Stirling Moss

1929–⁠2020

Contents

Part One · The life

  1. IThe early years
  2. IIThe 500s and the first wins
  3. IIIThe seasons
  4. IVThe Mille Miglia
  5. VThe sports cars
  6. VIRallies and records
  7. VIIGoodwood
  8. VIIIAfter racing

Part Two · The man

  1. IXRivals and friends
  2. Moss and Fangio
  3. XIn his words
  4. What they said
  5. XIThe machines
  6. XIIThe people around him
  7. XIIIThe sportsman

Part Three · Legacy

  1. XIVLegacy

The seasons

Reference
A young man in white overalls, goggles round his neck and one hand at his ear, stands beside a sports-racing car numbered 2; a mechanic leans into its cockpit, and spectators and photographers crowd a barrier beneath round petrol-company signs.

An independent tribute

Stirling Moss

Goodwood  Brescia  Aintree  Monaco

He won 16 World Championship Grands Prix and the Mille Miglia, was runner-⁠up for the title four years running and third for three more, and never won it: a racer in almost every kind of car, from 1948 until a crash at Goodwood in 1962.

Begin

Cover: Bjørn Fjørtoft · CC BY 4.0

I loved to drive English cars because you felt like a green gladiator fighting the red lions. Patriotism doesn’t matter nowadays, but it mattered to me.

Stirling Moss to Simon Taylor, “Lunch with…”, Motor Sport, 2006

Introduction

“Mr Motor Racing”, 1929–⁠2020

The photograph on the cover was taken in Sweden on 7 August 1955, at Kristianstad, on the day of its Grand Prix for sports cars. Stirling Moss was 25. He stands in white overalls, goggles round his neck, beside his Mercedes-⁠Benz 300 SLR, No. 2. In a car of the same type he had won the Mille Miglia that May; three weeks earlier, at Aintree, in the Mercedes-⁠Benz W196, he had won his first World Championship Grand Prix. In the race he led the first lap, then waved his team leader, Juan Manuel Fangio, by, and finished 2nd to him.

He was born on 17 September 1929, in West Kensington, London, into a family that raced for fun. His father, Alfred, a dentist, had started the Indianapolis 500 of 1924; his mother, Aileen, drove in trials; his sister, Pat, became the outstanding woman rally driver of her day. He was racing a Cooper 500 at 18, on the eve of his 21st birthday he won the Tourist Trophy at Dundrod in a borrowed Jaguar XK120, and from 1951 to 1961 he raced in the World Championship.

At Aintree in 1957 the Vanwall that he and Tony Brooks shared became the first British car to win a round of the championship, and in Rob Walker’s privately entered cars he gave Cooper and Lotus their first World Championship wins too. In sports cars he won seven Tourist Trophies, the Targa Florio and the Sebring 12 Hours as well as the Mille Miglia, and never won Le Mans.

A crash at Goodwood on Easter Monday 1962 ended his career in the front line at 32. In time he became “Mr Motor Racing”, and his own name outlasted the racing by decades, in what became the policeman’s question: a speeding driver, the story goes, would be asked whether he took himself for Stirling Moss.

Every date, from 1924 to 2024

The numbers

World Championship wins
16
1955 · 1956 · 1957 · 1958 · 1959 · 1960 · 1961

Eleven seasons of Grands Prix, 15 years of racing1

World Championship starts
66
Pole positions
16
Races, 1948–⁠1962
529
Race wins, 1948–⁠1962
212

The book

Contents

Great drives

Great drives

I

Brescia

 · Mille Miglia · Mercedes-⁠Benz 300 SLR, No. 722

Numbers in the Mille Miglia were starting times: 722 went down the ramp at Brescia at 7.22 in the morning, with Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport in the second seat. Jenkinson had the road written out in advance, every corner graded, and passed it to Moss by hand signals. They were 2nd to Castellotti at Ravenna and to Taruffi at Pescara, and in front from L’Aquila to the finish. Back in Brescia after 10 hours 7 minutes 48 seconds, they had beaten Fangio, driving alone, by more than half an hour, and the race was never run faster.

