A fortnight later, with the bigger engine installed, he travelled to the Isle of Man for the Manx Cup over the 3.8-mile circuit in Douglas, the island’s capital. It was his first experience of true road racing, and in a seventy-mile contest for Grand Prix cars he put the Cooper on pole position and was soon leading by such a distance that his father was again signalling him to slow down and save the car. But with victory almost in sight, the magneto drive failed. What the day had taught him, however, was that racing on public roads offered a much more compelling challenge than dicing on a strip of tarmac around the perimeter of an old aerodrome.
CHAPTER 6 VOYAGE TO ITALY
In July 1949, accompanied by two friends, he set off in the Bedford transporter for his first taste of continental racing. His destination was Salò, on the shore of Lake Garda in northern Italy, where Mussolini had led his final attempt to cling on to power only six years earlier. The town was now the base of the 9th Circuito del Garda, a race on local roads running into the hills above the town, and he made his way to the organisers’ headquarters to pay the £50 entry fee.
With the 1000cc engine still fitted and with special long-range fuel tanks slung alongside both sides of the bodywork, the air-cooled, chain-driven Cooper was initially the object of derision from local enthusiasts. They took one look at the funny little machine – one of only four non-Italian entries in a field of thirty-seven – and, having compared it to their own shapely Alfa Romeos and Maseratis, nicknamed it ‘the jukebox’. They were examining it through different eyes after the practice sessions, in which Moss set a time that split Luigi Villoresi and Mario Tadini in the latest works Formula 2 Ferraris, each with twelve cylinders to his two, two litres to his one and getting on for twice his horsepower.
He was discovering a different world, one to which he responded immediately and instinctively. The ten-mile Garda circuit was on public roads, mostly narrow, bounded by walls, banks and ditches. If you went off, you might hit a house or a telegraph pole or tumble down a hillside. On the airfield circuits at home, young drivers could acquire bad habits that were difficult to unlearn in a less forgiving environment. Moss found the new challenge very much to his taste.
The event was organised in two heats and a final. Drawn in the first heat, run over eight laps, Moss finished third, behind Villoresi and Tadini. While the second heat was in progress – won by Count Bruno Sterzi in the third works Ferrari – Moss and his pals cut a hole in the underside of the Cooper and bent the metal out in order to direct cold air on to the magneto, which had been showing signs of overheating.
He began the ten-lap final, the only non-Italian of seventeen starters, by trailing the three Ferraris, following directly behind Sterzi, a wealthy young paper merchant from Milan who had been one of Enzo Ferrari’s first customers. Noting the erratic nature of the Italian’s driving, he watched from a safe distance until Sterzi finally lost control while crossing a set of tram lines, left the road and hit a pole supporting the overhead cables, snapping it in two, before the Ferrari toppled over a drop. The driver was taken to hospital with internal injuries and a broken leg. Moss battled for a while with Clemente Biondetti’s two-litre Maserati and Dorino Serafini’s OSCA until both retired, leaving him to take third place behind the remaining Ferraris and victory in the 1100cc class.
For Moss, the £250 prize was a big step up from the tenner he was getting for a win at Prescott. And during his stay he was introduced to Tazio Nuvolari, the driver alongside whom Enzo Ferrari would one day rank him as the best of all time. Aged fifty-six, still competing occasionally despite the increasing symptoms of the ruined lungs that, combined with a series of strokes, would kill him four years later, the old master had watched Moss’s performance with great interest.
From Italy, Stirling and his friends drove the van back across the Alps and up through France to Reims, where the Cooper was one of three entered in the Coupe des Petites Cylindrées, a race for Formula 2 cars supporting the French Grand Prix. He had negotiated generous starting money of £200; otherwise, this was a fool’s errand. In a hundred-mile race over an ultra-fast road circuit, the little British cars were never going to be able to keep up with the two-litre Ferraris and Gordinis. When Moss’s drive chain broke, he pushed the car more than a kilometre to the pits and a repair was made, only for the magneto to fail again. But he returned to England having breathed the rarefied air of continental competition for the first time, finding himself more than equal to the varied challenges and multiple hazards presented by racing on public roads, and definitely wanting more of it.
