-year American single-seater career).
THE 1965 SEASON AND AFTER
Clark took the 1965 Formula One World Championship across the nine-race season (six Grand Prix victories: South Africa, Belgium, France, Britain, Netherlands, Germany) and became the only driver in the modern motor-racing era to win the Indianapolis 500 and the Formula One World Championship in the same season. The 1965 record has been matched by no subsequent international single-seater driver. Clark continued at the Lotus team across the 1966 and 1967 seasons (the Lotus 49 with the Ford-DFV-Cosworth V8 engine that became the foundational engine of the late-1960s-and-1970s Formula One era), took the 1967 South African Grand Prix and the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix on the new Lotus 49.
He was killed on the seventh of April 1968 at the Hockenheimring in Germany in a Formula Two race when his Lotus 48 left the circuit at the high-speed Eastkurve corner on the suspected-tyre-deflation failure, at thirty-two. He is buried at the small Chirnside parish churchyard outside Edington Mains. The Jim-Clark Trust at Chirnside has been the central single Scottish-Borders-motor-racing-memorial since 1969, with the Jim Clark Room museum at the Chirnside parish hall. The Clark name in modern motor-racing carries the weight of the Memorial-Day afternoon at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on the thirty-first of May 1965.