![]() But Michael Schumacher remains an all-time great and not just because he won seven world championships, 91 races and smashed every record there was to smash. He still polarises opinion, and there’s no question that he over-stepped the mark more often than was necessary. There was never any doubt which one was which." Being on the podium with Jimmy and sharing an apartment with him… people called us Batman and Robin. It was a serious life, we were doing an intense amount of racing. Jim was a farmer from the Borders and I was a glorified mechanic from Dumbuck. "We weren’t jet set, like people thought. "Jim Clark was everything I aspired to be, as a racing driver and as a man," his great friend Sir Jackie Stewart said. As well as his versatility, Clark was revered for his incredible silkiness behind the wheel, and his extraordinary mechanical sympathy. The son of a Borders sheep farmer whose route to F1 was facilitated by Lotus and its founder Colin Chapman, he won two world championships, in 19, but was equally dazzling in sports cars, touring cars, and also managed to win the 1965 Indianapolis 500, driving the first mid-engined car to do so, and leading 190 of the 200 laps.Ĭlark set 33 pole positions and won 25 of the 72 GP starts he made, and can claim numerous records to this day – in 1963, for example, he led 71 per cent of all laps raced that season. Jim Clark was one of the most unassuming men ever to sit in an F1 cockpit, but also arguably the most singularly gifted driver of all time. Not all of the world’s great sporting stars are as extrovert as they might appear – or as we might want them to be. But not just yet, and not so soon that he may well end up being the greatest, bar none. "Everything just works better now, with the experience I have… I don’t even think it’s harder to stay physically in shape, although I’m sure that will inevitably tail off at some point." At some point. I feel as young as ever, I feel fit, fitter than ever," Lewis told TG a while back. Which means that he may not yet have even reached his peak… "I think he went about those results in a technically cleaner executed way, just by the way of wheel-to-wheel combat and no real trickery in his contact with the other drivers." There are too many great drives to choose from, but the prodigious talent that produced such spectacular performances in the early part of his F1 career is now tempered by huge experience. "I think he’s more complete than Michael," Mark Webber once observed. ![]() On the other hand… he’s still winning races and breaking records. He’s still winning races and breaking records, so it may seem a little premature to be venerating Lewis.
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