The year is 1965. Spectators are flocking to Formula One hoping to catch glimpse of the danger, power and noise of Grand Prix cars. The grid is packed with legendary drivers: John Surtees, Graham Hill, Jack Brabham, Jackie Stewart, Jochen Rindt, Richard Attwood, Dan Gurney and Mike Hailwood were all battling it out on the global stage. Arguably, this was the most talent-laden Formula One field ever assembled. Unfortunately for them, however, if one particular Scotsman showed up on form, they were all battling for second place.

That driver was a fairly young, quiet and humble farmer from Fife named Jim Clark. Often, the only reason Clark didn’t come out on top was that his car had suffered a race-ending mechanical failure – or he didn’t show up at all. Jackie Stewart recognised that he “drove in such a way that he just didn’t make the mistakes that other drivers did”. His consistency and ability to repeatedly lay down fast lap after fast lap was unparalleled, much to the envy of his competitors.

That envy wasn't just restricted to Formula One. In 1965 alone, Clark stirred up the competition across five different classes. In his Lotus 25, he dominated the Formula One grid. A Lotus Type 38 took him to victory at the Indy 500, while a Type 35 secured both the British and French Formula 2 championships. To add a bit of closed-wheel spice to the mix, he also raced a Ford Lotus Cortina in the British Touring Car Championship, which he had won in 1964.

One of the most prolific drivers ever to sit in a racing car, Clark won 25 of the 72 Formula One races he entered – a win percentage shading even the likes of Michael Schumacher, Ayrton Senna and Stirling Moss. The 1965 season was utterly dominated by Clark, who claimed six victories from the ten-race calendar to take the overall championship. By mid-summer at Silverstone, he had already amassed three wins from four races. Having missed Monaco while winning the Indy 500, Clark’s form going into the British Grand Prix was nothing short of blistering.

Unsurprisingly, the race meeting started strongly for Clark, who planted his British Racing Green-clad Lotus 25 on pole position during qualifying, despite eleven other drivers breaking the previous lap record – a testament to the high standards of the field.

At the start, Clark faced a challenge for the lead from Honda’s American driver, Richie Ginther. Try as he might, Ginther couldn’t hold the lead for long. It was left to Graham Hill in his BRM to cling to the Lotus 25’s exhausts, but corner by corner, Clark began to edge away.

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However, the fragile 25 began to develop issues in the latter stages of the race. On lap 50, the Climax engine started misfiring – a problem that grew more pronounced as time went on. A faulty fuel pump was causing the car to choke and lose power, but the pace wasn’t significantly reduced. Despite the misfire, Clark soldiered on, though Hill caught wind of the Scotsman’s misfortune and began to push harder.

With Clark lapping the field and maintaining a slender lead, all he had to do was keep his lap times consistent and see the chequered flag. But on lap 63, disaster struck. The Climax engine had been slowly losing oil, and it was now so low in the sump that during Silverstone’s faster corners, the oil couldn’t reach the feed pipe, leading to low pressure. Highly strung race engines, as you might expect, don’t take kindly to oil starvation. Clark had to think fast.

In true Jim Clark fashion, he found a solution. Rather than risk catastrophe by keeping the engine running, he astonishingly turned it off through the corners where oil pressure was lowest and fired it up again on the straights.

This unorthodox strategy inevitably hurt his lap times, though not as much as you might think. Clark was famously adept at maintaining momentum through corners – a skill that had made him devastatingly quick in the low-powered 1.5-litre cars of the era.

As the final lap approached, the gap had shrunk enough for Hill to loom in Clark’s mirrors, but the race was in the Scotsman’s hands. Clark nursed his ailing Lotus to the finish line, crossing just 3.2 seconds ahead of Hill. Had the race been a lap longer, the outcome could well have been different – but to nurse such a sick car to the end for nearly 20 laps was an extraordinary display of skill and composure.

To pull out enough of a lead to win under such circumstances is nothing short of superhuman. Had Jim Clark’s time not been cut tragically short in 1968, he might not merely sit alongside Ayrton Senna and Sir Lewis Hamilton as one of Formula One’s all-time greats – he could well stand above them.