Sixty years ago the 1963 Belgian Grand Prix ran in circumstances so terrifying and dangerous nobody would dream of racing in them in this current age. It was a race won by a quiet genius, putting in a performance of almost superhuman skill. This is the story of that race and the tragic path that led to it.
The 1963 Belgian Grand Prix was contested at the traditional home of the event, the magnificent circuit of Spa Francorchamps. Everyone loves Spa. It’s the ideal of what a racing circuit should be. Swooping and climbing its way through the Ardennes forest it is beautiful and challenging. A tumbling rollercoaster of a place. Everyone loves Spa. To win at Spa is special. The mystique and the weight of history. To conquer the place puts you up among the best. Everyone loves Spa. Eau Rouge, Raidillon, Blanchimont, Stavelot. These are corners which evoke immediate reactions and respect from anyone involved or interested in motorsport. Everyone loves Spa.
Jim Clark hated Spa. Loathed it. In his all too brief career he started eight Belgian Grand Prix. He won four of them. Yet he detested the place. He had good reason.
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The Old Spa
Even now (as recent events have tragically shown) Spa retains teeth. It is high speed and high challenge. Requiring total commitment and unerring skill. It only rewards the best. And for those lacking (or indeed just plain unlucky) it can be immensely cruel. Behind that façade of pure motorsports challenge and old world European beauty, it still takes lives.
In the 1960s, when Clark took the place on, it was far, far worse. For all its immense challenge, the cut down circuit we know today is a reduced, sanitized and safety conscious edit of the original. The Spa of the 1960s was a savage, evil, monster.
Where now the circuit turns right at Les Combes it used to veer left and out into the Belgian farming countryside on a sequence of ultra fast, zero error, corners. First after Les Combes would be the terrifying long right hander through Burnenville with fences, farm buildings, and ditches to catch you if you made any mistake.
Then would come the challenge of Malmedy, a seductive right, left, right serpent between hedges and literal flagpoles. Then you would scream down the long back straight (not that it really was straight) which would take you to Stavelot, a corner far different than its namesake today, being instead a very technical uphill righthander with no run-off. There was a wall of advertising hoardings to plough into at high speed if you got it wrong. Of course, before you even got to Stavelot you had to run the ultimate gauntlet . . .
The Most Terrifying Corner In Formula One
Today the Eau Rouge/Raidillon is spoken of in hushed tones. It commands the ultimate respect, even now, when it is after all, easy to take flat in an F1 car. In the 60s this was not the case. Back then it was a dangerous dance of a downshift and drift section with the car on the absolute limit of adhesion on tyres which you wouldn’t consider as having any grip whatsoever by today’s standards. Yet it was still not the most severe test Spa offered a racing driver. That was Masta.
About a third of the way down the “straight” between Malmedy and Stavelot lay the Masta kink. A left right flick, literally between farm houses. Exit speed was essential as the rest of the run to Holowell and Stavelot was flat out. This meant that in order to be in any way competitive you would have to negotiate this lethal section of road without losing speed. This meant total commitment, in an era when there was no downforce to assist you, and crude bias ply rubber offered you a lower, shifting sand, level of grip. The car would step out on you. You would have to hold it. If you didn’t, the next stop was 170 mph into a solid brick wall, a tree, or a telegraph pole.
If you got Masta wrong it would kill you.
A Different Age
Viewed from today, this corner’s very existence seems insanity. Each driver would need to thread this appalling needle 32 times every single Grand Prix (not even counting practice laps). This was a different, different time.
Assuming you survived this, getting around Stavelot, without ending up smeared over an advertising hoarding for Castrol, you weren’t done yet. You would head back into the forest and scream through a sequence of ridiculously fast, blind exit drifts, La Carrier and Blanchimont, on your way back to the La Source hairpin. Braking hard for this on fading steel brakes you would squeal, slither and downshift down the (fully manual) box to make its apex. Again, plunging down the hill to Eau Rouge again and onto the Kemmel straight. Then dive left at Les Combes once more and remind yourself just how terrifying Burnenville was. Again. And again. And again. Until the nightmare was over.
