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Jim Clark, one of the all-time great Formula One racing drivers, died 40 years ago when his car slammed into trees at the Hockenheim race track in Germany in April 1968, stunning the motor racing world.
It is still a mystery how Clark's Lotus, painted in red-gold-white colours, came off the track in the lonely Hardtwald forest section.
There has been endless speculation. Clark hardly ever made a driving error. The most plausible explanation is that he lost control because of a deflating rear tyre.
Only two track marshals witnessed the accident. One of the marshals, Winfried Kolb, is still alive and vividly remembers how Clark's Lotus came wide through the right turn at a speed of about 260 km/h.
"Oh, I thought. He's got problems," Kolb recently told Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. "Then the car left the track at a 45 degree angle. It was about 30-40 metres away from us. It all happened in two to three seconds."
The world was stunned. Fellow driver Chris Amon summed up the gloomy mood among the drivers after the race:
"If it could happen to him, what chance did the rest of us have? I think we all felt that. It seemed like we'd lost our leader."
Like no other race driver before him, the Scotsman, born James Clark, was a natural talent in almost any type of car, winning the Formula 1 world championships in 1963 and 1965. In the 72 Formula 1 races he took part, he was victorious in 25, took 33 pole positions and clocked 28 fastest laps.
When he died at the age of 32 he was still at an early stage of his career and many motor sport experts arguably still see him as the greatest racing driver ever.
Clark proved his skills in almost any type of car and race series. Compared to a modern Formula 1 race car of today, the cars of the 1960s were extremely fragile with numerous accidents causing nasty injury and death.
But Clark could adapt himself to the anomalies of almost any car and in one race was almost just as quick with hardly any brakes left. Unthinkable today he used a single set of tyres for three Grand Prix events in 1963. A common tactic, later also adopted by his countryman Jackie Stewart, was to pull out all stops in the early part of the race, leaving all others way behind and then adopting a steady pace that would take him through to the finish line.
One of his mechanics, Eddie Dennis, remembers: "Clark came through at the end of the first lap of the race so far ahead that we in the pits were convinced that the rest of the field must have been wiped out in an accident."
Clark was born into a farming family with his parents wishing their only son to take over the family farm. He was the only son with four sisters. But it was a family friend, the owner of the garage where the family's tractors were serviced, who took Clark to his first motor race.
From then things speeded up. Clark entered his first competition in a Sunbeam as a 21-year old in 1957. Three years later, he was already racing Grand Prix cars for Lotus.
Lotus owner Colin Chapman quickly realised that he had come across an unusual natural talent.
But it was an era when every season claimed its victims. In the year 1968, when Clark died, three other Formula 1 drivers lost their lives. In the same year four other drivers were also killed at Hockenheim. Comprehensive safety measures were only taken after Stewart and other Grand Prix drivers campaigned for more safety.
A "Jim Clark Memorial Race" with veteran Formula 2 cars competing celebrated the champion's memory in Hockenheim last week with the Clark name inexorably linked to the race track.
A simple memorial stone near the track bears a cross with Clark's name and the date of his death, April 7, 1968. The section of the track where Clark was killed no longer exists. It has been ploughed under and is overgrown with forest.
