Paul di Resta has finally achieved his dream and been promoted into an F1 race seat, to become the latest flying Scotsman to drive in the sport. Patty takes a look back at those haggis-chomping pioneers that Di Resta is following in the footsteps of.
1) Jim Clark
If and when Scotland begins to wonder about the precise terms of their efforts to achieve full independence from the rest of the UK, one of the things they will be keen to take with them along with the oil fields and the shortbread is their record of F1 champions, because of all the sometimes-historic British names to have claimed world championships, from Hawthorn to Button, arguably the greatest of them all was a softly-spoken Scottish farmer from Fife.
Throughout his time in Formula One, Clark was synonymous with the name Lotus, possibly more so than "embarrassing name-grabbing courtroom appearances" are today. Every single one of his 72 grand prix starts came at the wheel of Colin Chapman-designed machine or another, and the fact that he only secured two world titles was arguably as much down to the typically flimsy design of the Team Lotus cars as it was anything else. In 1962, for example, he took three wins across the nine race season, but retired from four more races, a record so chronic that he didn't even need to drop any scores at the end of the year as he finished second to Graham Hill's BRM in the standings. Many of his drives have gone down in history as some of the greatest ever, with possibly his win in atrocious conditions at Spa in 1963, when he finished five minutes ahead of his nearest rival, the greatest of them all.
For a man whose car control was renowned as the best in the business, who was known for being able to extract the maximum from a car no matter how unwieldy the setup may have been, it is slightly ironic that his two titles in 1963 and 1965 came during F1's mildly soporific 1.5-litre engine formula, when cars competed with as little as 150bhp to challenge the driver. But Clark was a success no matter what the rules, and would likely have won plenty more titles but for those aforementioned reliability issues. Not content with just dominating any number of grands prix, he also found time to teach America a thing or two about racing, leading a staggering 190 of the 200 laps at the 1965 Indy 500 to win the bottle of milk with style. He also won the 1964 British Touring Car Championship at the wheel of a Lotus (what else?) Cortina.
Clark's story, as with so many from that era of F1, has a tragic end, with the Scotsman killed in a Formula 2 crash at Hockenheim in 1968. A definitive reason for the crash has never been fully established, though the most likely cause is considered to have been a rear tyre failure. It spoke volumes of Clark's ability at the wheel that throughout the extensive investigation held into the crash, the theory of driver error was never considered.
For a slightly lengthy, but rewarding documentary about Clark's career, courtesy of the BBC, click here.
2) Sir Jackie Stewart
If Clark was Colin Chapman's man through-and-through, so JYS was a Ken Tyrrell man. Having joined Tyrrell's operation in 1968 after a string of uncompetitive and unhappy years in various BRMs (in 1967, Stewart retired from nine of the eleven championship races and apparently just whispering the phrase 'H16' in the same room as him still brings him out in a rash), he raced for them for six successful years, winning 25 races and taking 10 further podiums from 70 starts (i.e. if he started a race in a Tyrrell, there was a 50% chance he would finish on the podium) and only once finished lower than second in the final championship standings.
But Stewart's F1 legacy is, of course, far more than merely his three titles and his then-record of 27 grand prix wins. Even while he was racing in the sport, he was a relentless advocate of driver safety, a push that began when the ramshackle safety team at Belgium's Spa track managed to get lost driving Stewart to the hospital following a huge shunt for the Scotsman in the 1966 race. So Stewart dedicated the rest of his life in the cockpit, and subsequently out of it, to making racing safer. He began working with a sport where it was still not necessary for drivers to wear seatbelts or full face-covering helmets, where any driver unfortunate enough to leave a track at speed could merrily career straight into a tree or tumble down a sheer drop, and worked on making the often-gruesome 1970s F1 era a safer place.
Some could argue that this push from Stewart was the genesis point for today's anodyne procession of identikit sanitised concrete tracks, but then given the choice between then (eight drivers died in F1 cars between 1970 and 1975 alone) and now, it is a matter that reduces to a simple Hobson's choice. It didn't win Stewart too many friends at the time though, and as he noted himself: "I would have been a much more popular World Champion if I had always said what people wanted to hear. I might have been dead, but definitely more popular..."
Stewart also achieved a modicum of success as a team owner, with his Stewart Grand Prix team winning the 1999 European Grand Prix at the Nurburgring through Johnny Herbert, ironically at the track that replaced the original Nordschleife, which Stewart detested. And as Stewart became Jaguar Racing in 2000, which became Red Bull in 2005, his team went on to secure a double championship success in 2010. Sort of.
3) Innes Ireland
As well as writing one of the all-time great motorsport books, the confusingly named Scotsman by the name of Ireland was Scotland's first grand prix winner, when he secured victory in the 1961 United States Grand Prix for Team Lotus, a win he inherited when long-time leader Stirling Moss retired on lap 59. That is not to say that the win was not well-deserved, and Ireland help of lap after lap of pressure from the moustachioed form of Graham Hill to take the chequered flag at the Watkins Glen track. Although that was his first full GP win, he had already won non-championship events prior to that moment of success, securing wins at the excellently-named Solitude Grand Prix and Flugplatzrennen earlier in the year.
Ireland, though, would never win another championship race, and by the time he won in the US, his departure from the Lotus works team was already secured, Colin Chapman dropping him after becoming irate following Ireland's friendly decision to casually swap his brand new Lotus 21 car with Moss for his old private Lotus 18 at the preceding Italian Grand Prix out of little more than politeness when Moss struggled to get his older car to run to his liking on the Monza banking.