Over 8.7 miles of lunacy. Long enough for the track to be bone dry at one point and soaking wet on another. The weather at Spa was always unpredictable. The rain clings to the trees of the forest in its own little microclimate. It appears from nowhere with a speed comparable to that of the cars to deluge the circuit. Or even more alarmingly, just half of it. And in 1963 that rain would be biblical.
The Great Debate
Motorsport fans often debate “the best ever” or “GOAT”. It’s a question that can never really be answered for many reasons. Especially in a sport which sees technology march on for good or ill. This impossibility won’t stop people trying of course. However, whenever it is debated any discussion which doesn’t include Clark is a particularly ignorant one. The quiet Scot’s talent in a racing car (any racing car it seemed) seemed to border on the supernatural. He combined unbeatable speed, and metronomic consistency with a lightness of touch on his fragile machinery which nobody else has matched. Senna called him “The Best of the Best”. Fangio rated him as the greatest he’d ever seen. Their testimony is not unusual.
It is almost zero exaggeration to say that if Clark didn’t have a problem with his car, he would win. Not just win, he would dominate to an almost unreal extent. Then he would get out of the car, smile, wave shyly and pick up his trophy. Then go and do it all again somewhere else. Perhaps the most telling statistic of Clark’s career, in the World Championship at least, is that he only finished second in a race once. Just once. At the 1963 German Grand Prix. In a car with a dead cylinder.
Genius In Adversity
When Clark did have a problem with the car, you would be treated to some of the greatest miracles ever performed behind the wheel. This article isn’t the place to discuss some of those feats, but in the World Championship alone (and Clark raced in many categories with much success) some of those drives are staggering.
Watkins Glen 1967, winning with the right rear wheel collapsing. Monza 1967 (often held up as Clark’s greatest drive) retaking the lead after being a lap down due to tyre problems. Zandvoort 1966, leading the Grand Prix in a car with an engine ⅔ the size of the drivers chasing him. Mexico 1967, winning without a clutch. Silverstone 1965, winning while having to turn the engine off in corners and getting it going again on the straights (yes, really).
You could base an article on any of these races very easily, however we’re discussing the 1963 Belgian Grand Prix, and in the 1963 Belgian Grand Prix Clark would have a problem. Typically for him he wouldn’t tell anyone about it, the full facts would have to be pried out of him later. Despite this he would score a victory which is among the very best in the history of motor racing.
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Clark and Spa. Conquering Fears.
Jim Clark first drove at Spa in May of 1958. It was his first race outside of the UK. The small but immensely effective Border Reivers sports car team, for whom he was enjoying great success, entered their Jaguar D-Type for the Spa Grand Prix (not to be confused with the Belgian Grand Prix), a major race on the European Sports Car calendar. Just a month before, Clark had put in the first 100 mph average lap for a Sports Car in UK circuit history at the Full Sutton airfield circuit in Yorkshire. Speeds at Spa were much higher. Even in 1958 a sports car like the D-Type could top out at 180mph. Big, overpowered and on skinny tyres with, by modern standards, feeble brakes, these machines were utter beasts. What followed is probably best explained by Clark himself who stated in his autobiography;
“The big race started at 4pm, and by this time I had a good dose of the shakes. I sat there on the line in the white D-Type. Around me were various people I held in awe . . . Archie Scott Brown and Masten Gregory in their Lister-Jaguars shot ahead and waged a tremendous battle but I was too busy frightening myself silly in the D-Type.
This race, with the subsequent fatal accident to Archie Scott Brown really put me off the circuit and I have never liked it since. I’ve just lost too many friends there.
I had a pretty rough race myself at Spa. I was never very happy there and I don’t mind admitting that I was very frightened throughout . . .
