The Boy

by Richard Williams

  Did he believe in God? ‘Yes, I do. I’m not religious, though.’ Did he ever have a thought of that kind, in a moment of fear, that he wanted to pray or that he was close to God? ‘No. Because invariably when you have an accident, you’ve got so much to think about. Self-preservation comes before everything. But I must admit that if I think about it now, I trust that God is with me and helping me.

  ‘I’m religious,’ he continued, ‘in that I think there’s a God. I’m not religious in that I don’t believe in going to church. I had too much of it thrust down my throat when I was at school. I don’t feel that I’m any better going to church and standing up singing hymns or praying with a lot of other people than I am on my own.’

  (Thirty years later, when asked about his religious beliefs, Ayrton Senna would say: ‘If I go to church, I go on my own and I like to be there alone. I find more peace that way.’)

  They talked about money. Did he care about it? ‘A fair amount.’ Did he save it against the time when he’d have to retire? ‘Yes, I do. Perhaps too much. Less than I did a year ago.’ Was he a rich man? ‘I suppose you’d say I’m fairly prosperous. I’ve got expensive tastes, yes. There are quite a lot of things I want that I haven’t got. But I prefer it that way. I don’t think I’d like to have everything I want. I find certain things in life frustrating, and I think that would increase the frustration. I like taking a pretty girl out. I like a luxurious flat. Funnily enough, cars don’t worry me too much.’

  If he were to stop racing, what might replace it? He didn’t know, but it wouldn’t be what people usually meant by retirement. ‘I can’t relax. I don’t want to relax. I think my friends find it rather annoying at times. I can’t just go and lie on a beach and get some sun. I have to be spear-fishing or water-skiing or something like that.’

  Racing drivers were popularly thought of as people who lived it up. Did he? ‘Well, this is a complete change-around. When I started racing, I was much more of a hermit. Right up until very recently I took it easy for a few days before a race. I didn’t go out and so on. What good did it do me? I didn’t get the world championship or anything else. So I suddenly thought, let’s live it up a bit. Now this year I have been. I’ve been out dancing – not the night before a race, but up till a couple of nights before – I’ve been really swinging it and having a lot of fun and it doesn’t seem to have yet affected my driving, and my personal and social life is a lot more fun.’

  And then, towards the very end of the half-hour interview, Freeman arrived at the questions to which everything else seemed to have been an overture. ‘How much have you been affected by the two very heavy blows you’ve had recently? You’ve lost your wife and you’ve lost your British driving licence, in very quick succession. Did this upset you greatly?’

  Guests on Face to Face were never given the questions before the cameras started turning. When Aristotle Onassis demanded advance notice, he was refused and did not appear. Moss must have guessed he would be asked about these issues, and his response was instant and straightforward.

  ‘Well, actually,’ he replied, ‘I had trouble in business and other things – and they were all dwarfed by the trouble I had with my wife. It did upset me very much at the time, yes. Now I try to take the view that it’s no good worrying about it. My wife has a life to lead and so have I. And if I worried, it would be very bad for my racing, in other words for my life, and that’s why I’m trying to push it to the back of my mind.’

  Freeman: ‘This leads me to ask a very candid question indeed: are you fit to be married while still in active racing?’

  Moss: ‘Not really. It’s very difficult for the wife, it’s very difficult for the husband. The last thing you want is a woman who’s worrying you. My wife didn’t. She was very good that way. But I think it’s difficult for a woman not to, and you’re conscious obviously of the fact that she should be and is, obviously, worried. Also I would like children and it’s bad in racing to have children because it must slow you up a bit – I think, anyway. And if you slow up a little bit, you drop an awful long way back. And if you’re a professional racing driver, you’re in there to win. Otherwise you should be doing something else.’

  Could he marry a woman who said she’d marry him if he gave up racing? ‘Yes, I think it would be possible. But there again I must qualify it: I don’t know that it would be the answer. Because to give up something that is so much of your life and means so much to you – you can’t say it means as much to your wife because it’s so different – but something that means so much, I don’t I know if that would work. It’s too difficult a problem. It’s something you have to take when it comes up. I don’t really think that if I’d stopped racing it would have saved my marriage.’