A dust-streaked open sports-racing car numbered 722 comes towards the camera on a village road, a helmeted driver in goggles behind its screen; men in coats and caps line the road, some standing on rocks at the right.
Jenkinson beside Moss in No. 722, somewhere on the route on 1 May 1955; the place is not recorded. Unknown photographer · Public domain
Start number, and starting time
7.22
Kilometres an hour, Brescia to Brescia
157.65
  1. 2Ravenna: Castellotti nearly 2 min up
  2. 2Pescara: 15 s behind Taruffi
  3. 1Rome: in front by almost 2 min
  4. 1Bologna: Fangio almost 28 min back
  5. 1Brescia: first, by 31 min 45 s
The Mille Miglia, mile by mile

II

Aintree

 · British Grand Prix · Mercedes-⁠Benz W196, No. 12

At Mercedes-⁠Benz he was Fangio’s number two, and through 1955 the two silver cars ran nose to tail so often that the papers named them “the train”. At Aintree, on a hot July day in front of a vast home crowd, the order changed. Moss took pole, swapped the lead with Fangio more than once in the first 26 laps and was in front at half-distance, when the pit hung out its sign to hold station. At the line Fangio drew alongside and finished 0.2 seconds behind. It was the first World Championship win of Moss’s career, and no British driver had won the British Grand Prix before. Whether Fangio could have won it, and chose not to, has never been settled.

Two pale, smooth-bodied open-wheeled racing cars, numbered 8 and 10, run nose to tail along a track lined with straw bales below a packed grandstand flying flags; the first driver wears a dark helmet and goggles, the second a white helmet.
“The train”, four weeks before Aintree: Fangio’s W196, No. 8, with Moss’s, No. 10, close behind at Zandvoort in the Dutch Grand Prix, 19 June 1955. Pot, Harry / Anefo · CC0
Seconds between them at the flag
0.2
His pole time, and the race’s fastest lap
2:00.4
Aintree, 1955

III

Monaco

 · Rob Walker’s Lotus 18–⁠Climax, No. 20

A small dark-blue rear-engined racing car with a white band, numbered 20, runs at speed between grass verges and straw bales; its driver wears a white helmet.
Walker’s dark blue with its white band, and Moss’s Monaco number, 20, on a Lotus 18 of the type he drove that day, at the Goodwood Festival of Speed on 1 July 2012. The photographer names neither its chassis nor its driver. Darren · CC BY 2.0
  • Pole, 1:39.1
  • In front from the 14th lap
  • 3.6 seconds clear at the flag

The new formula of 1½ litres belonged to Ferrari, whose V6 engines had 30 or 40 bhp more than the four-cylinder Climax in Walker’s Lotus, a type a year old, its side panels taken off for the heat. Moss put it on pole, passed Richie Ginther on lap 14, and for the remaining 86 laps kept both Ferraris, Ginther’s and Phil Hill’s, behind him, through most of the second half with no more than about 5 seconds in hand. When Ginther, near the end, lapped in 1:36.3, Moss answered with the same time on the next lap. Asked in 2006, he thought it probably the best race he ever drove.

The 1961 season

IV

Nürburgring

 · German Grand Prix · Lotus 18/21–⁠Climax, No. 7

At one o’clock a shower put every car on Dunlop’s new D12 wet-weather tyres, and within the hour Dunlop told the teams to fit their dry ones again. Moss and Colin Chapman kept the wet ones on; Lotus had already raced them on a dry track and seen none of the wear Dunlop predicted. Ferrari did as it was told. Moss was past Phil Hill on the first lap and led to the finish, though Hill and Wolfgang von Trips broke the lap record time and again in pursuit. When rain came back in the last 2 laps he drew away, and beat von Trips by 21.4 seconds on the Ferrari driver’s home ground. It was his 16th World Championship win, and the last.

