After five consecutive races at Silverstone since the inauguration of the world championship, the British Grand Prix was being held for the first time on the three-mile circuit laid out inside the Grand National steeplechase course, run clockwise – against the direction followed by the horses. Compared with the continental tracks it was flat, featureless and artificial, and lacked even the challenging high-speed corners of the best airfield circuits. Its only colourful features were the vast colonnaded grandstands and a few evocative names shared with the horse-racing track: Becher’s Bend, the Melling Crossing. It was destined, however, to witness two events that won it a particular place in the history of British motor racing – and that of Stirling Moss.
The first came on 16 July 1955, the day on which Moss won his first world championship Grand Prix. He and Fangio had set the fastest times in practice, and Fangio led him off the line when the flag fell in front of a huge crowd. Within three laps Moss had gone past his team leader. When Fangio repassed him, he had to snatch the lead once more. But an adroit piece of work in lapping a backmarker under braking for a corner, forcing Fangio to fall back, allowed Moss to build a cushion; this was a trick he had learned from Villoresi at Monza a few years earlier, while trying to follow the Italian’s Ferrari in his HWM.
When Neubauer put out signs telling them both to ease up, Fangio crept closer. As the two silver cars crossed the finish line Moss was barely a length ahead, leading a clean sweep of the first four places for Mercedes. His shirt stained with sweat, his face black with oil, he accepted the victor’s laurel wreath and a kiss from the formidable Mrs Mirabel Topham, a former West End Gaiety Girl who had run Aintree since marrying its owner before the war. He had become the first British driver to win his home round of the world championship.
Moss always said that his teammate could have won the race with ease, had he been so minded. When questioned in later years, Fangio invariably called Moss a worthy winner. What was the truth? With only one round of the championship to go after Aintree, Fangio had already claimed his third world title. A win for the young English hero would be of great publicity value. A year earlier, Fangio’s Mercedes had finished half a second behind the car of his German teammate Karl Kling at the AVUS track in the non-championship Berlin Grand Prix, a popular home win for a veteran driver who, by any measure, was not in Fangio’s class. A conclusion might be drawn. But Fangio did nothing to suggest that either victory had been gift-wrapped. And Moss’s capture of the point for fastest lap gave evidence of his speed on the day.
By the time they reached Monza, Mercedes had dropped a bombshell by informing their drivers that the team would be withdrawing from Formula 1 racing at the end of the season. They were told that the lavish and highly expensive project was being terminated in order to concentrate the resources of the experimental department on the development of their road cars. Meanwhile, Neubauer and Uhlenhaut threw everything they had at an attempt to win the last race of the world championship year.
Since the Italian Grand Prix was being run over a combination of Monza’s traditional road circuit and the new banked oval, a test session was booked at the track, where comparisons were made between the various wheelbase lengths with both open-wheeled and streamlined bodywork. Two brand-new cars were built as a result of the tests, but by the time they returned for the race weekend the surface of the banked track had been smoothed out and a new solution was required.
Hasty modifications were made, and two more chassis were built up in Stuttgart almost overnight and sent down to Monza. The work was done so well that the Mercedes team were again holding the top four places, with Fangio and Moss followed by Kling and Piero Taruffi, a guest in the team, when a stone thrown up by Fangio’s car smashed Moss’s aeroscreen. It was replaced quickly, but his attempt to recover lost ground was thwarted when a piston failed. His career as Mercedes Grand Prix driver ended in the pits, alongside Kling, who had also retired, the pair looking on as Fangio let Taruffi close up to within half a second by the time they swept past the chequered flag, the German team giving the Italian crowd something to cheer.
After that the W196s were taken home and packed away, their work done and their place in motor-racing history secure. In 2013 one of them became the most expensive car ever bought at auction. Donated by the factory to the Donington museum, it was sold to raise funds and was knocked down to a winning bid of £19,601,500.
