The British Era

Despite Moss's mid-1950s heroics, the British era really began in 1958, when Mike Hawthorn captured the F1 championship driving the Ferrari 246 — after the death of fellow Brit Peter Collins in the French GP at Reims — and Moss once again finished second in the Vanwall (designed by Colin Chapman). Disenchanted and distraught by Ferrari politics, Hawthorn — the first British World Champion — retired at season end, only to be killed just months later in a road accident in his Jaguar in January 1959.

Vanwall withdrew from F1, but it its place were to come a series of dominant British Grand Prix teams, making British racing green the "official" color of F1 for a more than a decade — and ushering in an era of British F1 engineering excellence that extends to today. Between 1962 and 1973, British F1 teams won 12 World Championships with drivers the likes of Scots Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart, Australian Jack Brabham, Englishman Graham Hill and New Zealander Denny Hulme. It all started in 1959-60 with the Cooper team, using a 2,500 cc Coventry Climax engine and a revolutionary rear-engine design that captured back-to-back F1 titles for Jack Brabham with a combination of superb weight distribution and handling. (Driving a "works" Cooper along with Brabham to second place in the 1960 World Championship was young New Zealander Bruce McLaren — whose real fame, like Enzo Ferrari, came later as a team owner.)

Yet it was Colin Chapman's Team Lotus, pushed by his technical brilliance, which dominated the second decade of Formula One. Beginning in 1960 with Moss and Innes Ireland, Lotus thrived on the extraordinary relationship between Chapman and his prodigy driver, Jim Clark, who was to make the most of Lotus' technical advances for F1 cars. The most important of these was the monocoque (or one-piece) chassis, introduced with the Lotus 25 in 1962, which along with rear engines marked the second watershed technological change in Formula One.

We must picture it as best we can: the low, low Lotus 25, Clark’s hands encased in black driving gloves and holding the wheel with such sensitivity, such lightness of touch. Jim Clark did not beat the Nürburgring into submission. He caressed it into surrender, seduced from it every secret it had.

Grand Prix Showdown - Christopher Hilton

After an initial controversy at Monza in 1961, where he was involved in an accident that claimed the life of Wolfgang ("Taffy") von Trips, giving the World Championship to American Phil Hill and his famous shark-nosed Ferrari 156, Clark barely lost the 1962 title to Graham Hill (then driving for BRM — "British Racing Motors") when an oil leak caused a DNF while leading the final race (and the season points) at Kyalami. He won handily in 1963, and repeated in 1965, taking the maximum possible championship points in both seasons. All this despite taking May off each year, and missing Monaco, to compete in and become the first Briton to win the Indianapolis 500. The Lotus string was broken only by John Surtees in the 1964 Ferrari 158 (it would be 11 years before the Maranello team would win another F1 title), and Jack Brabham's new Team Brabham, which won in 1966-67 while Lotus struggled with the new, increased 3.0 litre engine specification for F1.

Jimmy Clark may have been the most naturally talented driver ever to appear in Formula One. He won four straight Belgian GPs at the tremendously difficult Spa-Francorchamps circuit, a track he despised, and was masterful in wet conditions. His dominant 1965 season in the Lotus 33 — in which he led every lap of every race he finished — is matched in F1 history perhaps only by the spectacular 1988 results of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna at Team McLaren. Clark broke the legendary Fangio's record for career victories in the opening race of the 1968 season in South Africa, but died just months later at Hockenheim in an F2 race after crashing into the trees in the rain on 7 April. A small plaque — now located behind a protective Armco guardrail — is set in the forest to mark the spot of his tragic, and still unexplained, accident.