CHAPTER 7 ROYAL SILVERSTONE
It was the sight of Moss in a 500cc car that prompted the journalist Gregor Grant, the founding editor of Autosport, to compare him to a pre-war ace when he noted ‘a touch of Rosemeyer’ in the way he tackled a high-speed corner – ‘the same fire and certainty that the car was always under control.’ The Boy’s reputation was growing fast, and at Silverstone in May 1950 he stood in a line of drivers being presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in advance of an afternoon featuring the opening round of the inaugural FIA Formula 1 world championship.
Moss took part in the 500cc event, the day’s supporting attraction. The programme hailed him as ‘likely to become Britain’s star of tomorrow’, but after winning the first of two five-lap heats, cheered on by a crowd of 150,000, he had to give best in the ten-lap final to a Triumph-engined Iota driven by Wing Commander Frank Aikens, a veteran of wartime anti-submarine missions. Third came another English prodigy, the 18-year-old Peter Collins. Second place was worth £40, plus £20 for winning the heat.
The big race, carrying the honorary title of the Grand Prix d’Europe, was a clean sweep for the Alfa Romeo team, led by Nino Farina, who took the £500 first prize and the first step on his path to becoming the inaugural world champion. Their Majesties were taken round the circuit to watch the race from a variety of vantage points. When it was all over, many spectators found themselves held up for several hours while inching their way out of the car parks and through the jammed lanes around the circuit, a Silverstone experience with which several future generations would become familiar.
During the meeting Stirling also encountered Nuvolari again, and they were photographed together: a silver-haired man in a tweed jacket, shirt and tie standing next to a 19-year-old boy with a shock of dark, curly hair, wearing zipped white racing overalls with a BRDC badge proudly on his left breast. One legend on his lap of honour, the other busy being born.
His parents travelled with him on his first trip to the Monaco Grand Prix, where he greatly enhanced his reputation with wins in the heat and the final of the 500cc race, under the eyes of Formula 1’s big names. They stayed on to watch the following day’s Grand Prix, won by Fangio’s Alfa.
In June, on the little kidney-shaped track at Brands Hatch in Kent, Stirling entered five races in the Cooper-JAP and won them all. The 500 Club’s committee had helped raise the money to put an asphalt surface on a layout previously used by dirt-track motorcyclists. Each of the races was of only two laps, but five victories in a day was another milestone in Moss’s career, boosting the growth of his reputation.
In the autumn the Cooper was fitted with a more powerful twin-cam Norton engine, which Moss used to beat Raymond Sommer, the French veteran, in the 500cc race at Silverstone’s International Trophy meeting. At the end of the season he was presented with the BRDC’s Gold Star, awarded to the most successful British driver of the year: an extraordinary achievement for a 21-year-old, and the first of ten he would win between 1950 and 1961. Thanks to his results at Lake Garda and Monaco, he was also given the BRDC’s Richard Seaman Trophy, awarded to the British driver with the best results in international competition.
The invitations to drive more powerful machinery were starting to arrive, but 500cc and 1000cc racing would remain on Moss’s schedule even after he had become an established Grand Prix competitor. Prize money was coming his way, and points that counted towards the Gold Star. Ove
r the next four seasons he would drive Norton-engined Coopers and a Kieft to three more wins in the British Grand Prix support race and two victories in the Eifelrennen over the full 14-mile Nürburgring Nordschleife. There would also be a spectacular accident at Castle Combe: while holding off Tony Rolt’s two-litre Connaught in his Cooper, he braked too hard and was hit up the rear, the car throwing him out as it somersaulted, a bone in his shoulder cracking as he landed.
In 1954, his last season with the 500s, a Cooper heavily modified by the engine tuner Francis Beart carried him to six wins from eight races. A final victory at Aintree during the Daily Telegraph Trophy meeting would conclude his adventures in a category that had proved a useful launch pad for the careers of so many young drivers, his own most of all.
