Why they rank here
Clark's rate stats are second only to Fangio's among champions: 25 wins and 33 poles from just 72 starts — winning more than a third of every Grand Prix he entered — with two titles, 1963 and 1965, both sealed with crushing superiority. He still holds the record for grand chelems (pole, win, fastest lap, every lap led) with eight. His versatility has no modern equivalent: in 1965 he won the Formula 1 world championship and the Indianapolis 500 in the same summer, and he won in touring cars, sports cars and Formula 2 almost casually. Contemporaries considered the gap behind him unbridgeable — when conditions were equal, Clark simply drove away, as at Spa 1963, won by nearly five minutes in the rain. He died at Hockenheim in April 1968 in a minor Formula 2 race, aged 32, almost certainly with multiple championships left in him. On pure driving, many period observers rated him the best ever.
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