A panned photograph: a small open-wheeled racing car numbered 7, its driver in a white helmet, sharp against a blurred grass bank.
At the Schwalbenschwanz in Walker’s Lotus, No. 7, on the way to his 16th and last championship win: the German Grand Prix, 6 August 1961. Lothar Spurzem · CC BY-⁠SA 2.0 DE
Laps of the Nordschleife
15
Margin over von Trips, seconds
21.4
The Nürburgring

The championship

The title, 1955–⁠1961

1955
2nd
23 points to Fangio’s 40
1956
2nd
27 points to Fangio’s 30
1957
2nd
25 points to Fangio’s 40
1958
2nd
41 points to Hawthorn’s 42
1959
3rd
25½ points to Brabham’s 31
1960
3rd
19 points to Brabham’s 43
1961
3rd
21 points to Phil Hill’s 34

Seven years running he finished in the first three of the World Championship, behind Fangio three times, Jack Brabham twice and Phil Hill once, and the nearest he came was 1958. He won four Grands Prix to Mike Hawthorn’s one, but his Vanwall retired five times, three of them with Moss in the lead, while Hawthorn kept on collecting points. In August, at Oporto, Moss won, and Hawthorn, 2nd, spun once Moss had taken the flag; restarting, his Ferrari ran up onto the pavement against the race’s direction. Officials reported him and he was disqualified, but late that evening the stewards reinstated him, after Moss confirmed that nobody had been put in danger. Those were 7 points, 6 for 2nd place and a seventh for the fastest lap, a point Moss did not go for, having misunderstood his pit’s board. In October Moss won the last race, at Casablanca, with the fastest lap, needing Hawthorn to finish no higher than 3rd. Hawthorn was 2nd, and champion by 42 points to 41.

Three of the drivers he raced that year died of injuries from Grand Prix accidents: Luigi Musso at Reims, Peter Collins at the Nürburgring and his Vanwall team-⁠mate Stuart Lewis-Evans after Casablanca.

In time he came to like his distinction. In 1994 he told David Tremayne of Motor Sport: “I’m better off never having won one.” People, he said, would always think he should have won it. The sportsman follows how a missing title became part of his fame.

IX · Rivals and friends

Rivals: who finished ahead

Grands Prix both started, and the count between them2

Mike Hawthorn
37
Hawthorn ahead 22 times, Moss 15
Tony Brooks
35
Moss 21, Brooks 13, one win shared
Juan Manuel Fangio
32
Fangio 21, Moss 11
Peter Collins
28
Collins 15, Moss 13
Jim Clark
11
Moss 6, Clark 5

Fangio was the one he measured himself by: the master who beat him to three titles, the team leader he followed through 1955 a few feet off his tail, and a friend for 40 years. In 2007 Moss said it simply: “He was the greatest of them all.” The early years were Fangio’s; from Pescara in 1957 to Fangio’s last race the following summer, Moss finished ahead every time they met, and in 1995 he was among the men who carried Fangio’s coffin at Balcarce.

Three drivers stand under a race banner among officials and mechanics: a young man smiling at the left, an older man in the centre, and a fair-haired man in a dark jacket beside him.
Three of his rivals together: Collins, Fangio and Hawthorn at the Nürburgring on 4 August 1957, after the win that made Fangio champion for the fifth time. Moss had finished 5th. Willy Pragher · CC BY 3.0

Hawthorn, five months the elder, was England’s other front-runner of the decade, driving for Ferrari while Moss searched for a competitive British car; he gave up racing as champion and was killed on the road in January 1959. Collins shared his winning Mercedes-⁠Benz in the Targa Florio of 1955 and his Aston Martin, 2nd at Le Mans, the next year. Brooks, his Vanwall team-⁠mate, was the driver Moss said he would make number one in a team of his own.

Brabham was champion in 1959 and 1960; Hill and von Trips drove the Ferraris he beat in 1961, and von Trips was killed at Monza that September, with 14 spectators. At Monaco that May Jim Clark had started beside him, the coming man; Goodwood ended their contest almost before it had begun.

The rivals, one by one

X · In his words

My philosophy is that racing is what matters.

