Zinging in the Rain

Some people race because they feel that they can make easy money at it. Others race because it is the "done thing," or because it might make them more attractive to girls. With me, the motive is curiosity.

Jimmy Clark's curiosity takes an aw ful lot of satisfying. At 28, he is the youngest Grand Prix champion in history, and his income runs to $140,000 a year. Yet there he was last week, seeing how fast he could drive an untested car on a rain-drenched track outside Stuttgart, Germany--in something called the Solitude Grand Prix. The prize was far from grand--no championship points, no money to speak of (winner's purse: $1,500)--but Scotland's Clark still turned the afternoon into a breath-taking demonstration of his driving genius.

Drops Like Dimes. Even when it is dry, the 7.1-mile Solitude course is one of Europe's hairiest: the road twists through four tortuous hairpins, uncurling finally into a long "straightaway" that is an assortment of dips, hills and fast curves that are taken at upwards of 150 m.p.h. But last week Solitude was downright dangerous. A cloudburst turned the asphalt slick as ice; and it was still pouring dime-sized drops when 18 Formula I cars roared away from the grid, roostertails of spray streaming in their wake.

Within seconds, the field was cut by more than one-third, and $140,000 worth of machinery was reduced mostly to junk. On the long straight, Italy's Lorenzo Bandini hit a puddle, skidded and lost control; trying to dodge his wildly spinning Ferrari, four other racers piled up. StiJl another ran off the track and wrapped his car around a pole; a seventh scattered the hay bales on a bend. Miraculously, none of the drivers was seriously injured.

Clark escaped mostly because his car was too slow. Driving a new model Lotus-Climax that had been wrecked last April and practically rebuilt from scratch, Jimmy was having engine trouble, was running on only seven cylinders. After four sputtering laps, a mechanic waved a message board that read "Surt --20." With 16 laps to go, Ferrari's John Surtees already had a 20-sec. lead.

In Full Lock. It seemed hopeless. But now the Lotus was firing on all eight cylinders, and Clark was zinging flat out down the slippery track as if the championship depended on it, touching 155 m.p.h. on the straight. Power-sliding through one glassy corner in full opposite lock (with the front wheels turned against the direction of the turn), Clark nonchalantly flashed a thumb-up victory sign to a friend on the infield grass. "My God," breathed a mechanic in the Lotus pit as Clark cut huge chunks out of Surtees' lead: 5 sec. on the fifth lap, 7 sec. on the sixth.

By the ninth lap, Clark was only a car length behind. Seconds later, he had the lead. The rain had stopped and the track was drying now. Surtees wrung a few more r.p.m. from his Ferrari, bypassed Clark and opened a 3-sec. gap. Unable to beat Surtees on the straights, Clark fell in behind the faster Ferrari, waiting for opportunity to knock again. None came, so Clark made his own--with an astonishing maneuver that only a handful of drivers would dare attempt: he simply slid around Surtees on the outside of a hairpin turn.

Surtees, brilliant in his own right, could only watch in awe. At the finish, Clark was 10.4 sec. ahead. Face streaked with mud, he stood stiffly at attention for God Save the Queen, and then dived into a car to escape hordes of autograph hunters. "This postrace hullabaloo really kills me," he said. "My stomach gets all knotted up."

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