90th, Surtees' Triumph, Clark's Heroics, and Ferrari's Resurgence at Nürburgring

We’d seen glimpses in 1960, when briefly they’d been together at Lotus, but after walking away from Colin Chapman it had taken a couple of years for the seven-time motorcycle world champion to secure a recognisably competitive F1 seat. That said, he had qualified on the front row in Germany one year earlier, before taking his unfancied Lola Mk4 to second behind Graham Hill’s BRM. He knew the Nürburgring on two wheels and was no less accomplished on four.

This time Surtees was 16sec clear of the field (no, there shouldn’t be a decimal point) during the opening practice session, although Clark’s Lotus 25 had the upper hand (by a less spectacular 2.6sec) during the wet afternoon. Ferrari had plumped for Bosch fuel injection in a bid to get their six cylinders on a par with the Climax-powered Lotus’s eight and Chapman opted to give Clark a fresh engine overnight – a tactic Ferrari also adopted.

The Scot went on to beat Surtees’s previous best by the aforementioned nine tenths, although the Ferrari driver was now hampered by a chassis crack. As a mark of the gulf separating the top two from the rest, Lorenzo Bandini – third fastest in Scuderia Centro Sud’s BRM, almost three seconds clear of Graham Hill’s works car – was another 7.6sec in arrears.