Jim Clark Signed Original Photograph Very Rare

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Jim Clark Original Photograpg Hand signed This is beautiful and measures 6 inches by 4 3/4 inches. This is NOT a PRE-PRINT I have shown images of the sugnature and rear of the card and below is a biography of Jim Clark. We are listing some 100 Very Rare signed F1 Autographs over the next few weeks including, Clark, Ascari, Hill,Farina and a Great many more. Sunday April 7th, 1968. It was an April day like any other April day. Dull, overcast with intermittent showers. In England the motor racing fraternity's attention was focused on the BOAC 500 at Brands Hatch. A six hour race for Sports cars. The grid was filled with Porches, GT40's, Lola-Chevrolets and Ferraris. Much interest surrounded the debut of Ford's successor to their GT40, the new Alan Mann Ford V-8 F3LAt Hockenheim in Germany there was a minor Formula 2 race taking place, the Deutschland Trophy. It was the second round of the European Formula 2 Championship. In those days Formula One drivers competed in races almost every weekend. At Brands Hatch Denny Hulme and Bruce McLaren shared the new Ford; in Germany the works Lotus cars were driven by Graham Hill and Jim Clark. The Deutschland Trophy was to be run in two heats. The track was still wet from heavy overnight rain, although it was only drizzling by the start of the first heat. Jim Clark had not gone well in practice and he lined up on the grid in 7th position. As he passed the pits to start his 5th lap, he was in 8th place and clearly in some trouble with his car. Jim Clark never completed that lap. As he drove round a slight right hand curve at over 140 MPH the car was seen to twitch, then to leave the circuit diagonally and to slam sideways into some trees. Jim Clark was killed instantly. A lot died with Jim Clark's death. It signalled the beginning of the end of the "amateur" era in F1. Although many more drivers would die for want of even elementary safety measures, both in terms of car construction and track design, so shaken were the drivers that under the leadership of Clark's great friend and rival Jackie Stewart, the push for change started. Run off areas, guard rails and gravel traps would greet the over-the-limit driver. Not trees, ditches and earth banks. Jim Clark, the son of a Scottish farmer, made his competition debut in June 1956 driving his own Sunbeam Mk 3 in a local sprint event. He won. Over the next 12 years he would dominate world motor racing like no one before or since. Two World Championships, twenty five Grand Prix victories, thirty three pole positions, winner of the 1965 Indianapolis 500, three times Tasman Champion. When you dig deeper and realize that two more World Championships slipped away in '62 and '64 through engine related failures at the final race, a clearer picture of his dominance emerges. Statistics alone, though, can never tell the full story, just as drivers from different eras cannot and should not be compared. A driver can only be judged against the other drivers he drove against. Clearly Clark totally dominated his era and set the standards by which others were judged. Sure he had challengers, Graham Hill and Dan Gurney throughout most of his F1 career, Jochen Rindt in F2 was a fierce competitor. Jackie Stewart was emerging as his main rival in F1. Interestingly it was Jim Clark's father, who at his son's funeral took Dan Gurney aside and told him that he (Gurney) was the only driver Jim had ever feared on the race tracks of the world. Indeed it was Dan Gurney that pushed Colin Chapman, the legendary founder of the Lotus company - for whom Clark drove almost exclusively throughout his career, to build a series of special cars to compete in the Indianapolis 500. In many ways it was Jim Clark's performances in oval track racing, a discipline in which he had no previous experience, that underlined just what a natural talent he possessed. In the early '60s Indy was dominated by front engined roadsters, powered by the Offenhauser engine that had been around since be... read more

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