Low-key stock car outing for Clark

Jimmy Clark’s Indy-winning Lotus-Ford 38 was of course a heroine of the Goodwood Festival of Speed this year. But ever-enthusiastic Jeremy Nightingale really came up trumps with some photographs I had never seen before, recalling Jimmy’s other exploration of American Speedway racing when he drove a red-liveried Holman & Moody Ford stock car in the American ‘500’ at Rockingham, North Carolina’s flat one-mile oval, on October 29, 1967.

Jimmy took the start in mid-pack and ran there comfortably for 144 laps until the engine failed. He was sharing the drive with Jochen Rindt – at that time in his final year as a Formula 1 Cooper-Maserati works driver – but the engine let go before the Austrian could take over. The double World Champion and Indy-winner described the NASCAR experience as having been “very interesting”, but it was an experiment not to be repeated. Tragically, of course, Jimmy had barely seven months to live…