Lest you think that I was going to turn this day of content into an entire day of drag racing stuff, I’ve found and shared this completely and utterly amazing footage from 1963 that shows Jim Clark racing his Lotus around the Oulton Park course in England as Colin Chapman looks on. The Lotus race cars of the 1960s have this complicated and conflicting emotions attached to them. On the one hand they were lithe, fast, simple, and literally form fitted to their drivers. On the other hand they were fragile, prone to killing said drivers, and generally regarded as uncrashable in the sense that no one survived when a Lotus took a shot of any magnitude. Jimmy Clark was one of the great race drivers of his day in Grand Prix, various levels of Formula competition, and even at places like the Indy 500. In this video you can clearly see why. He is amazingly smooth and very fast around this track. So fast that he won the race.

Outside of watching Clark ply his trade in the cockpit of the car you can here the awesome 1.5L Coventry Climax V8 engine screaming behind him. This little wonder mill was able to produce more than 200hp out of a mere 90ci and that was naturally aspirated in the early 1960s. We take feats like this for granted in today’s age of EFI, turbos, and advanced engine design technology. The Climax was a plucky little bastard that stood toe to toe with engines from the likes of Ferrari and others for may years on the Grand Prix trail.

There is something cosmically right watching Jimmy Clark race a Lotus in his prime. We wish we could have been one of the distinguished looking English chaps greeting him at the finish of his triumph at Oulton Park. Great days indeed.

PRESS PLAY BELOW TO WATCH 1963 VINTAGE IN-CAR VIDEO OF JIM CLARK IN A LOTUS!