After Lotus’ commanding victory at the 1965 Indianapolis 500, they returned to the “Brickyard” in 1966 hoping for a repeat. With their contract with Ford Motor Company concluded, Lotus agreed to use the new BRM H16 engine for both Indianapolis and Formula 1, coupled to their new Lotus 42 chassis. In addition,they signed to have sponsorship with Andy Granatelli’s STP corporation, which for the first time made team Lotus race cars painted in something other than British Racing Green.
Unfortunately, the best laid plans sometimes go awry, as BRM was very late with the Indy version of their radical engine. This forced Lotus to build a new batch of updated Type 38 cars (1965 design), identified as 38B. They also continued to use the Ford four-cam V8 power, which proved itself so well the year before.
Jim Clark was designated as the team leader, and was backed up by Al Unser (Sr.) as team mate. Both team cars had handling problems all month, and for Jim Clark, a broken leg strap to his safety harness hampered his qualifying run, yet he ended up with second position at 164.144 mph. Al Unser suffered engine failures that forced his having to qualify the second weekend, where he turned 162. 272 mph for 23rd start position.
Race day will forever be remembered as “The Great Shunt” as right at the start, race cars in mid-pack went into Demolition Derby mode. Eleven cars were eliminated after slamming into each other and into the concrete walls, scattering wheels and debris everywhere. Miraculously, Al Unser was able to avoid the carnage and emerge unscathed. After a 1 1/2 hour clean up, the race was restarted.
On lap 85, Clark experienced one of two spins in which he lost the car but recovered. It was suspected that the car touched the wall in the first spin, upsetting the handling even further, as he later admitted that he actually had six spins, four of which he caught in time. Meanwhile, Al Unser had progressed up third place and catching the leaders when he ran over somebody else’s debris on lap 162 and crashed heavily into the wall, severely dam-aging his Lotus.
On lap 175, Both Jim Clark and Graham Hill were being shown “1st” on their pit boards. But when the checkered flag dropped, it was for Graham Hill. Thinking he had won, Jim Clark drove to the Winners Circle, but found Graham there first, enjoying the victory celebration. Being the sportsman that we was, Jim congratulated his long-time friend. Al Unser finished in 12th place.
Colin Chapman was convinced that the officials had made a scoring error. But after reviewing the official lap charts, he had to admit an error in his record keeping during the race. Apparently Graham Hill gotten past Clark during one of his spins, or possibly Colin had gotten distracted. In either case, Jim finished second, and summed up his difficult race by saying “STP means Spinning Takes Practice”.