CHAPTER 27 FANGIO’S PILLS
A year before he joined Mercedes, a smiling Moss had appeared in a newspaper advertisement for a popular glucose drink: ‘What do I drink to keep me going in a gruelling race? Why, Lucozade, of course!’ But one of the things that impressed him about Fangio was that the Argentinian champion, although now in his mid-forties, still possessed a capacity for physical endurance acquired in the great transcontinental South American races of the 1940s and evident when he completed long races in temperatures that were bringing much younger drivers to the point of collapse.
During their year together the world champion shared with his teammate what Moss came to call ‘Fangio’s little pills’. They were probably something very like the Drinamyl tablets – half amphetamine and half barbiturate – given to Second World War bomber crews and known to have helped Winston Churchill through wartime crises. Whatever they were, when it came to endurance races, the gruelling marathon events of motor sport, they proved their value.
Undoubtedly the highlight of Moss’s year with Mercedes – and, to some, the zenith of his career – was his victory in the Mille Miglia, the time trial around a thousand miles of ordinary Italian roads, inaugurated in 1927. When Moss first entered the race in 1951 he and his navigator, Frank Rainbow, had tried using a primitive intercom system and written notes. Four years later the procedure was to be refined, and Mercedes were happy to give him a prototype two-seater 300SLR for a week’s reconnaissance. When he wrote it off, they replaced it with a roadgoing 300SL coupé. When that was also wrecked, in a collision with an army lorry, he was handed the keys to a 220 saloon with which to complete his revision of the course. This time he was to be partnered by Denis Jenkinson, the Continental Correspondent of Motor Sport, who in a previous incarnation had won a world championship as the sidecar partner to the motorcycle racer Eric Oliver.
During these thousand-mile study laps Jenkinson borrowed a suggestion from their American teammate John Fitch by taking detailed notes, which he transcribed onto a roll of paper 18 feet long. The roll was then wound onto a spindle inside a custom-made waterproof aluminium box with a Perspex window, allowing the navigator to scroll through the notes and give Moss precise hand signals indicating the salient features of the course – fast left-hander, slow right-hand hairpin, hump-back bridge, railway crossing, and so on – as they went along. They practised wheel-changing and, with the help of the racing team’s mechanics, familiarised themselves with any simple mechanical problems they might have to deal with on the long stretches between the Mercedes pits set up in Ravenna, Pescara, Rome, Florence and Bologna, at roughly 250-kilometre intervals. Both accustomed to late nights in their normal lives, but knowing they would be starting the race at daybreak, they spent the week before the race getting used to going to bed early and rising before dawn.
Their car for the race was given the number 722, reflecting their starting time: twenty-two minutes past seven in the morning, making them among the last of the 521 starters, the slowest of which – including tiny Fiat 500s, Citroën 2CVs and Renault 4CVs – had set off first, leaving at one-minute intervals from nine o’clock the previous evening. In just over ten hours Moss and Jenkinson would cover almost a thousand miles of closed public roads from Brescia to Rome and back, taking in Verona, Ferrara, Ravenna, Rimini, Pescara, Rome, Siena, Florence, Bologna, Parma, Cremona and Mantua, crossing arid plains at 170mph and sliding around hairpins on the Radicofani, Futa and Raticosa passes, eight cylinders roaring as they sped past unprotected crowds in city centres and tiny villages, leaving cathedrals, castles and country churches in
their rear-view mirrors.
The day was not without incident. Moss misjudged a bend in the centre of Padua, bouncing off the straw bales and allowing the pursuing Castellotti in his Ferrari to pass them. But the Italian was overdoing it and had destroyed his car before half-distance. Thereafter they were unchallenged by anything other than Moss’s desire to complete the difficult 115km section through the Apennines from Florence to Bologna, taking in the Futa and Raticosa passes, in under an hour. Once that was accomplished, and they had come safely through the final fast, flat sections into Brescia, they were able to savour their triumph. After Jenkinson had caught his breath and washed the oil and dust from his face, he sat down that night with pen and paper to write a first-hand account of the adventure, rich in detail and emotion, which he put in an envelope and posted off to his magazine in London, creating an instant and enduring classic of sporting journalism.
