It was mentioned today that Schumacher has not had a mechanical DNF since Hockenheim in 2001 - a span of 51 races. With his 82nd win, Schumacher has won more races than the great Jim Clark entered (72)! One of the things that marked Clark's career was that he seemed perpetually unlucky: it seemed that he always failed to finish. Seen from the perspective of 2004, perhaps it is more simply that he drove in the wrong era of F1, for a Lotus team that had arguably not figured out how to make a reliable car. As Schumacher dominated yet again, it occurred to me to wonder what might have happened if Clark had had the benefit of essentially perfect reliability. The table below essentially says that armed with a fully reliable car, Clark would have dominated in demoralizing fashion just as Senna did in the late-80s and as Schumacher has for the past several years.

The table shows the actual results from Clark's 72 F1 races, and a projection of what might have happened if his car had been reliable. I assumed that Clark would have finished in precisely the position he was in when his car failed. Since very few drivers ever passed him without the aid of some mechanical difficulty, this is not a particularly optimistic assumption. For example, in the 1964 race at Rouen, he retired due to engine failure while leading, so this is credited as a win. The assumption of being able to maintain his position  is balanced by the assumption that he wouldn't have gained any more positions in the rest of the race, even if the competitors who were ahead of him failed. (This is, in fact, a very conservative assumption.) In the 1964 German Grand Prix, Clark's engine failed while he was in P2. We credit him with a 2nd place, even though it is possible that he might have overtaken Surtees had his engine not failed, to say nothing of the possibility that he may have simply overtaken his rival.

In a few cases, it wasn't easy to decide what the outcome might have been. At Monza in 1965, Clark retired with an engine failure while in the lead draft of three cars. I've assumed that he would have finished 2nd, although the nature of Monza in those days suggests that P1 or P3 would be equally reasonable assumptions.  Changes to finishing position were only made for failures due to reliability problems, such as drive shafts, suspension problems and engine failures. In a few cases, the problems were non-mechanical such as the famous tire puncture in the 1967 Monza race. I left this result unchanged. There were some other races that had outcomes that were difficult to predict, such as the 1963 US Grand Prix. In this event, Clark qualified the Lotus 2nd fastest, but had battery problems on the grid. At the flag, he was demoted to last at the end of the first lap, yet still fought back to finish 3rd. Although it is very possible that he could have won this race without the mechanical problem, I left the result a 3rd place finish.

Finally, I only searched for race reports in one book (Formula 1 Racing in the Modern Era by Jose Rosinski) and two web sites (planet-f1.com and grandprix.com). There are a number of races in which I couldn't determine where Clark was running when he retired, such as the 1967 South African race, where he qualified 8th and finished 22nd after an engine failure on lap 22.

The history books tell us that Clark won 25 of his 72 races and won two World Driving Championships. Impressive as that is, with a car as reliable the 2004 Ferrari, it seems quite reasonable to believe that he might have won 39 of those races (an astonishing 52%). Had he done so, he would have also won the 1962, 1964 and 1967 World Championships, in addition to the 1963 and 1965 WDCs that he in fact won, for a total of five WDCs in six years. He might also have finished on the podium an incredible 72% of his entries, an astonishing rate that is only made believable by the notion that as it was, he pretty much finished on the podium or didn't finish at all.

With a reliable Lotus beneath him, Clark would have swept all before him in every year except 1960, 1961 and 1966. Lotus as a team did not win a race until the last race of 1961.  If we omit the Scot's first two years, when he was not driving for a team capable of winning - and certainly not regularly - Clark might have won an even more remarkable 67% of his starts, and finished on the podium 83% of the time! Clark could have tallied 28 wins, 6 seconds, two thirds, and two fourths - and nothing lower - from the 1962-1965 seasons! The two races off the podium were the 1962 German Grand Prix, where he failed to engage the fuel pumps on the grid, and the 1964 Italian Grand Prix, where he suffered an engine failure while running in P4 after 27 laps. It isn't even beyond contemplation that he might have won every race for four years, although that would have taken not only perfect reliability but also some additional luck.

Clark won the WDC in 1963, even without perfect reliability. But with Ferrari-like (in 2004) reliability, he needed only one bit of good luck to win every race of the year. The only race in doubt was the Watkins Glen meeting, in which he had battery problems on the grid and was demoted to last place at the flag. This too might be considered a reliability issue, and it it takes only a small fortunate assumption that he might have turned P2 on the grid into a win. As it was, Surtees had qualified right behind Clark and had passed both BRMs for the lead by the eighth lap; Gurney too had passed the BRMs, so it is entirely possible that Clark might have done so as well!

I had not realized how much Lotus had struggled in 1966. Even under the perfect reliability assumptions above, Clark would not have won any more races than he actually did. He was so far out of the running in several of the races that it was not possible to determine the position from which he retired! This is reminiscent of Schumacher's 1996 and 1997 seasons. Of course, things had changed by the time that the Lotus-49 arrived in 1967, when he might have won every race for the rest of the season, with the sole exception of his famous result at Monza.