Moss in the pits at the 1951 Modena Grand Prix with his HWM teammates John Heath (centre), the company’s co-founder, and Lance Macklin (Rudy Mailander/Revs Institute).
CHAPTER 8 TEAM LEADER
Among those impressed by his talent were John Heath and George Abecassis, two racing drivers who were also the proprietors of Hersham and Walton Motors in Surrey. Their prototype HWM had been raced by Heath in 1949, encouraging them to build a series of three cars with two-litre Alta engines for the 1950 season, to be run as a works team with a squad of drivers in which the two proprietors would be joined by the Old Etonian Lance Macklin, the Belgian jazz trumpeter Johnny Claes and the 20-year-old Stirling Moss.
The new HWMs displayed residual traces of the special-builder’s magpie instincts – they were fitted with Armstrong Siddeley preselector gearboxes and front suspension parts from a Standard 12 saloon – and they were designed to be convertible for racing as sports cars; hence the driver’s seat was offset to the right. But the priority was to enter an ambitious programme of continental Formula 2 races. For Moss, promised 25 per cent of his starting money and winnings, it was a first exciting opportunity to race as part of a works outfit. The team would be transported to the circuits from their base in Walton-on-Thames in a convoy consisting of an ex-army Ford truck, a Fordson furniture van and a trailer carrying their special racing fuel. Their mechanics included Rex Woodgate, who had looked after Stirling’s Cooper the previous season, and a Polish ex-serviceman known as Alf Francis.
On the team’s first outing, at Goodwood on Easter Monday, the cars looked handsome in their light green paintwork and yellow wire wheels but were still not fully sorted or reliable, although Moss managed to finish second in a handicap race. He was lucky to be there at all, since he had been reported by a member of the public for driving his Morris Minor on the road in an unduly flamboyant way, and was fined £15 and given a one-month ban which covered the meeting; he successfully petitioned the RAC, the sport’s governing body in Britain, to allow him to keep his competition licence.
In April the team set off on its European campaign. He was running third in the Prix de Paris at Montlhéry until the engine blew up. In the Rome Grand Prix on the tight circuit around the Baths of Caracalla he was keeping up with the Ferraris of Ascari and Villoresi until a front wheel detached itself when the stub axle broke. At Reims he finished third in the Coupe des Petites Cylindrées behind Ascari and the Gordini of André Simon. Heath and Macklin were fourth and fifth, giving a boost to the team’s morale.
From there they made the long journey down to Puglia, where Formula 1 and Formula 2 cars were competing together in the Bari Grand Prix. To finish third behind the Alfa 158s of Farina and Fangio, and ahead of several F1 cars, was an achievement, although Moss endured the experience of being lapped by Farina with a move of unnecessary brusqueness on the entry to a corner. As a result, the Italian ran wide on the exit, allowing Moss the satisfaction of briefly repassing him as he recovered. When Fangio, sitting behind Farina, also went by Moss, he was laughing broadly at what he’d seen.
A fortnight later they were in Naples, where Moss got the better of Franco Cortese’s Ferrari and was looking a certain winner until he tried to lap Bernardo Taraschi’s Giaur on the outside of a curve, only for the Italian to run wide and knock the HWM into a spin. As the car collided with a tree, Moss’s face was smashed into the rearview mirror and his left knee connected with the dashboard. He managed to extricate himself quickly, fearing a fire, but his knee was broken and so were his top four front teeth. Rex Woodgate set off on foot to find him and carried him back to the pits in his arms. Two weeks later, with his leg out of plaster and wearing a set of false teeth made and installed by his father, Moss was in action once again in the Cooper at Brands Hatch.
Back in the HWM, he finished third in the Circuit de Périgueux, around the streets of the town in the Dordogne, behind two Gordinis, and the team’s season concluded with a return to Lake Garda, where he was chasing the Ferraris of Ascari and Dorino Serafini when a stub axle again broke at high speed, sending a wheel into a garden by the side of the circuit. Back at the pits, Heath told Moss that since it was a wire-spoked Borrani costing £50, he had better go and get it back. The owner of the garden showed him the damage to his wall and declined to surrender the wheel until the driver had gathered enough stones to repair the hole it had made.
