In 1965, Jim Clark was in the lead in the British Grand Prix.
He liked to build up a big lead as fast as he could. He didn’t like to save anything for later.
He knew that Formula One cars are subjected to amazing stresses, and after a few dozen laps driving flat out, things begin to break or wear out.
So he always tried to build a lead at the start, while the car was still in good condition.
Which was just as well because he was 35 seconds ahead, about halfway through the race, when things started to go wrong.
His engine started to leak oil, for a Formula One engine this is bad news.
The reason those cars sound like they’re screaming is because the engine is turning many times faster than a regular engine.
That means it runs very hot, and the thing lubricating all those spinning parts is oil.
Without lubrication, the spinning parts overheat and expand and the engine locks solid.
Clark knew this as he watched the oil-pressure gauge drop alarmingly. But unlike most drivers, Clark knew engines inside-out.
And he noted that the oil-pressure gauge was dropping most on the corners.
Clark grew up working on tractors on his family’s Scottish farm. He knew if pressure was dropping on corners, that meant centrifugal force was pushing the oil away from the oil-feed pipe.
So he figured he had to somehow nurse the car round the corners.
And that’s where the 35 second lead he’d built up came in handy.
He began slipping the car into neutral on corners, so the engine was just turning over and didn’t need so much oil-pressure.
Then he’d slam it back into gear for the straights, where centrifugal force didn’t matter, and the oil surged back towards the feed-pipe.
This cost him time of course, he was cornering with no engine, losing two seconds a lap and Graham Hill, in his BRM, was closing on him with every lap.
With 6 laps to go, Clark’s lead had been cut to 19 seconds.
With 2 laps to go, Clark’s lead had been cut to 9.6 seconds.
With one lap to go, Clark’s lead was down to 6 seconds.
And Clark crossed the finish line just 3.2 seconds ahead of Graham Hill.
With that attention to detail, Clark won the Formula One World Championship that year and then the Indianapolis 500.
In its list of the best Formula One drivers, The Times rates Clark as the Greatest-Ever.
Not just because of his driving skill.
What enabled him to drive that way was he knew every detail of how the car worked. He didn’t just know his own job, he knew everyone else’s, that was his advantage.
Where another driver would have pulled into the pits, Clark knew he could slip into neutral for the corners because he understood the engine as well as any mechanic.
That’s always our secret advantage, to understand the jobs of anyone who impacts on our work.
For us that’s directors, photographers, typographers, animators, illustrators, of course.
But, if we’re smart, it’s also strategists, and media, and account-handling, and clients.
If we understand their jobs then we are more able to take the decisions that impact on us and our work, rather than leaving it up to them.
I’ve seen this many times, we often beat other agencies because we looked places they didn’t.
They didn’t look in those places because they didn’t think it was their job.
Well they’re right, it isn’t their job.
Which is exactly why knowing about it gave us an unfair advantage.
Such a fuckin’ brilliant story!
I’m a fan of car racing stories and movies, so I had no problem reading the whole thing more than once.
But more than just the story is how you drew a parallel to creative work. Dave, you’re something else, man.
Thanks for sharing this insight. I’m keeping to this heart, henceforth.
Thanks again.
Please comment on this WTF story from The Spectator.
The Imperial War Museum has lost its way
A major rebrand looms
5 October 2026, 7:00am
From Spectator Life
It is a tale as old as time. A museum is slightly disappointed in its visitor numbers. Curators get together and conclude that the problem is a lack of young people. A large reorganisation takes place, usually driven by the hand of a consultancy firm, to seduce the elusive Gen Z visitor into their hallowed halls. The result is a far less interesting museum, no new young visitors, and those that loved and patronised the museum feel left behind and gradually stop going as well. This is the long march through the institutions for the twenty-first century. Previously, we have seen Kew Gardens, the Mary Rose and the National Maritime Museum all transformed by it.
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The latest victim is the Imperial War Museum (IWM), which will be spending £1 million on a major rebrand which will highlight modern conflicts because younger visitors apparently can’t relate to the First and Second World Wars. To justify their decision, museum executives have published a report arguing that there is a ‘growing public misunderstanding about what the IWM does and why it exists.’ This is not, they conclude, because the museum has thoroughly failed to explain its raison d’être to visitors, but because of ‘the growing number of people with no connection to someone who lived through the First or Second World Wars, or who was involved in the post-1945 conflicts.’
