Scotland's Jackie Stewart is something of a brooding fatalist. His elder brother Jimmy preceded him as a racing driver but retired after two serious accidents and a near-fatal collision in the 1954 Le Mans classic. In 1968 his roommate and closest friend, the incomparable Jim Clark, was killed in a crash on the Hockenheim circuit. "The loss of Jimmy was an enormous blow," says Stewart, "but it couldn't make me give up racing. Jimmy was a professional, and so am I."
And few are better. This year Stewart, 30, has replaced King James as the Scottish ruler of the road. Last March, in the South African Grand Prix, first of the 1969 world championship Formula I series races, he roared into the lead on the very first lap, and has rarely been behind since. In the most astonishing driving display in Grand Prix history, Jackie raced his 430-h.p. Matra-Ford M580 to victories in Spain, The Netherlands and France. He lost at Monte Carlo only after a faulty drive shaft forced him to drop out one-third of the way through the race; at that point he held an extravagant 30-sec. lead. Two weeks ago, he won his fifth victory in five finishes in Great Britain's rugged 246-mile Grand Prix at Silverstone. That race gave Stewart a total of 45 world-championship points. His nearest rival, New Zealander Bruce McLaren, has only 17. With a full five Grand Prix races yet to run, the flippant, flamboyant Scot has virtually sewn up racing's most coveted prize.
Cutting Corners. Stewart invites comparison with Clark for more reasons than a heritage of heather; Europeans consider him a "natural" driver, as they did Clark. Accurate and adaptable, he consistently picks the most efficient curb-shearing line around corners, which gives him an extra jump into the straightaway. At Silverstone, he crashed his car during a trial run, and had to race in a slightly inferior model usually driven by a teammate. On top of that, his clutch jammed on the fourth lap and he was forced to powershift for the remaining 80. Yet his average speed of 127.25 m.p.h. was nearly 10 m.p.h. faster than the existing track record—set in 1967 by Clark.
Stewart's father ran a small garage near Dumbarton, and his mother was a lively lady who liked to roam the moors in modified sports cars. After her first son's ill-starred attempts at a racing career, though, she had no intention of letting Jackie get behind the wheel. The young man did not much care; he was too busy pursuing his first love—trap shooting. "I put more effort into it than I put now into my racing," he recalls. Between 1957 and 1962 he won the Irish, Welsh, English and British champion ships and was named as a substitute to the British Olympic trap team. Finally persuaded to race at Charterhall, where Clark had made his start several years earlier, Stewart finished third. To fool his mother, he says, "I snuck out to race under the nom de plume of A. N. Other. I thought that terribly clever."