Stirling Moss 1929-2020
‘The greatest driver never to become world champion’ was a well-meaning epithet, but it damned him ever so slightly with faint praise. ‘The greatest all-rounder’ is more telling. Stirling Moss, who died on Sunday aged 90, could drive any car flat-out, anywhere and in any conditions, for as long as it took to win – a fraction more than 40% of his 520-plus race starts resulted in victory – or to fail with honour.
He prevailed in front-engined, rear-engined and (uniquely) four-wheel-drive Formula 1 cars, in well-padded saloons and skin-and-bone 500cc Formula 3s, and in glamorous GTs and sensuous sports-racers. His relaxed style and ferocious competitive instinct extracted the maximum from them all. He won everything from three-lap sprints to 1000 miles against the clock, on airfield tracks and public-road courses, street circuits and gravel Alpine passes.
If ever the curtains were drawn to reveal a rainy race day, everybody knew that Moss would be unbeatable. And why anybody else bothered to turn up at Oulton Park when he was competing there – 12 wins from 17 starts, including eight in succession from 1956 to 1961 – escapes this writer.
Always a charger, Moss was comfortable running at the front, calmly managing any size of gap – witness his sensational victory in the 1958 Argentinian Grand Prix on down-to-the-canvas Continentals – but in his gut he preferred a chase or a tear-up. This top dog relished being the underdog.
In early 1962, he dumped his Lotus for a Cooper simply because pundits had irked him by blithely stating that the Lotus was perfectly suited to the upcoming venue: Australia’s Warwick Farm. (Yes, he still won.) Only Tazio Nuvolari, Moss’s boyhood hero, could match him for notable defeats of superior machinery. Both men lived to race and raced to live. That’s why Moss never wavered. He revelled in beating the odds, and recorded numerous fantastic recovery drives because of it. Win or lose, he always added to his allure.
Moss was a genuine hero – to sturdy men in Worsted suits and brogues, to their fluttery partners in twinsets and, be warned, their coquettish daughters in floral print, but most of all to throngs of gawping, autograph-hunting schoolboys in caps whose admiration of him survived into middle age and beyond. When Britain was still just about great, Moss was an embodiment of its spirit: professional yet sporting, chivalric but cheeky. (Was that wave to a compliant backmarker a thank you or plain showing-off? Both, probably.)
A restless and successful ambassador, he spread the speed from Ste Jovite in Quebec to Invercargill on New Zealand’s South Island; he did so via Caracas, Nassau, Aintree, Vila Real, Casablanca, Kyalami and Melbourne’s Albert Park. Only once did he make intentional contact with another competing car, and only once did he knowingly ‘cheat’, theatrically waggling a column gearchange while surreptitiously flicking the overdrive switch to dupe a scrutineer into thinking that his rally car still had a full complement of gears, as required by the regulations.
From the teenager with the dark, wavy hair and the twinkle in his eye to the prematurely bald twentysomething (still with a twinkle in his eye), Moss was a force to be reckoned with, and – his unalloyed deference to Juan Manuel Fangio (in single-seaters at least) notwithstanding – was the man to beat for the majority of his career.
His was a ‘natural’ talent – he won a trophy at his first
