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Nothing, though, could have prepared him for what happened at Monza midway through the 1961 season, when the Ferrari of Germany's flamboyant Wolfgang von Trips swerved suddenly, with Jimmy's Lotus directly behind. For one horrible instant, the two cars touched at 150 m.p.h. The Ferrari hurtled up an embankment, ricocheted off a steel guardrail, sheared through a wire fence, and spun end over end, back onto the track. Clark leaped out of his crumpled Lotus and pushed Trips's car off the road. There was nothing he could do for Trips—or for 17 spectators who had been leaning on the fence. "When a thing like that happens," says Jim, "you vow that you will never drive in a race again. But then your mind begins to function, and everyday things begin to crowd their way back. Three days later, you are packing your bags for another race. I am lucky to have been blessed with a short memory."
In 1962 it looked like the same story all over again. Jimmy was leading the Dutch Grand Prix when he lost three of his five gears. At Monaco he was running second when his engine blew up. Before the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, mechanics worked all night to install a new engine and gearbox in Clark's Lotus. Then next day Jimmy worked his way into the lead on the first lap—and ran away with the race for his first Grand Prix victory. Before the year was out, he had won two more, heard himself hailed as "the new Stirling Moss." All that praise was flattering, but Jim would have preferred to win the championship that went instead to Britain's Graham Hill. He would have had it, too, if "one bloody little runt of a screw" had not fallen off the distributor shaft and let loose his oil while he was leading in the South African Grand Prix.
Oil & Grapes. After that, it suddenly got easier to count Clark's losses than his victories. In 1963, he lost Monaco altogether (frozen gearbox while leading by 10 sec.), had to settle for a second in the German Grand Prix (seven cylinders instead of eight) and a third in the U.S. (dead battery on the starting grid). But he won in The Netherlands with the wrong tires and in France with a rough engine, steered to victory in Belgium with one hand, using the other to hold his slipping shift lever safely in fifth. All told, Jim won seven Grand Prix, equalling Alberto Ascari's 13-year-old record. He would have won the Indianapolis 500 besides, if officials had followed their own rules and black-flagged Parnelli Jones, whose Offenhauser was leaking oil all over the track.