Stirling Moss to David Tremayne, Motor Sport, November 1994
More of what he said

What they said

What they said: from Maranello

Stirling Moss symbolised motor sport. He was a true personality who left an indelible impression on the history of racing. His versatility meant he was able to win in so many different categories, from Formula 1 to sports car endurance races. He also produced incredible performances in road races such as the Mille Miglia, setting a record that was never beaten.

Piero Ferrari, Enzo Ferrari’s son statement on Moss’s death, April 2020
Rivals, reporters and champions on him

XI · The machines

A long red front-engined racing car with wire wheels and exhaust pipes along its flank stands on a patterned floor, a placard before its nose, road cars behind it.
The red of the works Maseratis, on a 250F in the Panini collection at Modena, 19 April 2022. Its placard dates it to 1957 with a V12 engine; the 250Fs in which he won in 1956 had the straight-six. pelican-actor · CC BY 2.0

Five makes, 16 wins

Vanwall
6
1957–⁠1958, one of them shared with Brooks
Lotus
4
Walker’s 18 and 18/21, 1960–⁠1961
Cooper
3
Walker’s T43 and T51, 1958–⁠1959
Maserati 250F
2
the works car, 1956
Mercedes-⁠Benz W196
1
Aintree, 1955

In the World Championship he started in cars of nine makes and won in five, which no other driver has done. No Grand Prix car did he praise more often than the Maserati 250F, and in 2009, more than half a century after he first raced one, he summed it up as an easy car to drive fast, with no vices.

The championship was only part of it: his own website counted 107 types of car. In sports cars he won in the Jaguar XK120 and C-⁠type, the 300 SLR, Maserati’s 300S and “Birdcage”, the Aston Martin DBR1 and Walker’s Ferrari 250 GT. On the salt at Bonneville in 1957 he took the MG EX181 to 245.64 mph (395.32 km/⁠h) through the flying kilometre. And at Oulton Park in September 1961 the four-wheel-drive Ferguson P99 gave him the Gold Cup: no car driving all four wheels has won another Formula One race.

Every car, make by make

VII · Goodwood

On Easter Monday, in the Glover Trophy, he was laps down after a long stop in the pits and coming up behind Graham Hill’s BRM at St Mary’s when his Lotus left the road and struck an earth bank. Freeing him took half an hour, the report of the day said, and up to 45 minutes by later accounts. He was unconscious for about a month, with injuries to his head and a leg and an arm broken, and for months his left side was partly paralysed. Officials could find nothing wrong with the car, and why it went off has never been settled. On 1 May 1963, after a test alone at Goodwood, he announced that he would not race again.

XIV · Legacy

Fifty-seven years more

He lived 57 years after he retired, was knighted in 2000 and raced historic cars until he was 81, and when he died, at home in Mayfair on Easter Sunday 2020, no driver who never became champion had won more Grands Prix than his 16.

An elderly man in a blazer and tie sits laughing in an open wooden carriage, a smiling woman with a flower in her hair facing him, people in period costume behind.
Sir Stirling, laughing, in an open carriage at Goodwood’s Revival meeting on 20 September 2009, at 80. Nathan Wong on Flickr · CC BY 2.0
How he is remembered

Explore

For reference

Notes

  1. Starts, poles and wins are F1DB’s count, which Jolpica and the official Formula 1 archive bear out race by race: 66 starts from 67 entries, the entry without a start being the Belgian Grand Prix of 1960, where he was hurt in practice. One of the 16 wins, at Aintree in 1957, was shared with Tony Brooks. The races and race wins of 1948–⁠1962 are counted as in All My Races, the book of 2009 that lists every race of his career: races alone, with no rallies, hill climbs, sprints or record runs. Other counts draw the line elsewhere; the British Racing Drivers’ Club’s, with some hill climbs and sprints, is 216 wins from 585 events. Records sets them side by side. ↑

  2. World Championship races that both men started, counted from F1DB and from Jolpica, which agree. The one with the better final place finished ahead; if neither finished, whoever was credited with the greater number of laps, and a disqualification counts below any retirement. ↑

Sources