Naturally I was lapped by Masten who won the race . . . I was coming down to Burnenville and by now I had a scrap of confidence and I felt I was really beginning to motor . . . Suddenly there was an almighty howl of sound, a blast of wind, the whole car shook and Masten went steaming past like a bat out of hell. He was well out in the lead with the Lister-Jaguar all sideways, his arms crossed up and fighting the steering. I remember having a sudden twinge of shock and thinking “To heck with this, if this is motor racing I’m going to give up now”
Jim Clark At The Wheel – Clarksport ltd 1964
Clark then had a very bad moment at Masta. A lap down and slipstreaming Paul Frere and Lucien Bianchi, he pulled out from behind them just before the kink;
“The whole car was suddenly blown right across the circuit to the inside of the corner. It gave me the shock of my life, and we reckoned afterwards that I’d been doing about 174mph.”
Jim Clark At The Wheel – Clarksport ltd 1964
The Duel
Worse was to come. Though not for Clark. Archie Scott Brown (a man about whom a movie needs to be made) was battling Masten Gregory for the lead. Two superb sports car drivers though neither looked much like a racing driver is apparently supposed to. Gregory, the famed “Kansas City Flash” had a reputation for speed and utter heroics which belied his slight build and bookish bespectacled appearance.
Archie Scott Brown, due to infant polio, was missing a fully formed right hand and had severe deformity to his legs. The doctors had told his parents it would be an achievement if he could walk. After enduring many surgeries, and confronting the prejudice and skepticism of others, he had emerged as one of the most naturally gifted racing drivers of his day, and the first disabled driver to race in Formula One. A titan of the sport, more needs to be made of him. Sadly the Spa GP of 1958 would be his last race.
Spa’s Teeth
Whilst attempting to catch and pass Gregory, Archie ran fractionally wide on the approach to La Source, almost certainly due to Spa’s horrible tendency to have a circuit which was wet in one part and not another. This was enough for him to graze the marker placed to mark the spot where Richard Seaman had suffered his fatal crash in the 1930s. The Lister then ploughed into a road sign. Spa was mostly public roads at this time. The car rolled and burst into flames in a truly horrific wreck. Scott Brown was pulled clear. Horrendously burned he died the next day.
Despite being a fellow Scot, Clark did not know Scott Brown except by reputation, and had only been introduced that weekend. Nevertheless the accident left a deep impression. This impression was only to grow.
The 1960 Belgian Grand Prix. Hell.
By 1960 Clark was a Formula One driver with Lotus. Originally he was supposed to sign for Aston Martin, but their F1 project ran into difficulties. Clark was snatched up by Colin Chapman who had personally raced against Clark in a sports car race at Brands Hatch and had been impressed.
Lotus were running the nimble and versatile Lotus 18 in 1960, the first of their truly competitive cars. They had also supplied these chassis to numerous privateer teams too. They were about to have a truly awful weekend.
The first incident was a double whammy in practice for the race. Stirling Moss, driving a privateer Lotus 18 for Rob Walker Racing had the left rear suspension fail in the middle of Burnenville at 130mph. The Lotus spun into a bank, rolled and threw Moss out. He was fortunate to escape with a broken nose and legs.
Almost simultaneously at the other side of the circuit Mike Taylor, driving another privately entered Lotus 18 went straight on at La Carrier when his steering column failed. He went into the trees and suffered an accident which ended his career then and there as he suffered chest and neck injuries. A nervy atmosphere settled on the circuit and practice continued. It felt like there was a jinx somewhere. Clark qualified tenth but was promoted to ninth. Moss was unable to take the third place start he’d earned before his accident.
When the race came it became an all out slipstreaming battle between the cars through Spa’s blazing fast corners. The average speed around the course at this early stage was over 133 mph. This includes the drop taken to navigate the La Source hairpin, which remains one of the slowest corners in F1. It was in this crucible of speed that things began to go wrong.
The Rag Doll
On lap 19 inexperienced but quick English driver Chris Bristow, driving a Cooper for the Yeoman Credit team, managed to squeeze past the Ferrari of the very fast but very wild Belgian Willy Mairesse. Trying to keep the Ferrari behind him Bristow streaked into Burnenville on the wrong line. He lost control and the car rolled into a barbed wire fence. Tragically, this decapitated Bristow. The body thrown onto the circuit. Clark, immediately following, was the first to drive past.
