The Boy

by Richard Williams

  He was the right size, which helped. Hawthorn, more than half a foot taller, crouched at the wheel like a pre-war ace. ‘I adopted a rather hunched driving position quite early in my career as most of the cars I drove were too small for me and I had to keep out of the wind,’ he wrote. ‘Gradually it became a habit.’

  It was with the 250F that Moss perfected his mastery of the four-wheel drift, the art of setting a car up for a fast curve and pushing the tyres a fraction beyond the limit of their adhesion, using the throttle to guide the car through the bend with the front wheels pointing along the longitudinal line of the car, making corrections with just a touch of opposite lock. This refined approach was very different from the cruder sliding technique favoured by drivers who would leave a corner with their cars at an exaggerated angle as brute power overcame minimal grip, inducing a level of friction that wasted momentum and rubber. Drifting required great sensitivity to the car’s behaviour, and it was much easier to execute with a straight-arm posture in the cockpit and fingertips rather than fists on the wheel. It also needed something like the 250F: a responsive car with no handling vices.

  Who invented the drift? Some said Tazio Nuvolari, whose front wheels seldom seemed to be pointing in the actual direction of travel. Fangio was certainly its master. Moss watched him closely, studied the subtleties of his approach, and became his equal.

  Eventually, as the design of racing cars changed, the technique would become obsolete, or at least applicable only to the cars used in historic racing. While it lasted, it gave spectators a clear view of something both aesthetically satisfying and clearly beyond the ability of the ordinary mortal. The four-wheel drift belonged to an age when elegance and virtuosity went hand in hand. With Moss, it was as much of a characteristic as the way he walked or talked.

  CHAPTER 25 VERSATILE

  He was never a motor-racing snob. In 1951, already recognised as Britain’s most promising driver and being courted by Enzo Ferrari, he shared a friend’s Morris Minor convertible in the Chiltern Night Rally, missing out on a prize through a map-reading error but, as he put it, ‘enjoying ourselves regardless’. His versatility was one of his greatest assets. He had grown up with parents who entered trials and rallies, not the most glamorous forms of the sport. Curiosity about design was a quality he had in abundance, and the range of machinery in which he competed throughout his career was astonishing. He could step into almost anything and make it go faster.

  His first rally had been a light-hearted ‘crumpet-catching tour’ with Lance Macklin, during which they had made themselves unpopular with other competitors by the boisterous tactics they employed to make up time after oversleeping. In 1952 a more serious proposition came from the management of the Rootes Group competitions department, inviting him to take part in the eight-day Monte Carlo Rally in one of their Sunbeam-Talbot 90 sports coupés.

  He took along The Autocar’s John Cooper and the secretary of the BRDC, Desmond Scannell, to share the driving. Blizzards and sheet ice were among the hazards encountered that year, and in the Alps they had to make up time after getting stuck in a snowbank with Moss at the wheel, freed only with the help of a farmer and a pair of oxen, but they were delighted to finish second overall. Moss’s fee from Rootes was an unimpressive £50, but it had enlivened the off-season, as did his first experience of a cross-country trial a few weeks later, coaxing a Harford Special up a muddy hill in Derbyshire with Cooper again alongside him as ballast.

  He had enjoyed the rallying enough to enter his own Jaguar XK120 in the three-day Lyons–Charbonnières event, co-driving the green and cream car with the journalist Gregor Grant, and finishing second in their class. He was in a Sunbeam-Talbot for the six-day Alpine Rally in July, this time with John Cutts as his co-driver. They finished sixth as part of a Rootes squad, now also including Mike Hawthorn, which won the team prize. In November he was back in the XK120 for the RAC Rally, finishing thirteenth with Cooper as his navigator.

  By 1953 his diary was filling up with commitments to the international racing calendar, but he found room for the Monte Carlo and Alpine rallies. The weather was milder that year: he, Cooper and Scannell finished sixth in the Monte, while he and Cutts again finished the Alpine event – in a soft-top model named the Sunbeam-Talbot Alpine in recognition of the previous year’s success – without incurring penalty points, for which they were awarded their second Coupe des Alpes.

