Yahoo Autos Remembering Jim Clark
The first motor racing book I received was Jim Clark at the Wheel. I would have been seven or eight at the time-around a decade after the Scot’s death-and it became my first proper introduction to the driver whose name and accomplishments would dominate the Pruett household.
The two-time Formula 1 world champ was spoken of like royalty by my father, an auto mechanic who specialized in the Lotus marque. He wasn’t “Jim Clark” – that would have been too formal. He was “Jimmy” to my father. It felt like a long-lost relative being mentioned when he found a reason to conjure Clark’s name.
His grand prix titles for Team Lotus weren’t the connective strands that elevated Jimmy to elite status in our family. As an amateur race car driver, my father knew his limits in the open-wheel machinery and sports cars he prepared, and it was from witnessing his hero in action where Jimmy rose to the stature of a demi-God.
Informed by what I read in his autobiography, and amplified by my father as the puzzle that couldn’t be solved by his rivals, Jimmy, with his humble upbringing in farming country and that bright smile, was passed down to me as a man who flirted with perfection.
Decades later, getting to know Dave Sims, Jimmy’s Team Lotus mechanic, allowed me to identify another Pruett family hero. My father, who grew up on a farm and spent his youth working the fields before chasing his passion for cars and driving, was always going to deify Clark, whose life traveled an identical arc.
And me, as the son of a mechanic, who was immersed in the cults of Jimmy and Lotus, took my father’s love of racing and turned that into my life’s work as a mechanic, engineer, and team manager before giving this media thing a try. In Sims, now 76, I found a bridge between my father’s hero and the one I received second hand.
Sims sent a letter to Team Lotus asking for a job-the same thing I did with Dan Gurney’s All American Racers-and we were both rejected. The difference? His rejection was in error, and he went to work for Colin Chapman. Sims progressed up the ranks from junior mechanic to senior mechanic and went on to run all manner of championship-caliber teams while I was in my teens. I’d walk the same path, with smaller teams and had sparse encounters with success, but it was a shared passion that was my own and different from my father’s arc.
As someone who experienced the horror of having a driver die in a car I prepared-on my first day as a fully professional race car mechanic–I was drawn to Sims’ unfathomable experience of having Jimmy die, 50 years ago today, in the Lotus Formula 2 car he prepared. As an off-brand mechanic in comparison to Sims, I would never suggest my encounters are in any way parallel to his. But I will say the dark episode that engulfed Sims’ life in the wake of Jimmy’s crash and death also spent some time casting shadows from overhead when my driver didn’t come back.
In Sims, I’ve found a friend who completes the circle started by my father with Jimmy, and has been an inspiration for longer than we’ve known each other.
His humanity, shared in a recent conversation about being raised in poverty, ascending to his dream job at Lotus, forging a friendship with Clark, and the tragedy that befell the two of them-one in perpetuity, the other with the ever-present memories of April 7, 1968-is among the great gifts I’ve received.
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