Moss had become only the second non-Italian to win the race in its proper incarnation, after Rudolf Caracciola in 1931, also in a Mercedes. How should posterity rank his feat? Ascari, Castellotti and Taruffi each won the race – in 1954, 1956 and 1957 respectively – with no passenger alongside to give instructions on the hazards immediately ahead. Perhaps, as Italians, they enjoyed the benefit of greater familiarity with the roads of their home country, but their achievements were also extraordinary. And it might be remembered that Fangio, driving alone in 1955 in another 300SLR, finished in second place, thirty-two minutes behind Moss, despite experiencing engine problems as early as Pescara and running the final portion of the race on seven of the car’s eight cylinders. Moss was also fortunate in that this was a rare edition of the Mille Miglia not to be affected by rain. On 1 May 1955, every one of the 992 miles was bone-dry. A year earlier, Ascari had faced terrible weather from start to finish.
Moss and Jenkinson would be unable to win it again. In 1956 rain came down hard from the start and they were lucky to escape when their Maserati 350S slid wide on the wet road, smashed through a stone wall and was prevented from tumbling down a 400ft drop only when its progress was arrested by a tree. A year later they were thwarted when the brake pedal on their Maserati 450S – a car with which they believed they could challenge their own record – snapped off when Moss tried to slow the car from 130mph only 8 miles out of Brescia, forcing him to use all his skill in bringing the car safely to a halt. They had been racing for barely five minutes.
In that 1957 race the Spanish nobleman Alfonso de Portago and his navigator Ed Nelson were killed in their works Ferrari when a tyre burst at high speed as they approached the village of Guidizzolo, taking nine roadside spectators, including five children, with them. The wrath of motor racing’s critics – particularly in the Vatican – erupted and the 30-year-old event disappeared from the calendar. ‘The most dangerous race ever held,’ Moss called it, ‘but the most exhilarating to win.’
He had entered the Mille Miglia six times and finished only once, but his record of 10 hours 7 minutes and 48 seconds – at an average of 97.95mph – would stand in perpetuity. In 1995, the year before Jenkinson’s death at the age of seventy-five, there were few dry eyes at Goodwood as the two men were reunited in the 300SLR bearing the number 722, buffed up and sent over from the Mercedes museum in Stuttgart for a run-out at the Festival of Speed. And so venerated was the 1955 victory that, many years later, exact replicas of Jenkinson’s waterproof aluminium box, containing reproductions of his pace notes on a hand-wound roller, with a certificate of authenticity signed by Moss, were manufactured by Stirling Moss Ltd, in a limited edition, priced at £1,395 each.
CHAPTER 28 LE MANS
As he stood next to Pierre Levegh’s coffin in the church of Saint-Honoré d’Eylau in central Paris, five days after a crash that had killed more than eighty spectators, Moss may have reflected on the reasons why he had never enjoyed the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Although the race attracted enormous worldwide attention, the need to drive at less than ten-tenths in order to preserve highly stressed machinery over such a long duration made it a bore. Equally tiresome were the hours between stints, when the co-driver was at the wheel. More pertinently this day, as he stood behind Fangio in the church, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and funeral tie in homage to a man who had been so briefly their teammate, their presence underlined the special factors that made the race inherently hazardous.
The catastrophe of 1955 had been made possible by the mix of cars, big and small, sharing the circuit, creating a danger compounded by the different levels of ability among more than a hundred drivers, from Grand Prix champions to inexperienced amateurs. You’re travelling at a hundred and seventy in what amounts to a Formula 1 machine disguised as a sports car, coming up behind a little 750cc Panhard doing barely ninety, driven by someone you’ve never heard of, and you’re about to overtake him in the braking zone at the end of the three-mile straight. Has he glanced in his mirrors before turning in? Does he even know you’re there? And in the hours between nightfall and dawn it was worse. Those were the special dangers of Le Mans.
Even before the start in 1955 Moss had a collision during practice with a tiny French DB while leaving the pits on the narrow straight opposite the grandstands. Two people were knocked down: one of them was Jean Behra, who suffered a bang on the head and leg injuries that kept him out of the race.
