1,000 Greatest Drivers: Jim Clark
He used to be my goat.
When I was starting this project, I initially intended to list Clark as my #1 driver of all time, but now it looks like that’s not going to happen. I know he was Formula One’s all-time winner at the time of his death and he also crossed over to win on ovals and in touring cars which most of the F1 stars of a similar caliber can’t say, but I just think he didn’t have quite enough seasons to place him in first place in retrospect and I note that he is nowhere near first place in my open wheel model since Juan Manuel Fangio and Ayrton Senna both have ratings over .5 and no titles, although admittedly Clark is ranked 2nd in my touring car model so I think he is closer to the all-time goat conversation than where people typically place him, particularly as an analyst who doesn’t strictly judge drivers based on their F1 careers as if nothing else matters.
Now that I updated about my mom in the last post, I want to update about what I’ve been reading in this one. As I’ve been riding the bus back and forth to the nursing home, I’ve been reading a lot more than I had in the past couple years since I don’t have a smartphone and I would prefer to avoid dopamine injections while outside the home. I finished Aaron Likens’s Playing in Traffic (he’s the autistic IndyCar flagman and demonstrator who got interviewed on James Hinchcliffe and Alexander Rossi’s podcast a while ago). Then I reread Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? He’s probably my favorite non-fiction writer and I’ve read most of his books. I read Michael Harrington’s The Other America about poverty in the ‘60s (he’s the guy who later founded Democratic Socialists of America, and now I’m reading Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, which is one of the definitive books about baseball. I’m not really into baseball but I do find it interesting since he has a great, entertaining writing style and some of the people I do like reading have talked him up. He talks a lot about the industry “inside baseball” (har har) and was one of the first people to write about what baseball players were actually like in an era when they were apparently usually written about hagiographically. Now it’s almost quaint a half-century later in a vastly edgier culture.
For the record, I previously rated Clark’s teammate Graham Hill #1 for 1962 but I’ve decided to flip them so I will be editing Hill’s entry accordingly. I also forgot to rate Lewis Hamilton’s 2005 and I’m going to give him a C for that. It’s possible I might change my mind and rank Clark first later. If I do, I’ll obviously rewrite this.
