Jim Clark
We have often been asked why it was that Jim Clark did not race for Ecurie Ecosse, save for one occasion at Goodwood in 1959,and the answer is simple; deadly rivalry.
One of the first racing cars Jim Clark ever saw in action was Ecurie Ecosse who took their C-type Jaguars to Charterhall circuit, the World War II airfield in the Scottish Borders, for a private test session one summer afternoon. Jim had been playing cricket and was cycling home but heard the sound of cars and climbed the fence to watch David Murray’s blue cars circling the track. It would be romantic to say that his interest in motor racing was sparked at that moment but in fact he really did not become interested until he started to drive and joined Berwick and District Motor Club and the Border Young Farmers Motor Club. There he met up with Ian Scott Watson who was totally in the thrall of motor racing, had run his little MG in rallies and had built a grotesque Buckler sports car from a kit.
Clark competed in local rallies and in 1955 qualified for an International rally licence to do the 1955 International Scottish Rally with his cousin, Billy Potts, in an Austin Healey 100. It was on that rally that Jim Clark drove a car at 100 mph for the first time, crossing Glencoe in convoy with Ken Best in his Austin Healey 100.
After Scott Watson persuaded Clark to race first his DKW saloon and then his Porsche 1600 Jock McBain and Scott Watson decided to revive Scotland’s first true motor racing team, Border Reivers, and buy a Jaguar D type for Jim to race. By this time it was 1958 and Ecurie Ecosse had already won Le Mans twice and were high on the hog, so to speak. In his first Continental race with Reivers Jim Clark raced directly against Ecurie Ecosse at the notoriously fast Spa circuit and Clark was overawed. He admitted to the writer that when one-time Ecosse driver Jack Fairman took Jim round the track in a road car to point out the corners he could not believe how fast the track was.
In that race two things happened, the great Archie Scott-Brown was killed in his factory Lister-Jaguar and Ecurie Ecosse’s American driver Masten Gregory won the race in the Ecosse Lister-Jaguar. Jim recalled being lapped by Gregory."there was this vroom and Masten came past me as though I was standing still and I thought to myself I will never be able to drive as fast as that". Later that year Jim had his first races against Ecurie Ecosse where he was now competitive and this was at Charterhall. Innes Ireland was in the team’s new Tojeiro-Jaguar and Ron Flockhart was in a D type. In the two races in which they ran Clark split the two drivers and even Innes Ireland made a mistake and spun off the road at the end of the straight in the heat of the battle. At the end of the season Border Reivers sold the D type Jaguar and bought a Lister-Jaguar and yet for Jim Clark the call never came from David Murray to drive for Ecurie Ecosse. It irked him somewhat and he used to refer to Ecurie Ecosse as "those guys from Edinburgh" and might never have driven for the team had it not been for a telephone call from David Murray in September 1959 asking him to share the Tojeiro-Jaguar with Masten Gregory in the Tourist Trophy race at Goodwood. Clark was so hurt that he had not been asked to race for Ecurie Ecosse that we fully expected him to turn it down but the key factor was Masten Gregory. Up to that time Jim thought Masten Gregory was superfast and now here was a chance to share the same car with him and gauge his own progress in racing, so he agreed.
In practice he proved to be the equal of Gregory and in the race was actually faster than him and they were looking forward to a good finish. However Gregory had his third, and last, crash for Ecurie Ecosse at Goodwood’s Woodcote Corner which wrote off the car and resulted in a DNF for Clark in his one and only race for Ecurie Ecosse. He had proved to himself he was quicker than Gregory and what happened next was the emergence of Clark as one of the greatest racing drivers Britain has ever known.
