05/12/2025
Which of the Greatest F1 Drivers in history started their Racing career in Aberdeenshire?
Senna
Prost
Schumacher
Clark
Well I suppose upon reflection the answer is pretty obvious, but its an untold, highly unlikely, yet true story.
Birth of a Legend.
It is 69 summers since Formula one legend Jim Clark drove his very first circuit race. For one of the greatest f1 Drivers in History started his motor racing Career right here in Aberdeenshire, Jims racing debut came at Crimond race track in Aberdeenshire. Jim had never raced a car on any circuit before and went along to help his friend Ian Scott Watson. Doing a bit of mechanic work, refuelling the car and other menial tasks. Jim had competed in the odd car Rally in the borders of Scotland, but had yet to drive a car in anger on asphalt.
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Story as told by Jim Clarks best friend Ian Scott Watson who was there.
Standing on a piece of dull Aberdeenshire countryside, shivering against the wind as it blasts off the North Sea, you might not at first realise that there was anything of particular motorsport significance going on, or that the ghost of one of the most remarkable careers in racing history was ‘whispering around you.
More fool you, then. This is Crimond airfield, just beside the village of Crimond and about halfway between Fraserburgh and Peterhead. It’s on what used to be known as the ice cream road, in the days when you bought an ice cream in one town and bet your friends that it wouldn’t have started melting by the time you drove into the other. A feat requiring a very high average speed, this, which is why the Fraserburgh-Peterhead road is now the most Gatso-intensive in Scotland.
Hard driving at Crimond is confined nowadays to the stock car track which takes up about five square feet of airfield ground. 68 years ago an enthusiastic driver or rider had more room to play with, since the perimeter roads were used as the basis of a two-mile circuit on which Aberdeen and District Motor Club regularly held combined race meetings for cars and bikes.
These events are largely forgotten now, but one of them occupies an important place in the sport’s history, because it was at Crimond, on June 16 1956, that future World Champion Jim Clark competed in his first ever circuit race.
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Although only 20, he was already making a name for himself in club-level rallies, autotests and sprints at home in the Borders. One of his closest friends on the competition scene was a fellow farmer, Ian Scott Watson, whose unusual DKW Sonderklasse car he shared in speed events.
DKW Sonderklasse, similar to Clark’s first circuit race car, at Goodwood
As well as sprinting the car, and navigating for Scott Watson on a number of rallies (not very successfully, because he was no expert on the maps and could be reduced to a quaking mass of nerves whenever Ian had to make up time after a wrong slot), Clark also prepared the DKW at race meetings. Admittedly this amounted to little more than removing the spare wheel and applying numbers to the doors, but Scott Watson was sufficiently grateful to suggest that he take part in the event at Crimond. The pair drove up from the Borders town of Duns in Scotland in Ian Scott Watsons car, and stayed at the Albert Hotel along the road in Peterhead prior to the race meet the next day.
This suggestion came about through a combination of chance and subterfuge. Ian would never have considered it for a meeting at Charterhall, since that was too close to home: Clark’s parents, who hated the idea of their son taking up circuit racing, would have heard about it immediately and made their feelings very clear. And in normal circumstances Crimond was too far away about four hours’ drive to the north to think about visiting.
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The abnormal circumstance regarding Grimand, though, was that the secretary of the meetings held there was one Noreen Garvie, a cousin of Clark’s, who was keen to see her relative and his friend at one of her events. Ian agreed to enter the handicap race, and since there was no chance – how could there be ? – of Clark’s parents finding out, he quietly persuaded Jim to go out in the sports car event.
As far as results were concerned it wasn’t an auspicious day for either of them. Clark, up against Lotus Elevens and in a heavy, underpowered saloon car, finished well down. Scott Watson, who was rather shaken to see that in practice Clark was nearly three seconds quicker than him within five laps of leaving the pits, found that the organisers had also taken this fact on board and promptly handicapped him to smithereens.
June 16 didn’t get much better after that, either. It turned out that Clark wasn’t the only relation Noreen Garvie had attracted to Crimond. A number of other cousins were there, too, and of course they were very excited about seeing one of their clan out on the circuit in Aberdeenshire. News of Clark’s exploits got back to the family home faster than the DKW did, and a reception committee was waiting for the travellers on their return. “In perfect fairness it really was a very good-natured grilling,” Ian said years later, “but I do remember taking the blame and apologising profusely.”
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Not much of a day, then, but look what it led to. ‘Who was the world’s greatest racing driver?’ is a pretty fatuous question, but any attempt to answer it invariably involves mention of Clark’s name. It was the Crimond meeting that started the ball rolling – Clark’s parents could hardly object to his starting racing when he had already done so, which removed the principal obstacle to his early career.
He still needed an opportunity, though, and that was provided by Ian. Clark’s performance in practice was enough to convince him that he needn’t take competition driving too seriously in future, and although he was an enthusiastic racer for several years afterwards his main efforts were concentrated on helping Clark, first by continuing to lend him cars and later by acting as team manager for Jock McBain’s Border Reivers team, which was re-formed in 1958 largely as a way of pushing Clark on to greater things.
One look along the main straight, rising evocatively beyond the pits, and it all comes back
And now, with all that in mind, here we are at Crimond, celebrating in a small way that immensely significant race meeting of 69 summers ago. There are five of us present, trying to work out the old circuit layout through a maze of radio masts and wishing the wind would die down.
Without Crimmond in Aberdeenshire, Its possible Jim Clark would never have been a circuit racer, and the world would have been denied one of the greates drivers of all time.
Without Ian Scott Watson, there would be no Jim Clark, for it was he who offered his best friend the drive that would change his life.
But when you think about Crimond, and his willingness to let a friend race his road car, and the work he put into helping that friend progress as a driver, and the dominance that friend was later to achieve, the enormity of what Scott Watson did soon becomes apparent. Clark’s career was astonishing. To have stood, 69 years later, on the track where it started, alongside the man who started it, makes me feel both proud and humble.
A post script. As we drive through Crimond on the way home we pass an old church. Many years ago the organist of that church wrote one of the most famous hyms of all time, named after the village, around the words of Psalm 23, The Lord’s My Shepherd. At the memorial service after Clark’s death in 1968, the final hymn was The Lord’s My Shepherd. To the tune Crimond.
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