The 1968 BOAC 500 sports car race at Brands Hatch was cheerless. As news filtered in from Hockenheim a generation came to realise motor racing would never be the same again. It was more than the death of a driver; it was the end of an era. It was more than a squall following a storm. When Jim Clark died the whole of motor racing changed.
Read MoreDutch Grand Prix 1967
I asked Facebook and Twitter about this picture. That’s me behind Jim Clark’s Lotus photographing its new engine during practice at Zandvoort. I started commenting on it then mis-keyed and couldn’t find where it came from, but delving into my photographic archive I was pleased to find the pictures I was taking that day (below - Jim Clark’s legs on the right) in front of the Lotus pit.
Read MoreZandvoort: Ford-Cosworth DFV wins first time out
Owing to his tax exile status Jim Clark was not able to take part in testing the first Lotus 49, completed during May 1967. The first time he saw it was when it was unloaded from the transporter at Zandvoort. Its basis was not unfamiliar, for it was an evolution of Chapman’s Lotus 43, the abbreviated monocoque designed for the stop-gap, complicated, overweight but cleverly conceived BRM H16 engine of 1966, which Clark had taken to its only grand prix win in America.
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