After a close finish to the 1962 season, Clark and the Lotus team had every reason to expect that 1963 could be their year.
The World Championship was contested over ten rounds in 1963 (in contrast to the current 15 or 16 rounds).
He said at the end of the season that Monaco, while the most physically demanding, was his favourite race, as much for its atmosphere as anything else.
In 1982 the circuit was renamed in honour of Gilles Villeneuve, the very popular Canadian driver, who died during practice for the Belgium GP that year and who had won the first F1 race held on the Ile Notre Dame circuit in 1978.
Thus the legend of 'the brickyard' was born.
At the start of the 1980s there was a general wish for a Grand Prix to be held behind the Iron Curtain and negotiations took place with the Soviet Union with a view to a race being held in Moscow.
In the summer of 1983 however, the attention of the Formula One decision makers turned away from Moscow and towards Budapest in Hungary, whose national sporting authority was keen to put the country back on the map of global motorsport.