  While Alf Francis was preparing his Maserati 250F for the 1954 grand prix season, Moss was reunited with Cooper and Scannell for the Monte, in which they finished fifteenth. That year’s Alpine Rally, however, provided one of the most dramatic episodes of his career. He and Cutts won their third Coupe des Alpes in a row, earning them a special gold trophy, but to get it Moss had to drive a flat-out stage across a series of mountain passes including the Iseran, the Croix de Fer, the Glandon and the Galibier – all more celebrated as climbs on cycling’s Tour de France – in filthy conditions with only second and third gears remaining in the car’s four-speed box. And then, through surreptitious manipulation of the overdrive button, Moss had to demonstrate during a brief drive with an official that the car still had all its gears, thus satisfying the requirement to finish the event in the condition in which it had started. It was, he said, the only time in his entire career that he could remember having cheated.

  His final adventure in the world of rallying came at the end of the year when he rejoined the Rootes team for the Great American Rally, starting and ending in New York and going up through New England to the Canadian border. As they tackled the snow-covered Lincoln Gap, a mountain pass in Vermont, Moss complained that, because he couldn’t get his Sunbeam to the top, the stage should be cancelled. When a rival pointed to a set of tyre tracks which indicated that the official car had managed it, the Englishman’s objection was drowned in the sound of other competitors restarting their engines and setting off to tackle the climb. A squad of Oldsmobiles won both the overall victory and the team prize.

  Consolation for that inglorious finale to his rallying career came before he set off for home, in a message telling him that he was about to become a Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix driver.

  After their two Mercedes finish a length apart in the 1955 British Grand Prix, Juan Manuel Fangio congratulates Moss on his first win in a world championship race (George Phillips/Revs Institute).

  CHAPTER 26 THREE-POINTED STAR

  What would it mean for an Englishman to drive a Mercedes, only ten years after the end of a war that had killed so many millions? In 1937 Dick Seaman had signed up for the same team and watched as the shadow of war fell across Europe. He stood to attention when Adolf Hitler inspected the cars and their drivers in Berlin and made a reluctant Nazi salute on the victory podium at the Nürburgring. He had been killed, while leading a Grand Prix in one of the Silver Arrows, only weeks before Britain and Germany went to war. Now former foes were expressing unstinted admiration of Germany’s engineering prowess as applied to the science of motor racing – skills that had only recently been used to fashion Tiger tanks, V2 rockets and Messerschmitt engines. It was as if the two things had no connection.

  Mercedes’ tentative return in 1951 with pre-war cars in Argentina – not exactly a hostile environment – proved only that reviving obsolete machinery was not the way to go. It was followed in 1952 by the development of new sports coupés which secured first and second places at Le Mans and in the Carrera Panamericana. That was more like the old Mercedes, and the company’s full-scale return to Grand Prix racing in 1954 saw them resuming the sort of dominance they had enjoyed between 1934 and 1939. For Moss, just as it had been for Seaman, the invitation to join this historic team was the greatest compliment that could be paid to a racing driver.

  Having rejected his overture at the start of the previous season, Mercedes had seen enough to conclude that he now had the experience to go with his talent. Ken Gregory had paved the way with a visit to Stuttgart, where Alfred Neubauer had immediately made an offer of a stagge
ring £28,000 for the season (about £700,000 today). Since that was roughly twice what Gregory would have asked for, in the expectation of being beaten down, he felt able to accept on the spot. For that sort of money, Stirling would certainly abide by a contractual obligation to be in bed by ten o’clock on the night before a race. Although the deal left him free to drive other cars outside the races for which Mercedes needed him, there would be no more messing around with rallies or picking up prize money in Formula 3. Gregory was soon setting up a company called Stirling Moss Ltd to handle his principal client’s income and reduce the tax liability.