  And, yes, the other heavy blow: did he feel he should have lost his driving licence? ‘I’m satisfied in my own mind that it should not have been taken away. If my name had been John Smith, it wouldn’t have been taken away.’ But his name was Stirling Moss.

  CHAPTER 48 SHUNT

  ‘Shunt. Back. Legs. Nose. Bruises. Bugger.’ That, recorded in his diary, was his summary of the accident that blighted 1960, a season that might have seen him finally fulfilling his ultimate ambition. The year had started well, with sports car wins in a Maserati in the Cuban Grand Prix and, co-driving with Dan Gurney, the Nürburgring 1,000kms. Rob Walker’s Cooper-Climax, which had won two of the last three Grands Prix of the preceding season, took him to third place in the Argentinian Grand Prix and second in the Glover Trophy at Goodwood, outpaced on both occasions by Innes Ireland in Colin Chapman’s Lotus 18. The Cooper was quickly abandoned when Walker persuaded Chapman to sell him one of the new machines, which had immediately raised the standards of performance for a lightweight rear-engined car.

  That performance came at the cost of a certain fragility, but no such problems were evident as Moss, in his first outing in the car, drove to a superb victory at Monaco, receiving the trophy from the hands of Princess Grace after thrashing the more powerful but far less nimble front-engined Ferraris and BRMs, as well as the works Lotuses and Coopers. The Lotus 18 was, he thought, an extremely sensitive car but highly responsive to his touch: ‘A real driver’s car, it rewarded meticulous precision and subtle chassis adjustments.’

  During the practice sessions he had accepted an invitation to try the Scarab, a front-engined car built by the young Woolworth’s heir Lance Reventlow, whom he had met at one of the Nassau Speed Weeks, and who was trying to launch an American F1 team with himself as one of the drivers. When Moss went out, a best time nine seconds slower around Monaco than he had recorded in his Lotus persuaded him – and probably Reventlow, too – that the day of the grand prix car with its engine at the front was well and truly over.

  A week later, for the first time since the accident at Monza in 1957, he really scared himself. This was among the dunes of Zandvoort during the Dutch GP, in the same Lotus. He was lying second, close behind Jack Brabham’s Cooper, when the Australian dislodged a stone slab which Moss ran over, bursting a front tyre and sending him heading towards a wood at 120mph. ‘I thought I’d had it. I thought this is my lot, I’m going straight into the woods. But I managed to regain control in time or the car came back – anyway, something happened – and it was all right. I felt frightened while it was happening but immediately after I didn’t get the feeling of fear because I had something else to think about. The tyre was burst, my second place was lost, I had to get back to the pits, and so on.’ Rejoining the race in tenth place, he fought back to finish fourth.

  Much worse was to come a fortnight later at Spa when the left rear wheel came off the Lotus at 140mph during a practice lap, the car crunching into an earth bank at barely reduced speed. That night he was flown back to St Thomas’s Hospital in London, where it was discovered that he had broken both legs and crushed three vertebrae. He was astonished when his consultant had him on his feet the next day, cutting away the head-to-toe plaster cast and getting him standing for a few seconds to keep t
he muscles in shape. Even more amazingly to the general public, he was racing again seven weeks later, winning a sports car race at Karlskoga in Sweden in a Lotus 19 before returning to Formula 1 a week later, having missed only the Grands Prix in France and Britain as well as the Belgian round.

  Walker had bought a new Lotus 18 to replace the Spa wreck in time for the Portuguese Grand Prix. Without telling Moss, he would go to the expense of buying new drive shafts and stub axles – the bits that tended to break on Lotuses, sending the wheels flying off – after every race, as a precaution against that notorious fragility. But at Oporto, Moss spun the car in the closing stages and was disqualified for push-starting it on the pavement against the direction of the race – the very thing for which he had successfully pleaded on Mike Hawthorn’s behalf at the same circuit two years earlier.

  This time it had no bearing on the championship. He had missed too many races, a third of the season, although he finished it off with a good win in the US Grand Prix at Riverside in California, beating Ireland’s works Lotus home by forty seconds. But Brabham was the champion for a second time.