But the 24 Hours was one of the year’s most important events, in terms of publicity and commercial value, and he made sure he was ready for it. Some drivers took a light-hearted approach to the famous Le Mans start, which required them to run across the track and jump into their cars; not Moss, who had been a schoolboy athlete and prepared himself for the short sprint, as well as for the business of not wasting a second in opening and closing the door and firing up the engine. As a result, he was almost always away before the rest of the field, with a clear track ahead and the chance to build a cushion over pursuers who were sorting themselves out in a high-speed traffic jam. ‘Those starts were very important,’ he said. ‘No one was going to hit you if you got away in front, whereas you can be back a few places and some other idiot will do something and suddenly you’re in the middle of the accident.’
He raced there for the Jaguar team every year between 1951 and 1954. On the first occasion, in a brand-new C-type, on a shake-down run before official practice began, he discovered what it was like to do 140mph in regular traffic down the route nationale that would become the Mulsanne Straight a day later. The best performance of the four came in 1953, when he and his co-driver, Peter Walker, led from the start and were only relegated to second at the finish, behind another works C-type, by the several lengthy pit stops needed to clear what was eventually diagnosed as a blocked fuel filter.
In 1955 he and Fangio were on their way to victory in the Mercedes 300SLR, holding an untroubled two-lap lead with fourteen hours to go. But much earlier, only two and a half hours into the race, Levegh’s sister car had crashed into the crowd opposite the pits, with terrible consequences. A wealthy 49-year-old French sportsman whose real name was Pierre Bouillin, Levegh had been invited to join the team in sentimental recognition of his celebrated near miss in 1952, when he tried to drive the entire race solo in his Talbot-Lago but missed a gear change – probably through exhaustion – and broke his engine while leading with only an hour to run, handing the victory to the German team. Now his dead body was one of many in the worst disaster in the history of motor racing.
As ambulances came and went opposite the pits, ferrying away the dead and injured, the race went on, statements over the public-address system skirting around the scale of the calamity in order to avoid a panic among the crowd of more than a quarter of a million, and keeping the entrances and exits open for the emergency services. But at two o’clock in the morning, after much discussion among the Mercedes directors, the order arrived from Stuttgart to withdraw. As soon as the cars and pit equipment had been packed into the team’s lorries, all the personnel – management, drivers, mechanics, guests – left the circuit, the
lorries heading for Stuttgart, the drivers towards the team’s hotel in Alençon. At half past ten that morning, as the race went on to its conclusion, a memorial service for the dead began at the cathedral in Le Mans.
Moss felt strongly that the unilateral withdrawal was a mistake. What difference would it make? Nothing would bring the dead back; in half a century of motor racing, nothing had ever brought back a dead driver or spectator. And he and Fangio were on course for victory in a hugely important race that, as fate would have it, neither man would ever win. Hawthorn, whose entry into the pit lane in his works Jaguar D-type had begun the sequence of events leading up to the accident, went on to take the victory – along with his co-driver, Ivor Bueb – and was much criticised when newspaper photographs showed him smiling and drinking champagne as he sat on the car afterwards, accepting the congratulations.
He had not, of course, been impervious to the tragedy in which he had played a part, but this was motor racing in the 1950s, when a race was run to the finish and casualties were accepted as collateral damage. But no one had ever been required to find the correct reaction to a catastrophe on this scale.
Forensic attempts to establish a definitive cause of the accident, and to attach blame to one party or another, went on for decades. Hawthorn had overtaken Lance Macklin’s Austin Healey as they came towards the pits, doing perhaps 150mph to the smaller car’s 120. Then, having overtaken on the left of the narrow road, he cut across in front of the Austin Healey and slowed, using his car’s powerful disc brakes, to enter the pit lane on the right. Macklin jammed on his less efficient drum brakes in response, skidded as his wheels locked and steered left to avoid hitting the rear of the Jaguar, which stopped safely at its pit. That put the Austin Healey in the path of Levegh, whose Mercedes, running at close to top speed, was launched off the back of the British car like a rocket from a ramp. It hit the bank, somersaulted in the air, came down on a concrete wall, disintegrated and exploded, its blazing components hurled through the crowd filling the enclosure on the other side of the wall, scything down men, women and children in their dozens.
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