The Scot continued to make GP appearances for another five years for a motley bunch of private teams, but never again stood on the podium in a full championship race, but did win a smattering of other non-championship affairs, including the comically poorly-supported 1963 Glover Trophy at Goodwood. After retiring, Ireland re-invented himself as a journalist and author, and even took the reins of the British Racing Drivers Club for a couple of years before his death. He may not have been the most successful of Scottish F1 drivers, but he was the first to give the country something to cheer in the sport.
4) David Coulthard
Good old David "Next year is my year" Coulthard - the man, the self-parody - remains the most recent barometer of Scottish success in the sport. And to be fair to DC for a moment or two, while he will forever remain the butt of plenty of F1-based jokes (on this site, if nowhere else), his career statistics were not particularly terrible. After all, a record of 13 wins and 62 podiums is not necessarily to be sniffed at, especially as he only really spent six seasons of his time in the sport in genuine race-winning machinery.
His Boobens-lite reputation obviously comes from his 1998 and 1999 seasons, when by and large he was little more than second driver foil to Mika Hakkinen's title wins. But perhaps by virtue of his performances in those seasons being so completely dismissed for so long, when you actually go back and reassess them they don't seem all that bad. In 1998, DC lost almost certain wins in Monza and Montreal and effectively won in Melbourne only for McLaren's snarky pre-race gentleman's agreement to kick in. Results that wouldn't have won him the title, but would have helped to even out the skewed sensation of the final points standings, which saw DC on 56 points to Mika's 100.
In 1999, his luck was even worse, retiring from four of the first seven races, and the final two races of the year, with luckless reliability gremlins. In the other ten races, he retired once of his own accord (spinning out while leading at a sodden Nurburgring, though he was far from the only driver to make a mistake that day) and finished in the top two at all but three of the others (ending 7th in Canada after coming together with Eddie Irvine). Granted, 1999 was a season where plenty of drivers had a share of bad luck, but DC still seemed to pick up more than his fair share.
After that, of course, his star dramatically waned, thanks to being outperformed by Kimi Raikkonen at McLaren prior to the Finn giving up on life, and then by Mark Webber at Red Bull after DC slipped into his end-of-career slowbie mode. But although UK F1 historians may not remember him too fondly in future compared to the Mansell/Hill and Button/Hamilton era that sandwiched his title-less stint in the sport, there was plenty for Scotland to be proud of when it comes to Mr Coulthard.
5) Ron Flockhart
He only competed in fourteen races throughout a brief F1 career, and it was hardly the career of a legend, featuring a single solitary podium finish at the 1956 Italian Grand Prix, but then this list is not just about detailing success in terms of simple GP victories, and more about celebrating the best of the overall bunch.
While Flockhart, whose name conjures up images of a certain dashing wartime RAF pilot never really secured a top line F1 drive, save for a one-off appearance for Lotus that netted him a sixth place finish at the 1960 French GP, he racked up plenty of success elsewhere. Flockhart won two consecutive Le Mans 24 Hours races in 1956 and 1957 for the Scottish Ecurie Ecosse Jaguar squad, securing a remarkable 1-2 result for the privateer team in the latter triumph, and setting a new distance record for the endurance race in the process. His single F1 podium would also stand as the best result in the brief and unsuccessful life of the Connaught team.
After a brief sojourn into the heady world of television advertising, he then switched his attention to flying, making an attempt to break the speed record to fly from Sydney to London, though his first effort only saw him make it as far as Athens. Tragically, while preparing for a second attempt, Flockhart died when his plane crashed during a test flight near Melbourne.
6) Allan McNish
McNish, like Flockhart, is a driver whose sportscar successes will always put his rather patchy Formula One career in the shade. Indeed, McNish's F1 career stats are unhappy to look at to say the least. 17 races entered, 16 race starts, no points and a best finish of 7th place at the 2002 Malaysian GP. Suffice to say that his single year of competition will not go down among the all-time great F1 seasons, and it was rounded off uncomfortably by his terrifying shunt at 130R during the qualifying session in Suzuka, a crash which saw the Scot mercifully walk away from a crash so violent that his car smashed itself backwards through the guardrail itself.
But then McNish was 33 by the time he made his F1 debut, and by then had honed his skills in the entirely different world of prototype sportscars, achieving no end of success with the crack Audi squad. Added to that, he was tasked, along with team mate Mika Salo, with driving Toyota's first attempt at a competitive F1 car, and while it was not exactly a 2010 HRT, it was still far from a truly competitive beast. After a season of torturous development work disguised as a genuine season-long championship campaign, both McNish and Salo were rewarded for their efforts by being dumped for the duo of Olivier Panis and Cristiano da Matta, a move viewed by many as Toyota callously discarding a pair of jacks simply in order to draw another pair of jacks.
Still, if his F1 career never amounted to much, his sportscar career has more than made up for that. McNish has triumphed at Le Mans twice, and has also secured three wins in the Sebring 12 Hours, four wins at the Petit Le Mans race at the Road Atlanta course, and has won three American Le Mans Series titles. In case any McNish fans wish to enjoy a bit of schadenfreude at the end of this article, then we can contrast these successes with this summary of Toyota's Formula One successes since dumping the Scotsman. Chortle.
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