“I came bustling down behind them and no one had any flags out to warn me of what was round the corner. I saw a marshal suddenly dash out onto the road, waving his arms and trying to stop me, and the next thing I saw was another marshal run from the far side of the road. I remember thinking “Where is he going?”. And then he bent down and grabbed this thing by the side of the road. It looked just like a rag doll. It was horrible and I’ll never forget the sight of his mangled body being dragged to the side. I was almost sick on the spot. I remember at the end of the race that my car was spattered with blood . . .”
Jim Clark At The Wheel – Clarksport ltd 1964
Spa dished out yet more horror. Five laps later Clark’s team mate, Alan Stacey, was hit in the face by a bird as he came through Malmedy. The car went off the road. It flipped end over end down a hill before bursting into flame. The unfortunate Stacey was killed instantly, throw out of the wreck.
Clark eventually finished a very shaken fifth. It was one of the blackest days in Formula One history. The dislike Clark had for Spa was now, understandably, deeply rooted. It was going nowhere, no matter what he would achieve at the circuit.
Fragility
It was perhaps the ultimate irony that, two years later, Clark would win his first World Championship Grand Prix at Spa during the 1962 Grand Prix. The World Championship though would elude him. He would finish second to the BRM of Graham Hill. His Lotus gave up with an oil leak just 20 laps from victory in the South African Grand Prix, the last race of the season.
For 1963 Clark and Lotus intended to make no such mistake. The team were equipped with the Lotus 25, first seen in 1962. This was the first monocoque chassis in F1 and a revolution. Lighter and stiffer, its cornering performance was a step forward, but it was very fragile and not easy to drive. This fragility had lost Clark the title in 1962, and 1963 had already shown the same frailty. Clark had taken a commanding pole at the season opened in Monaco, and had led for 78 laps, before the gearbox broke. Graham Hill once again benefitted from Clark’s retirement and took the win. The first of five in the principality which were to make him “Mr Monaco” for a generation.
And so the World Championship moved on to Spa for Round 2.
Practice Problems
Again Lotus had issues. The chassis and spring rates were still set up for Monaco. The car was oversteering badly. Putting this right took time and experiment to work out, and then the gearbox began to act up again. By the end of practice Clark had qualified a disappointing eighth. Three seconds off the pole time of Graham Hill. It looked set to be a difficult weekend.
Sunday dawned with a literal thunderstorm. Rain sheeted down across the circuit all morning. The start was at 3:30pm. The hope was things would have improved by then. They did and, despite most of the preparation for the start having to be done under umbrellas and tarpaulins by 3:30pm the track was damn but not soaking. At the start line at least. Still the skies glowered darkly though, and the forest of the Ardenne brooded menacingly in the grey.
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Into The Shadow
Given the threatening conditions and the issues he’d had already, not to mention the nature of Spa, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Clark would’ve taken it easy and played himself into the 1963 Belgian Grand Prix. Instead, when the flag dropped, Clark came out of the grid slot like a cork out of a champagne bottle. In those days the start line at Spa was after La Source and before Eau Rouge, on the steep downhill section. Clark dived down the pitlane side of the circuit like a bullet and, incredibly, he cut back onto the racing line for Eau Rouge in the lead. Graham Hill following close in his wake and the rest of the field behind them.
By the second lap this pair were comfortably ahead of the field. By lap five Clark was eight seconds ahead of Hill who himself was a long way clear of anyone else. However all was not well with the Lotus. Clark later wrote;
“I began to get the old gearbox trouble again. It started dropping out of top and at Spa this is not funny. You wind the car up to, say, 9,500rpm on the straights when suddenly all hell is let loose and you make a grab for the gear lever and pull it back into gear before you put the revolutions right off the clock. Once this happens you start waiting for it to happen again.”
Jim Clark At The Wheel – Clarksport ltd 1964
One Hand
The only alternative to retirement was for Clark to hold the car in gear with one hand and drive with the other with Graham Hill pushing hard behind him.