  For his new team, the acquisition represented more than just the capture of an enormously gifted young driver: it also had a public-relations value. When Hitler endorsed Seaman’s inclusion in a team whose successes were intended to proclaim the superiority of German technology, he was still hoping that his country and Britain might form an alliance. Bringing Moss into the squad could have been seen as a friendly gesture to a recent enemy. It was also a hand outstretched towards a potentially lucrative market for road cars bearing the same three-pointed star.

  Before leaving for America in November, he had tested the new Ferrari F1 car in secret at Monza and visited Modena to talk to Omer Orsi. He had turned down Enzo Ferrari’s offer, but Orsi had said goodbye to him believing that the arrangement with Maserati would continue into 1955. When Orsi learned that the man he expected to lead his team would be joining Mercedes, a telegram was sent to Stuttgart, warning them that Moss was already committed for the coming season. But although a contract was sitting on Moss’s desk in London, it had not been signed. Jaguar’s management was similarly disappointed, since the deal with Mercedes included driving the German cars in the major sports car races.

  The news drew a mixed reaction in the British press, but most understood why Moss was following Hawthorn’s lead in signing for a foreign team. ‘If there is any blame to be laid,’ an Autosport editorial declared, ‘then it will fall on the British motor industry, who by their continued apathy to the importance of full-scale Grand Prix racing have virtually forced our best drivers to seek their fortunes with foreign products. In the case of Moss, the foreign country is one whose cars are presenting a real challenge to the British industry, judging by the number of cars now to be seen in England.’

  In the final weeks of 1954 there was an invitation to a special Mercedes test session at Hockenheim, arranged just for Moss. He arrived with his father and his manager. A single-seater was ready and waiting, and one incident impressed him early on: when he came into the pits with his face covered in dust from the inboard front brakes, a mechanic was standing by with a bowl of hot water, a cake of soap and a towel. At Mercedes, he discovered, you could have anything you needed. Or they’d give you a good reason for refusing. ‘If you asked for square wheels,’ he told the journalist Maurice Hamilton, ‘they’d look in the book and say, “We tried that in 1928 and they vibrated too much.” They used four-spoke steering wheels, but I liked three-spoke, so that’s what they made.’

  He would also have noticed immediately that there was no sound quite like that of the Mercedes straight-eight engine. The noise was channeled through twin exhaust pipes curving outwards as they made their exit through the side of the bodywork just in front of the cockpit. Compared to the bellow of a four-cylinder Ferrari, the howl of a straight-six Maserati or the scream of a V8 Lancia, it was a fierce, unrelenting, leonine roar that seemed to swallow the air and shake the grandstands. It was loud beyond belief: a sound that engulfed the opposition.

  These Silver Arrows were being run by the same duo who had supervised their pre-war successes: Neubauer, who had virtually invented the art of Grand Prix team management, and the designer and engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut. Like Seaman, Moss got on well with both of them straight away. For all his fearsome reputation, Neubauer liked to dine well and had an engagingly boisterous sense of humour. Uhlenhaut had been born and spent his early years in London, where his father worked for the Deutsche Bank before the Great War. In testing, he could step into a car and put in laps that matched those of the team’s drivers. Moss spoke no German, but Neubauer’s English was serviceable and Uhlenhaut’s was perfect.

  With characteristic Mercedes thoroughness, the W196 was produced in short-, medium- and long-wheelbase configurations to suit individual circuits, and with dramatic fully streamlined bodies for use at high-speed tracks. It was a big car, unhandsome in a well-muscled way in its usual open-wheeled guise, quite heavy to drive and with an unusual arrangement in the footwell: the brake and the clutch pedals were separated by a very wide transmission housing, meaning that the driver’s legs were splayed apart. Moss found that easier to get used to than the gearshift pattern, which had first, third and fifth at the back of the gate and second and fourth at the top. It could also be tricky to handle in the wet, and even in the dry it was not a car that could be flung about in the same way as a 250F. But the power and torque of its engine and its all-round sturdiness made it superior to anything Ferrari or Maserati could produce. At a price, of course: it was estimated that each W196 cost the company around £50,000 to build, about ten times what Maserati were asking their customers for a 250F.

