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Finally, there is fame. Jim Clark is already the most famous Scot since Robert Burns. Pretty girls strain against police barricades pleading for his attention; small boys dog his footsteps, clutching at his clothes. (At Indianapolis last year, the crowds were so insistent that Jim nervously warned a strolling companion: "Look, when we get to the paddock I've got to take off. If I walk, I'm in real trouble.") The Queen of England invites Jim to garden parties. His fan mail runs to 100 or more letters a week: propositions from businessmen that he tears up angrily ("I don't want to be bandied about like some blooming soap powder"), laboriously printed missives on lined paper that start out: "Mummy asked me yesterday what I want to be when I grow up, and I told her. You should have heard what mummy said." A day's mail may even bring a poem penned by a Scottish millworker:
A proven champion of the world,
O'er tricky tracks you've screeched and skirled.
And mony a braw held you've uncurled
Wi' fear and fright,
As roond the hairpin bends you whirled,
Like Hell gane gyte.
Jim Clark still bites his nails ("It's better than smoking," he insists defensively). He still is shy: "If you're a Scot, you don't push yourself forward. That's the way I was brought up." He can't quite get it through his head that he is a celebrity. "That bloke over there," he asks, "why is he staring at me?" And his idea of a great old swinging time is to tug on his black mesh driving gloves, climb into his little Lotus Elan and go blasting through the countryside at 100 m.p.h.—eyes on the road, hands in the prescribed "10 minutes to 2" position—until he gets exhausted and turns back for home. "Actually," says Jim Clark, "the only time I'm relaxed is when I'm behind the wheel."
*Who later changed the spelling of his last name, became the U.S. ace of aces by shooting down 22 German planes in World War I, and is still known around the world as Eddie Ricken backer.