Word: clark
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Scotland's Jackie Stewart is something of a brooding fatalist. His elder brother Jimmy preceded him as a racing driver but retired after two serious accidents and a near-fatal collision in the 1954 Le Mans classic. In 1968 his roommate and closest friend, the incomparable Jim Clark, was killed in a crash on the Hockenheim circuit. "The loss of Jimmy was an enormous blow," says Stewart, "but it couldn't make me give up racing. Jimmy was a professional...
Cutting Corners. Stewart invites comparison with Clark for more reasons than a heritage of heather; Europeans consider him a "natural" driver, as they did Clark. Accurate and adaptable, he consistently picks the most efficient curb-shearing line around corners, which gives him an extra jump into the straightaway. At Silverstone, he crashed his car during a trial run, and had to race in a slightly inferior model usually driven by a teammate. On top of that, his clutch jammed on the fourth lap and he was forced to powershift for the remaining 80. Yet his average speed of 127.25 m.p.h...
...shooting. "I put more effort into it than I put now into my racing," he recalls. Between 1957 and 1962 he won the Irish, Welsh, English and British champion ships and was named as a substitute to the British Olympic trap team. Finally persuaded to race at Charterhall, where Clark had made his start several years earlier, Stewart finished third. To fool his mother, he says, "I snuck out to race under the nom de plume of A. N. Other. I thought that terribly clever...
Cautious Conservatism. After he joined the European circuit in 1964, he and Clark shared an apartment in London. Their digs soon became known in racing circles as the "Scottish Embassy." Stewart married a Lowland lassie, Helen McGregor, who came to understand the substance of her mother-in-law's fears. At the Belgian Grand Prix in 1966, her husband's car spun out of control as he whipped around a rain-slick corner at 150 m.p.h., and ripped through a telegraph pole and a tree before it screamed to a halt. For 35 minutes Stewart was trapped...
Coupled with Clark's death, that near-tragedy had a signal effect on Stewart. Off the track, the little (5 ft. 6? in., 148 lbs.) driver is all Scottish charm; he wears Savile Row suits and affects shoulder-length locks. When it comes to his profession, however, he is all caution and conservatism. The Belgian Grand Prix was canceled this year largely because of his argument that the race would be too dangerous on wet roads. He was among the first Grand Prix drivers to use the six-point-contact seatbelt, and he introduced the idea of remote-control...