“On the main straight at Spa there is a kink [Masta] in the middle and, though I decided to drop 300 rpm when going through this kink for safety’s sake, I was still doing about 150 mph. This meant that as I approached the kink, I would be holding the gear lever in place with my right hand and moving my left hand down to the bottom of the steering wheel. I did this because the car has a redundancy on this kink to move from one side of the road to the other and I often needed correction. By keeping my hand low on the wheel I could twirl the steering round with one hand and hold the slide but doing this for lap after lap was not in the least funny.”
Jim Clark At The Wheel – Clarksport ltd 1964
Just consider that quote for a minute. This is a driver describing driving a mechanically compromised car, at high speed, through the most frightening corner in Formula One. He is racing in a fully manual car, with no downforce, no driver aids, on all weather tyres with cross ply construction. He is driving one handed, on a damp track, while maintaining a lead and being chased down by the reigning World Champion.
Staggering. By lap 16, half distance, Clark was 26 seconds clear of Hill. In a car he was having to drive one handed. The challenge of the The 1963 Belgian Grand Prix was about to get even more severe.
Thunder
On lap 17 lightning split the sky over Malmedy heralding the return of the thunder storm, and soon the rain was lashing down onto Spa again. Cars howled on in a dense fog of spray. Visibility tumbled. What little grip there was vanished utterly.
On the long circuit lap times increased dramatically as the rain took hold, but somehow Clark continued to motor on and the gap to the others only increased. Graham Hill retired from second as the rain began, his own gearbox giving out suddenly. This gave second place to Dan Gurney in the Brabham, a very distant second indeed.
Clark, by now, had decided to do without the problematic fifth gear as much as possible and yet somehow was still pulling away from everyone else.
By lap 25 there were almost literal rivers running across part of the circuit and Clark had lapped Tony Maggs, who himself was running fourth. Thunder rolled across the sky along with flashes of lightning to give the whole scene a nightmarish quality. It was practically dark. You would never, ever, even contemplate running a motor-race in such conditions today.
Lightning
Lap 29 saw the storm reach its peak. Clark’s 29th lap came in at 6 minute 40 seconds. Hill’s pole from practice was a 3 minute 54. This gives you some idea of how apocalyptically bad the weather was, average speeds were nearly half of what they had been at the start of the race. Yet by this point, Clark had lapped everyone.
Gurney, perhaps sensibly, was backing off and this allowed Bruce McLaren in the Cooper to forge into second. Indeed McLaren did succeed in un-lapping himself before the finish. Clark had decided the race was in the bag and backed off himself, letting the young Kiwi past. McLaren would be the only driver to finish on the leader’s lap.
Hallelujah
Clark completed the 1963 Belgian Grand Prix’s 32 laps (over 256 miles of Grand Prix racing) in 2 hours, 27 minutes and 47.6 seconds. McLaren finished his 32nd lap 4 minutes and 54 seconds behind.
To put that in context for you. In between Clark winning and McLaren finishing second you could listen to the entirety of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” from start to finish. You would then still have time to pour yourself a pint of lager.
By any definition it was one of the most staggering victories in Formula One history. Taken by a driver having to do much of the distance one handed due to nursing an ailing gearbox. On one of the most demanding and dangerous circuits in the world. In a thunderstorm. A performance which frankly defies belief.
Clark’s victory in the 1963 Belgian Grand Prix was his first of the season. He would win six of the next eight World Championship Grand Prix. Taking his first World Title in a fashion of dominance few have ever matched.
Racing In The Rain
And what of that gearbox issue? Well. Clark never mentioned it to anyone at the time publicly. He didn’t explain his struggle to any of the motoring press who interviewed him about his victory. Why? Because he didn’t want to embarrass his team, or Colin Chapman. The whole thing only came out months later. The truth is probably, that given it was Spa, he was just glad for it to be over.
The debate about F1 racing in the rain is intensifying. There are arguments on both sides certainly, and it’s not a discussion for here. One thing is certain though. Formula One has no business endangering drivers or spectators in the manner that was normal in the 1960s. If we continue to race in the rain we must find a way to do it as safely as possible. To paraphrase Clark himself, If that’s motor racing, give up now. The 1963 Belgian Grand Prix is an event that seems to belong in the past. We can marvel at the skill and bravery of those involved. But should we ever ask for it to be repeated?
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