This must come as a devastating blow to museums worldwide. We must think of the poor Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza. There are a growing number of people with no connection to someone who lived through Tutankhamun’s reign so we will have to assume they will be imminently facing a dearth of visitors.
The truth is that the IWM has been suffering a crisis of identity long before trustees got out the hammer for this most recent nail in the coffin. The rot set in over a decade ago when curators cleared their atrium out of much of their best military hardware – rockets, tanks and guns – allegedly out of fear they were ‘glamorising war.’ The museum’s head of brand and marketing at the time, claimed that their brand was ‘viewed as old-fashioned by its stakeholders’ and that, God forbid, people thought the five sites ‘were military museums, rather than being about social history.’ This was when the museum dropped use of its full title in marketing and leant into the abbreviation. A director at Jane Wentworth Associates, the strategic consultancy hired to assist in the overhaul, advised that ‘“Imperial” sounds old-fashioned, “war” forbidding. It didn’t provoke a fantastic response.’ And thus, the uninspiring IWM was adopted.
More recently, we saw the London museum resolve to close the Lord Ashcroft Gallery, which displayed more than 200 VC medals, and a smaller number of George Crosses. Lord Ashcroft, who had lent his £70 million collection of medals to the museum in 2010, has accused curators of cutting the exhibit in order to launch a self-guided LGBT tour featuring stories of drag shows in prisoner of war camps and an allegedly trans land girl. The museum denies there is a connection between the closure of the gallery and the launch of the tour. But the change in direction is clear. The museum is scared of war and scared of military history. They prefer ‘social’ stories of evacuees and rationing to tanks and torpedoes.
The change in direction is clear. The museum is scared of war and scared of military history
It is hard to overstate the importance of museums that tell the history of the two world wars. Not least because we might be on the brink of a third. As fights about defence spending rage in parliament, and the scourge of antisemitism rears its ugly head, now is the time to remember those who fought to secure the freedoms that we all enjoy today.
It is precisely because so many of us lack a living relative who served in the First and Second World Wars that we must rely on institutions to preserve their story. This is the moment at which history is at its most fragile. If young people are no longer connecting with the history of these conflicts, then it is the Imperial War Museum’s moral obligation to ensure they do rather than give up on the task all together.
In the meantime, I’d recommend a visit to the National Army Museum in Chelsea, which still tells a compelling story of the heroism of our glorious dead.
Dave, you published a story a while ago stating that there is no point in teaching advertising.
I was a university lecturer at the time, teaching advertising. I have met and got on well with Dave Cook, and Nick Wray.
One of my former students at that uni in Cardiff is the brand manager for Thatcher’s cider. And she seems to be doing pretty well in the job.
I’d agree that you can’t teach advertising, in the same way that you can’t teach writing, music, art, design, or anything that requires creativity. Yes you can teach the fundamentals, the history, the current directions etc, but you can’t teach someone how to create something that astonishes and moves people. I can take every relevant class going, and spend decades studying the techniques that Pozzo used to paint the ceiling at Sant’Ignazio, and even if I invested 30,000 hours, I still wouldn’t be able to produce anything that would even vaguely resemble his masterpiece, because originality, sense of proportion, and the ability to create something beautiful/memorable cannot be taught. Could you teach someone how to create a memorable ad campaign? No, of course not. As a personal observation, were I to study any creative activity, I’d think if the lecturer had all the answers (not including the visiting practitioners from that field), they would be out changing the world/ pulling in the big bucks, rather than standing up and telling me how it should be done. The adage ‘Those who can’t. Teach.’ holds true.
Nick George.
Creative subjects can’t be taught. Novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi declared university creative writing courses ‘A waste of time’; making the statement during his tenure a professor of creative writing at Kingston University!
Kureishi said that while you can teach someone to write a functional sentence, you can’t teach them how to tell a story or engage the reader. He also stated that most students lack the imagination required to produce great literature.
Nick George- Thatcher’s cider? Never heard of it. Jog on son.