Today, Jackie Stewart will unveil a statue of Jim Clark at Kilmany in Fife. This reminder of the personal friendship between the two great Scottish world champion racing drivers also makes the point that, although usually regarded as a Borderer, Clark was actually born in Wester Kilmany farmhouse. His family moved to Berwickshire when he was six.

Next week, Ford will celebrate the anniversary of the first victory by the famous Ford Cosworth Formula One engine, achieved when Clark's Lotus 49 won the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix. And a new Jim Clark biography, by Eric Dymock, is being published.

So long after Clark's fatal accident in 1968 at Hockenheim, can there possibly be anything fresh to say? And if there is, will it sully his reputation, still jealously guarded by those who were close to him? Eric Dymock is just the author to tackle a book like this. When the 19- year-old Clark was navigating an Austin-Healey in the 1955 Scottish Rally, young Dymock was doing the same in a Morgan. Later, as a motoring journalist here and in London, he reported on many of Clark's racing successes.

However, the book is not simply a rehash of his own previously published work and his personal recollections. He has talked at length to members of Clark's family, as well as to racing colleagues and friends like Ian Scott Watson, who helped Jim progress from local events into the international arena.

Here is Clark from all angles, a much more three-dimensional figure than has been captured before. Certainly, the book recalls the racing highlights of his career, but it is in the personal side of his life, often skirted round by other biographies, that this one excels.

Dymock is informed and direct on Clark's strong family background, how concerned he was about his public image, on his girl-friends, and the disastrous way some of his advisers handled his finances. His pursuit by the tax authorities explains why his gravestone describes him as being of ''Edington Mains, Chirnside, and of Pembroke, Bermuda''.

Some of the yarns are hilarious, like the account of what happened when Clark and Colin Chapman of Lotus met the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, and the champagne flowed too freely before Chapman unwisely drove their hired car away.

Dymock also makes it clear that Clark was by no means the simple, uncomplicated character many people like to remember. He was much more enigmatic, more complex, and sometimes more abrupt, than other memoirs have suggested. Of course, he was the greatest driver of his era, still being described in magazine articles in 1997 as ''peerless'', at a time when racing was more hazardous than it is today. The strain sometimes told.

And he was no pushover. One revealing photograph in this very well presented book shows him with fellow-driver Brian Naylor, after Naylor had accidentally forced him off the road at Oulton Park, both their cars crashing. A menacing Clark is grabbing a totally penitent Naylor by the shirt, apparently restrained from thumping him only by the presence of a track marshal keeping them apart.

But none of this detracts from the abiding appeal of a man still revered by people who saw him racing, without ever being directly connected with him.

Like the lady in the Jim Clark Room at Duns, tears in her eyes as she looked at the winner's trophy from the 1963 British Grand at Silverstone. She had been spectating there on what happened to be her birthday, and recalled, ''I felt that was Jim's birthday present to me.'' Or the industrialist who said recently, ''Jim Clark was my hero, and I haven't had one since.''

Jim Clark, by Eric Dymock, is published by G T Foulis at #24.99.