Obituary: Sir Stirling Moss 1929-2020

In that time he famously never won the Formula 1 Driver’s title or Le Mans 24 Hours. Instead he won 16 World Championship Grands Prix, seven RAC Tourist Trophies, an unprecedented 10 BRDC Gold Stars and in 1955 the fastest Mille Miglia that would ever be run. He also won the Sebring 12 Hours, the Targa Florio and the Nurburgring 1,000kms (four times). He was the first person to win a World Championship Grand Prix in a Lotus and his drive to victory in the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix, in an entirely outgunned private Lotus 18, is widely regarded as one of the finest achievements in the history of Grand Prix racing.

Moss was runner-up in the F1 World Championship four years running in the 1950s including losing by a single point to Mike Hawthorn in 1958. This despite winning four races that season compared to Hawthorn’s one, and then only because he helped persuade officials not to disqualify Hawthorn from the Portuguese Grand Prix.

In addition Moss was a prolific and successful saloon car racer, a highly competent rally driver (he came second in the 1952 Monte Carlo rally) and serial speed record breaker. Most notably, in 1957, he broke five class international Class F records driving the MG EX181 at Bonneville at over 245mph.

Perhaps the single most extraordinary statistic of his career is that he won over 56 per cent of the races he finished. So if you were in a race with him, you knew that if his car didn’t break, second was likely to be the best available result.

Tony Brooks, probably the greatest driver alive today from the Moss era describes him as: "The greatest team-mate I ever had. Whereas others like me and even Fangio would take their time to work out the best way to attack a race, Stirling was gone. He loved to lead, build a gap and completely demoralise the opposition. The biggest difference between him and me was that he was happy in that area just outside the envelope whereas I always drove within myself and kept something back. And I think the biggest tribute I can pay to his talent is to point out that, despite living on or often over the edge, hardly any of his accidents were ever caused by driver error."

But accidents he did have, notably at Castle Combe in 1953 when his Cooper-JAP was hit by Tony Rolt’s Connaught, Moss being ejected in the ensuing crash and breaking a shoulder. More seriously at Spa in the tragic 1960 Belgian Grand Prix that claimed the lives of Chris Bristow and Alan Stacey and ended the career of Mike Taylor, a wheel came off his Lotus 18 at the flat out Burnenville curve, throwing Moss from the car once more, breaking both his legs and crushing three vertebrae in his back.

Within two months Moss’ immense fitness and strength saw him able to race again, but his accident at Goodwood on 23 April 1962 when, for reasons still unknown, his Lotus 18/21 left the track at St Mary’s, called an end to his full time professional career. His visible injuries included a broken left leg and ankle, a broken left arm a crushed cheekbone and displaced eye socket. But the damage to his brain left him in a coma for a month and paralysed down one side of his body for six. As soon as he was fit enough to drive again, he tested a Lotus sports car at Goodwood but concluded his old instincts had left him and retired from the sport, a decision he would later regret.

Moss continued to race in occasional guest appearances and briefly returned to full time competition in 1980-81 in an Audi touring car, sharing first with Richard Lloyd and then Martin Brundle, but in the latter years he increasingly turned his attention to historic racing, finally retiring after qualifying his beloved OSCA for a support race at Le Mans in 2011: he was 81.

But it is Goodwood that book-ended his professional career: his debut at the Sussex circuit came the day after his 19^th birthday and was only the second race meeting he’d attended, the first at anything recognisable as a racetrack today. Driving a Cooper-JAP MkII he finished half a lap clear of the field. He took part in a further 56 races at Goodwood over the next 14 years, finishing 46 and winning 21. Of those 46 races he failed to make the podium on just 12 occasions. In this time he won races for Cooper, HWM, Kieft, Maserati, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Lotus and Ferrari in formulae as disparate as 500cc F3, F1 and sports car racing.

Four of his seven Tourist Trophy wins were claimed at Goodwood, two in Aston Martin DBR1s, two in Ferrari 250 SWBs. And anyone doubting that Moss was still getting better at the time of his career-ending encounter with the bank at St Mary’s should consider that in his last three full seasons he raced at Goodwood 11 times, by this stage against the world’s greatest drivers, won seven of the races and missed the podium (by a single place) just once.