Moss would start 1951 as HWM’s designated team leader, with Macklin in support and Heath or Abecassis taking the third of a batch of new pure single-seater cars. His win on Easter Monday at Goodwood sent the team off to Europe in a mood of optimism. A third place in Marseille was followed by fifth among the F1 cars in San Remo and third in the Monza Grand Prix, where he learned how to overcome a power disadvantage by slipstreaming Villoresi’s Ferrari, earning applause from the crowd and congratulations from the Italian. At the Bremgarten circuit in Berne he finished eighth, behind the Alfas and Ferraris but ahead of half a dozen other Formula 1 cars while coping for the final hour of the race with an aeroscreen broken by a stone and then coasting across the line with a silent engine after running out of fuel 300 yards from the chequered flag.
His first continental win for the team came on the triangular 1.5-mile street circuit at Aix-les-Bains, in the second heat of the Circuit du Lac; in the final he took second place behind Rudi Fischer’s Ferrari. Fourth place in Rome with a jammed throttle and a misfire, third at Zandvoort and retirements in Berlin, Rouen and Modena were balanced by wins at home in the Wakefield Trophy on the road circuit at the Curragh in County Kildare, the Madgwick Cup at Goodwood and finally a Formula 2 race at the Winfield aerodrome in the Scottish Borders. But these victories in modest home events were no longer enough.
CHAPTER 9 LIFE LESSONS
With ten days off between races in Bari and Naples in 1950, there were plans to take a short holiday in Capri, where he and Lance Macklin had arranged a rendezvous with the recently crowned Miss Italian Air Force. When she failed to arrive, Macklin had another idea. He told Moss that he could introduce him to Miss France. The only snag was that she was in Monte Carlo. ‘He asked me to take him all the way up there to meet her,’ Macklin remembered. ‘That’s about seven hundred miles. Unfortunately, when we got there Miss France had just left. So we went all the way back to Naples again.’
For a couple of years Macklin became his mentor in the art of living. Ten years older, a wartime naval officer and expert skier, this debonair teammate showed Moss how to widen the scope of his social life, and how, in general, to live up to the popular image of a successful racing driver. The son of the founder of the Invicta and Railton car companies, Macklin had volunteered for the Royal Navy in 1939, aged twenty, and served on gunboats. Once in the world of motor racing, his main priority was meeting girls; it was noted that he never showed too much dismay when his car broke down if it gave him the opportunity to persuade a beautiful woman to spend the rest of the afternoon in his hotel room. Sometimes he got himself into trouble. On one visit to Monaco, Moss noted in his diary the aftermath of a kerfuffle when ‘the bod Macklin clouted’ summoned the police.
Macklin was among those interviewed by Eamonn Andrews when Moss was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1959. ‘I remember t
he first time I tried to follow Stirling round in about the same car,’ he said, ‘and I thought to myself, this fellow certainly doesn’t hang about.’ (‘That’s how I felt about Lance with his girlfriends, I might say,’ Moss interjected.) ‘We raced all over the Continent together – I think he gave me more trouble off the track than on the track. We were both pretty young men in those days and we chased around a bit together.’
At the end of their first season, they entered the 1950 Daily Express Rally, a thousand-mile competition around Britain, sharing the wheel of an Aston Martin DB2 borrowed from the factory, for whom Macklin had been driving in sports car races. They were not classified among the finishers, thanks to messing up the final parking and reversing tests. According to Moss, the whole thing was little more than what he described, using a favourite term, as ‘a crumpet-catching tour’.
In 1955, his hopes of a Grand Prix career long over, Macklin was involved in the crash at Le Mans in which a Mercedes ran up the back of his Austin Healey and flew into the crowd, killing eighty spectators. In the late 1950s he worked as head of export sales for the Facel Vega car firm in Paris, and for a while Moss drove one of their Chrysler V8-engined luxury sports saloons, a useful marketing boost for his friend’s employers until, despite the additional patronage of Christian Dior and Ringo Starr, the company went bust in 1963.
The Boy Page 3