  CHAPTER 49 RADIO ON

  Rob Walker also entered Moss for races in other categories in cars bearing his colours. In 1960 there was a dumpy little Porsche Formula 2 machine, on loan from the German company and developed from their sports cars. After Alf Francis had removed the imprecise gear-change mechanism and replaced it with one left over from Moss’s old Maserati 250F, the Porsche was used to win the Aintree 200, the Austrian Grand Prix, the Cape Grand Prix and the South African Grand Prix.

  There were also two almost identical Ferrari 250GT Berlinettas, the short-wheelbase model which became the forerunner of the legendary 250GTO. With the first of them, owned by the stockbroker Dick Wilkins but run by Walker, Moss won the 1960 Tourist Trophy at Goodwood in a car that was ready for normal use on the road.

  His victory was so comfortable that he was able to switch on the car’s radio and tune in to the BBC’s live commentary. His pit signals were telling him how he was doing, but on the radio he could listen to Raymond Baxter giving updates on the other competitors. ‘That was quite interesting. With the helmet I wore then, I could still hear – and it’s not a noisy car, it was a very quiet car, relative to racing cars, so I could keep up with what was going on right through the race.’ A telegram arrived from Modena, offering Enzo Ferrari’s congratulations. A year later, driving the second Walker-run 250GT SWB, Moss held off a determined assault from Mike Parkes in a similar car entered by the official UK Ferrari dealership.

  Following Aston Martin’s withdrawal from sports car racing, Moss was also back in the cockpit of a Maserati. The company had produced a new design, the Tipo 60/61, with a complex frame made of a seemingly infinite number of slender alloy tubes welded together, thus earning the car its nickname: the Birdcage. Maserati could no longer afford to run an official factory team, so the new cars were designed by Giulio Alfieri to be purchased and run by private owners. They had to be competitive with the new lightweight sports cars from Cooper and Lotus, but also rugged enough for the classic endurance races.

  Moss was invited to Modena to test the prototype, a two-litre Tipo 60. He liked its handling and the power from its four-cylinder engine, and took it to Rouen in July 1959 for its first race, easily beating the English cars. He also suggested that a larger engine could be fitted to compete in the world championship, then restricted to three litres. When potential US purchasers also made similar requests, the engine was stretched to 2.9 litres.

  Known in that form as the Tipo 61, the works-prepared car was entrusted to a young American wheeler-dealer named Lloyd ‘Lucky’ Casner, who had used backing from the Goodyear tyre company to put together a team he called Camoradi, an Italian-sounding name formed from the first two letters of each word of Casner Motor Racing Division. In post-revolutionary Havana at the start of 1960, Moss drove the white and blue car to victory in the Grand Prix of Freedom despite having to sit on a broken seat for much of the race. At Sebring, he and Dan Gurney were leading the 12 Hours by a distance when the final drive failed with a third of the race left.

  They had better luck at the Nürburgring, where they won the 1,000kms – Moss for the third year in a row – and vanquished the works Ferrari team with a tremendous comeback following repairs to a broken oil pipe. Both drivers took advantage of the rain that fell throughout the race, Gurney matching Moss as they exploited their skills in the mist-shrouded Eifel mountains. Next Casner wanted Moss to drive a streamlined version of the car at Le Mans, but was unable to find the $5,000 (about £1,200) the driver was asking.

  The short-wheelbase 250GT and the Tipo 61 Birdcage were two of the cars whose reputations Moss did much to create. Both became highly prized by collectors of historic machinery, and in the decades that followed it was impossible to glimpse either of them without summoning the image of his figure at the wheel, putting his mature virtuosity on display and calmly outpacing the field on the way to yet another victory.

  With a wave from the cockpit of Rob Walker’s Lotus 18 on the Monaco harbour front in 1961, Moss acknowledges the chequered flag at the end of one of the greatest drives of his career (AP).

  CHAPTER 50 MASTERCLASS

  Moss was thirty-one when the 1961 season began, the most experienced driver in Formula 1 and by common consent the best. He had raced and won against three generations of drivers: Fangio’s, his own and now a bunch of younger men, of whom the Scottish farmer Jim Clark looked the most gifted. Four times Moss had been runner-up in the drivers’ championship, and twice third. Surely his bad luck could no longer continue to deny him the title he deserved.

