Auto Racing: Wee Jimmy's Wee Bomb

The machine is minuscule: 21½ in. long by 27 in. wide, and only 370 Ibs. But listen to it hum. Bolted into a fragile frame of piping and Plexiglas, it generates 330 h.p., sounds like a Dixieland band, and last week propelled Scotland's Jimmy Clark, 31 (TIME cover, July 9, 1965), to a record average speed of 107 m.p.h. in the South African Grand Prix, his 25th Grand Prix victory—breaking the alltime career record set by Argentina's now-retired Juan Manuel Fangio.

Like the other Clark victories, this one was scored in a Lotus, one of those creations of British Designer Colin Chapman that have made such proud marques as Ferrari and Maserati alsorans on the Grand Prix circuit. In place of the familiar old Coventry Climax engine (originally designed to power a fire-engine water pump), the Lotus 49 boasts a brand-new V-8 Ford-Cosworth engine that may well give Ford a Grand Prix championship to go with the victories it has already won at Indianapolis, Le Mans and on the stock-car circuit. Constructed mainly of aluminum, with a single-plane crankshaft (instead of the usual V-8 two-plane shaft) that permits a simplified exhaust system, the engine took a year and a half to develop, and can actually be tuned, if desired, to put out as many as 420 horses.

So powerful is the new engine and so light the Lotus chassis (total weight, with engine: 1,102 Ibs.) that A. J. Foyt, last year's Indy 500 winner (in a Ford-powered special), says: "I wouldn't be caught dead in it; and if I ever did get in it, I probably would be." Britain's Graham Hill, who drove another Lotus 49 to second place in the 204-mi. South African Grand Prix, says: "You have to keep tabs on the car. You can't let it get away from you."

Clark himself admits that "the cornering is not yet what I'd like it to be," and says that if the engine is tuned too high, "you get wheelspin even at 6,000 r.p.m. in top gear." Still, shrugs Jim, who has never had a serious shunt, "I don't see any special danger in the car—insofar as danger is up to me."