  Moss was engaged as Fangio’s number two, a position he was happy to accept since it enabled him to spend a year following closely in the wheel tracks of the man he respected above all others, measuring his own performance by the best possible yardstick. This was his finishing school: a clear hierarchy of master and pupil (although, as the season progressed, Moss would note with interest that Fangio was often happy to accept his suggestions on gear ratios and other mechanical settings). The bond between the two men was strong: neither spoke the other’s native language, so they conversed in basic Italian. Moss never wavered from his belief that Fangio, eighteen years his senior, was the greatest of them all.

  Their first race as teammates was in front of Fangio’s home fans, the temperature at the Buenos Aires autodrome topping 100 degrees at the start of the opening round of the 1955 world championship series. Fangio won, driving solo, but even he needed a pit stop lasting three minutes to cool himself down while drinking several litres of lemonade. As for Moss and his two other teammates, Hans Herrmann and Karl Kling, they made use of the rule allowing more than one driver to share a car. Moss was lying second, with Union Jack stickers on either side of his head fairing, as he had requested, and extra cooling vents cut into the bodywork, when a vapour lock in the fuel system stopped the car out on the circuit; he parked it, got out and lay down on a shaded patch of grass, seemingly exhausted. Suddenly, before he could make himself understood, he was being whisked off to the medical centre. Finally succeeding in getting himself discharged, he returned to the pits. With the race still under way, and seeing that he was fit and ready to resume, Neubauer sent him out in a car that had already been driven by Herrmann and Kling; together they were able to finish fourth, splitting the three championship points between them, as the rules then permitted.

  They met President Perón at an official reception for the team and paid a visit to the resort of Mar del Plata before returning to the track for the City of Buenos Aires Grand Prix. Held under Formula Libre rules, the race enabled Mercedes to try out the three-litre sports-car engines they had brought from Germany. It was run in two heats, the aggregate times determining the winner. Farina won the first in a Ferrari, followed by Fangio and Moss, who then pipped his team leader to victory in the second. Although Fangio’s combined times gave him the overall victory, the Englishman had shown that he could compete on level terms.

  At Monaco he started on the outside of the front row, alongside Fangio and Eugenio Castellotti’s impressive new Lancia, outbraking them both into the Gasworks hairpin and squeezing his team leader towards the outside of the track on the exit before thinking better of it and tucking in behind. Both in new short-wheelbase cars, they looked set for a one–two victory until Fangio’s transmission broke at half-distance. On a glorious day, watched by p
acked grandstands, Moss led for thirty laps until, to his surprise and dismay, his engine failed. He drew up alongside the pits before pushing the car across the line to be classified last of the nine finishers.

  A more spectacular exit from the contest was made by Ascari, who had been about to inherit the lead when his Lancia flew off the road at the chicane and plunged into the harbour. A frogman fished him out, the rescue confirming a belief among drivers that the use of safety harnesses would only hamper their chances of escape. But it would be the great Italian’s last race. Four days later, during a test session at Monza, he went out in the Ferrari sports car he was due to share with Castellotti in the Mille Miglia and died on an otherwise deserted track in a crash for which no explanation was ever found. Just as Moss’s defection to the Germans had deflated Maserati, the death of their double world champion knocked the stuffing out of the Lancia team, whose cerise D50 had been looking a match for the silver W196.

  The Mercedes hegemony was re-established with one–two wins for Fangio and Moss at Spa and Zandvoort, running in close order in both races. The two were separated by only three-tenths of a second at the end of the Dutch race, in which they lapped the entire field. This was very much the sort of dominance enjoyed by the team before the war, when the quality of their engineering and organisation had made them seem invincible. At Aintree in July, however, there was a twist to the narrative.