Clark was born into a farming family at Kilmany House Farm in Fife and grew up at Edington Mains Farm near Duns in the Scottish Borders. His parents opposed racing, but by 1958 he was competing in national events for the local Border Reivers team, driving Jaguar D-Types and Porsches, winning 18 races and attracting the attention of Lotus founder Colin Chapman. Driving a Lotus Elite, Clark finished second in class at the 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans, and Chapman gave him his Formula Junior debut shortly afterward. Clark immediately dominated the Formula Junior championship, beating reigning seven-time Grand Prix motorcycle world champion John Surtees.
Clark made his Formula One debut partway through the 1960 season at the Dutch Grand Prix. Following multiple podiums in 1961, Lotus introduced the groundbreaking monocoque Lotus 25 in 1962, and Clark took his maiden win at the Belgian Grand Prix. That year he finished runner-up to Graham Hill for the championship. In 1963, driving a season of almost unprecedented dominance, Clark won seven of ten Grands Prix and secured his maiden title, a 70 per cent win rate that was not approached for sixty years.
His 1964 season was undone by reliability failures — an oil leak in the final race cost him the title, which went to John Surtees by a margin of one point. In 1965, Clark won six races and claimed his second championship, simultaneously winning the Indianapolis 500 in the Lotus 38. He was the first non-American to win at Indianapolis in 49 years and the first winner in a mid-engined car — a configuration that quickly became universal. He remains the only driver to have won both the Indianapolis 500 and the Formula One title in the same calendar year.
The 3-litre engine era from 1966 was less kind to Lotus, and Clark won only the United States Grand Prix during his second title defence. In 1967, with the introduction of the Lotus 49 and Ford-Cosworth DFV engine, he took four victories. He was leading the 1968 World Championship at the time of his death.
Clark's technique was distinguished by its apparent effortlessness. Jackie Stewart said of him: "He was so smooth, he was so clean, he drove with such finesse. He never bullied a racing car, he sort of caressed it into doing the things he wanted it to do." Fellow driver Chris Amon's response to his death became one of the sport's most quoted lines: "If it could happen to him, what chance do the rest of us have?"
Clark holds the Formula One record for grand slams — races in which a driver takes pole position, fastest lap, race win, and leads every lap — achieving this eight times. His record of winning seven races in a season stood until Alain Prost equalled it in 1984, with Clark's figure carrying far greater weight given it came in a ten-race season. He led 71.47 per cent of all laps raced during his 1963 campaign, a record that stood for sixty years until Max Verstappen surpassed it in 2023.
Beyond Formula One, Clark was champion of the British Saloon Car Championship in 1964, winning every race he entered; he won the Tasman Series three times (1965, 1967, 1968); and he took the French and British Formula Two championships. In a single 1965 season, he simultaneously held championship titles across Formula One, the Tasman Series, French Formula Two, and British Formula Two — a feat no other driver has matched alongside a World Drivers' Championship.
On 7 April 1968, during the Deutschland Trophäe Formula Two race at the Hockenheimring, Clark's Lotus 48 veered off the circuit on the fifth lap and struck trees. He suffered a broken neck and skull fracture and died before reaching hospital. Investigators concluded that a deflating rear tyre was the most probable cause, though the exact reason was never definitively established. He was 32.
At his death, Clark had 33 pole positions and 25 wins from 72 championship starts. Juan Manuel Fangio, himself the five-time world champion, called Clark the greatest driver he had ever seen. Clark is buried in Chirnside in Berwickshire. The Jim Clark Motorsport Museum stands in Duns, and a memorial marks the approximate site of his accident at Hockenheim. In 2024, Motor Sport magazine ranked Clark as the greatest racing driver of all time.