The Maestro in the Mist: Stewart's Wet-Weather Masterclass

The conditions that morning at the Nürburgring Nordschleife were, by any reasonable measure, unsuitable for motor racing at the speeds Formula 1 demanded. Fog sat in the valleys between the circuit's forested hills. Rain fell in persistent curtains. In some sections of the 14.2-mile lap, visibility was measured in metres rather than in the clear sightlines that racing normally requires. Several drivers were openly apprehensive. The race proceeded anyway.

Jackie Stewart, in the Matra-Ford MS10, drove into the fog and disappeared. What he did in there for fourteen laps produced a winning margin — four minutes and three seconds over Jochen Rindt in second place — that has no parallel in the modern history of the sport. He did not merely beat the other drivers at the Nürburgring in the wet; he beat them so completely that the race might as well have been run on a different day against a different field.

Stewart had injured his wrist earlier in the season at the Spanish Grand Prix — a crash that required him to drive with special adaptations to his controls. He was racing, at the Nürburgring, with a physical limitation that would have reduced most drivers' performance. In the fog and rain of August 4, he posted lap times that his competitors, healthy and on a dry track, would have found difficult to match. Each of his laps was faster than anything the rest of the field produced. The winning margin widened every time he passed the pits.

Stewart was, by 1968, the most vocal advocate for safety improvements in Formula 1 — a campaign that many in the sport's establishment resented as an imposition on the nature of racing. The Nürburgring was the circuit he most wanted changed: too long, too dangerous, too many corners invisible to marshals, too many places where a car could crash and burn before anyone knew it had happened. He won on it, that August, with a performance that transcended what the sport considered possible. And then he spent years arguing that the track that had given him his finest hour should never be allowed to kill another driver.

Jackie Stewart won the German Grand Prix for Matra-Ford by over four minutes, the largest winning margin the modern World Championship had seen. Jochen Rindt was classified second, Graham Hill third — both so far behind Stewart that the contest for second place had been almost entirely separate from the one at the front.

Stewart's winning margin of 4 minutes 3.2 seconds over Rindt stands as one of the most extraordinary results in the history of the World Championship. On a day when conditions punished imprecision, Stewart produced a race without it.

The 1968 season was the first after the death of Jim Clark, who had been killed at Hockenheim in April in a Formula 2 race — a loss so large that the sport spent the remainder of the year adjusting to a world he was no longer part of. Graham Hill won the championship that year, providing a form of continuity for Lotus and for British motorsport, but it was Stewart who demonstrated at the Nürburgring the scope of what he would achieve in 1969 and 1971.

Stewart won three championships and was arguably the fastest driver of his era. His safety campaign — pursued throughout his career and continued after his retirement — transformed the sport's approach to circuit design, medical provision and driver protection. He was knighted in 2001.

August 1968 was one of the most turbulent months of an already extraordinary year. Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in June. Martin Luther King Jr. in April. In Prague, the reform movement known as the Prague Spring was reaching its climax — and on August 20, sixteen days after the German Grand Prix, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush it. The Nürburgring sat in West Germany, a country that shared a border with the Eastern bloc and that felt the weight of the Cold War in its geography and its daily life.

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which opened on August 26, would produce some of the decade's most disturbing television footage as police clashed violently with protesters outside the convention hall. Vietnam, assassination, Soviet tanks, police brutality — 1968 was a year that seemed to accumulate catastrophe. Against it, a motor race in the fog of the Eifel hills was a parenthesis: dangerous and vivid and contained.

Dense fog and heavy rain throughout, conditions deteriorating from before the start. Visibility in the forested sections of the Nordschleife was sometimes reduced to the length of a car. Standing water lay across multiple sections of the track. The conditions were judged dangerous by most of the field and unsuitable for racing by several; the race nevertheless ran to its full distance. Track temperature was low and grip essentially absent in the wet sections.