  Standing in his way was his old nemesis, Enzo Ferrari. This was a season in which the rules changed. Out went the 2.5-litre cars of the past seven years. The new Formula 1 was for cars with unsupercharged 1.5-litre engines, the same as the old Formula 2. Ferrari had used the previous seasons to develop their smaller single-seater with a new V6 engine, whereas their British rivals, unwisely believing that the unwelcome change of regulations could be overturned, had been left behind. The new Dino 156, with a distinctive twin-nostrilled snout, would prove immediately to be the fastest car in the field by a good margin. Everyone else would be trailing in the wake of the car that quickly became known as the Sharknose. When an Italian rookie, Giancarlo Baghetti, was given one of them for the non-championship Syracuse Grand Prix, an hors d’oeuvre to the season, he outpaced the Lotuses of Moss and Clark, the Porsches of Dan Gurney and Jo Bonnier, the Coopers of Jack Brabham and Bruce McLaren, and the BRMs of Tony Brooks and Graham Hill. Then Baghetti did it again in Naples, against a less formidable field. The Sharknose had sent out a warning.

  But the first race of the world championship season was at Monaco, where Moss was the master. He called it ‘a real drivers’ circuit, where skill can make up for technical deficiencies’. In his underpowered four-cylinder Lotus-Climax he started from pole position and produced a masterclass, taking the lead on the fourteenth lap and using everything he had to stay ahead of the pursuing red cars of Richie Ginther, Phil Hill and Wolfgang von Trips, all unable to profit from the extra thirty horsepower of their engines on the tight 1.9-mile circuit, where Moss’s precision and concentration paid dividends. He had removed the side panels from the car to provide extra ventilation on a baking afternoon, thus incidentally allowing spectators a clearer sight of him in action.

  Later he would consider it to be the greatest victory of his career. He had driven, he thought, ninety of those 100 laps flat out – ‘at ten-tenths’, as he would say. It was the equivalent of asking a track athlete to run a mile at the speed of a sprinter. He had expected the Ferraris, with their superior power, to come breezing past him in the closing stages. They attacked him in relays, but somehow he stayed out of reach, finishing three and a half seconds ahead of an exhausted Ginther.

  This two-hour demonstration of genius would be repeated three months later, in the German Grand Prix. In the meantime, the Ferr
aris had made the most of their power advantage to sweep the board at Zandvoort, Spa, Reims and Aintree, but at the fourteen-mile Nürburgring, with its 174 corners and 1,000 feet of elevation change, Moss’s brilliance and racecraft would once again come into their own. In a day of changeable weather in the Eifel mountains, he decided to use Dunlop’s new rain tyres; this was against the advice of the company’s own technicians, who told him they would not last in the mixed conditions. He opted to take the chance, and once Jack Brabham – his Cooper fitted with the new powerful V8 Coventry Climax engine – had left the road early in the first lap, Moss led the rest of the race, increasingly heavy rain in the closing stages helping him to preserve the tyres and fend off the Ferraris of von Trips and Hill.

  There was also an element of psychology involved: his reputation for brilliance in bad weather made his rivals reluctant to try to match his speed on a wet track. ‘I didn’t like the wet,’ he told the author Peter Manso. ‘Everybody thought that I did. I wasn’t going to broadcast it.’ He might not have liked it, but he was certainly its master. The heaviest traffic he saw all day at the Nürburgring, he said later, was on the autobahn heading for the airport at Düsseldorf that night.

  In his whole career, he once remarked, he had never achieved a perfect lap. But the joy, as he explained to Ken Purdy during their collaboration on the book All But My Life, came in trying. ‘You go through a corner absolutely flat out. Right on the ragged edge, but absolutely in control, on your own line to an inch, the car just hanging there, the tyres as good as geared to the road, locked to it, and yet you know that if you ask one more mile an hour of the car, if you put another five pounds of side thrust on it, you’ll lose the whole flaming vehicle as surely as if someone had smeared the road with six inches of grease; so you stay just this side of that fraction of extra speed, that fraction of extra weight that could ruin everything, and perhaps kill you to boot, you’re on top of it all, and the exhilaration, the thrill is tremendous, you say to yourself, all right, you bastards, top that one, match it, even, and you feel like a painter who has just put the last brush-stroke on a canvas after years of trying to catch a certain expression – it’s rewarding. And you must grant that it’s not monotonous. No art can be monotonous.’