As a person, Stirling Moss was as unreconstructed as they come, once describing his life as one of ‘racing cars and chasing women’, yet for the last 40 years of his life was blissfully happily married to Lady Susie Moss, who was his constant companion and business partner and who did so much to preserve the Stirling Moss brand over the years. They had a son together, Elliot, (Stirling already had a daughter, Allison, from a brief earlier marriage to Elaine Barbarino) and lived in the house in Mayfair Stirling had bought as a literal bombsite after WW2 and converted into one of the most high tech residences in London. It was down the lift shaft of this house that an 80-year-old Stirling fell in 2010, smashing his ankles and damaging his back again. To everyone’s astonishment he not only recovered but raced again. They also owned homes in Florida and Arizona.

To strangers, Stirling could seem brusque and at times little less than rude, though those who got to know him would soon realise this was simply a coping mechanism for the shyness that stayed with him all his life. That said he suffered fools not at all, was often impatient and could be sharp-tongued with those he felt had let him down, often in quite trivial ways.

Then again, he was also perhaps unique in having achieved such greatness in his professional life seemingly without acquiring the smallest ego in his personal life. Even at the height of his fame when he was known alternately as the ‘Boy Wonder’ or ‘Mr Motor Racing’ anyone could contact him simply by looking him up in the telephone book. So long as you shared a passion, be it for racing or his beloved gadgets, he’d talk to you for as long as you liked whoever you were. He was always solicitous in the attention he gave to his millions of fans wherever in the world he might find them.

If there was a side of Sir Stirling Moss that was perhaps more rarely seen in public, it was his sense of humour that remained intact, effervescent and schoolboy in nature to his final days. Away from the voice recorders and cameras, Moss could often be found with close friends, speechless with laughter, tears running down his face at some ribald joke he’d just heard.

Perhaps the truest measure of Stirling Moss the racing driver can be gained from those who wanted to work with him. Among many others, Moss drove for Porsche, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin, Lotus, Maserati, Vanwall and, via the inestimable Rob Walker, Ferrari too. Indeed waiting patiently in the paddock for him that fateful day at Goodwood in 1962 was a brand new 250 GTO, and the combination would have been the stuff of legend.

That said, Moss did acknowledge that, while he felt his talent and supreme natural fitness would have seen him able to race competitively into the mid-1970s, such were the hazards of racing in this era that the Goodwood accident may well actually have saved his life.

Brooks goes further: "Stirling was the kind of racer who would never give up and I have often wondered what would have happened to him had his accident at Goodwood in ’62 not forced him to retire. And I have no doubt that crash saved his life."

But his final words on the subject of Moss are perhaps more telling still: "You know we were team-mates at Aston Martin and Vanwall and then friends for decades thereafter. And in all that time, we’ve never had an argument. How many team-mates can say that?"

The racing world is an immeasurably poorer place without Stirling Moss. Unquestionably England’s greatest racing driver until Lewis Hamilton came to challenge that status, one of the finest sportsmen of any kind and from any era anywhere in the world, his legacy will live on long after the rest of us are turned to dust.

And as for his time at Goodwood, take the 1959 Tourist Trophy race as just a vignette of what he could do here. In an outdated Aston Martin DBR1, he took the start against full works teams from Ferrari and Porsche. He was first into the first corner and disappeared. Then, when his car caught fire in the pits with team-mate Roy Salvadori in situ, he took over the sister car of Carroll Shelby and Jack Fairman, swept past the leading Porsche and hammered home to victory driving solo, gifting Aston Martin its first, and to date only, World Sports Car Championship. He’d driven for three quarters of the six-hour race, something regulations would never allow today.

There will never be another Stirling Moss, nor anyone remotely like him. How lucky are those of us at Goodwood to have seen him at any age in his Herbert Johnson helmet with his distinctive straight-armed driving style, racing at one of his very favourite circuits, doing what he always did best.