Word: lotuses
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...green. No. 6. Driver wearing a blue helmet. Who else? "Clark!" somebody shouted, and suddenly the crowd was chanting: "Clark! Clark! Clark!" Sure enough, just 3 min. 29 sec. after it had left the starting grid, Jim Clark's Lotus-Climax swept around the last left-hand bend into full view of the cheering stands. "C'est formidable!" gasped one awed Frenchman. Sighed another: "C'est termine"-It's all over...
...fabled Stirling Moss, who spent eight years winning 14, and Argentina's five-time World Champion Juan Manuel Fangio, who had 16 when he quit racing at the age of 47. Says Moss: "In terms of sheer native ability, Jim probably has more than any champion in history." Lotus Designer Colin Chapman puts it even more emphatically: "Jim Clark is the greatest racing driver the world has ever seen...
Curiously, Clark's most important contest in 1958 was one he lost. On Boxing Day, Dec. 26, he drove the Reivers' Lotus Elite in a ten-lap race at Brands Hatch, found himself involved in "a whale of a dice" with another Elite driven by a persistent, mustachioed fellow who bore a striking resemblance to Actor David Niven. His competitor, it later turned out, was Colin Chapman -a young, prematurely grey engineer who had graduated from London University in 1948, set up shop in 1952 as Lotus Cars, Ltd. For eight of the ten laps, Jim managed...
Died. Dr. Ichiro Ohga, 82, known throughout Japan as "Dr. Lotus" for his lifelong experiments with lotus plants, who won worldwide notice in 1952 when he succeeded in making a 2,000-year-old seed blossom into a beautiful pink flower and nursed the plant back to such health that it is still alive in a Kemigawa botanical garden dedicated to him; of a stroke; in Tokyo...
...stops were crucial. To encourage drivers to carry lighter fuel loads, thereby reducing the risk of crash or fire, officials required all cars to stop at least twice. Sloppy work by Lotus mechanics had hurt Clark's chances in 1963 (he finished second to Parnelli Jones), and Designer Colin Chapman was determined not to let this happen again. Carefully calculating Clark's rate of fuel consumption (3 mi. per gal. of alcohol), he scheduled a stop every 162 mi. He redesigned the Lotus' gas tank to speed up the refueling process. Finally, he hired a crew...