Taken from Motor Sport, August 2013, Coulthard drives the Lotus 25: ‘I whooped on Hangar Straight!’

David Coulthard cuts the ignition, wiggles the red leather steering wheel and folds his arms. “Well, if you’d just like to put me in the back of the truck I’ll stay in here. Tell the wife and kids I love them, but I might not be home.” It’s a nice soundbite from the professional broadcaster; maybe he composed it on the run down the pitlane, aware cameras were waiting, that the BBC crew has him miked up in the car. But it becomes plain later that the enthusiasm is real, the pleasure unfeigned. One Scottish driver who took the chequered flag here at Silverstone connecting with another Scotsman who did the same 50 years ago, one brick in an over-arching year that made him champion. This is Jim Clark’s Lotus 25, a revolution in design that fulfils a well-used phrase. It really did make all other racers obsolete overnight.

This is an appropriate place for DC, retired Formula 1 driver and popular BBC commentator, to experience his countryman’s view over that minimal screen: Coulthard twice won the British GP here, in 1999 and 2000; Clark did so three times — ’63, ’65 and ’67, and the upcoming Silverstone Classic will honour the late double champion with a commemorative dinner and two Jim Clark Trophy races. But if a Chapman Mk9 time machine (that restless innovator would have got around to one eventually) dropped Jim here today he’d not know where he was, blanked off by barriers, constrained by concrete. Yet he’d learn the updated track in a couple of laps, and similarly DC soon has the feel of the gearchange, the light steering, the airy ride of a car that, aerodynamically, performs worse rather than better as speed soars.