Moss and Gregory saved on hotel bills by travelling to races towing a specially built caravan, until it became detached from Stirling’s Jaguar Mk VII while they were going down a steep hill in Belgium, overturning and writing itself off. For a while they shared Stirling’s flat in west London, and Gregory’s girlfriends included Moss’s 18-year-old sister, Pat. Taught to drive by Stirling when she was eleven, she had grown up hating motor racing, possibly because her brother was good at it. Gregory converted her to rallying, after which she gave up her successful career in international showjumping. She turned out to be as good in a rally car as Stirling was in his racers, crowned European ladies’ champion five times, with outright victories in the tough Liège–Rome–Liège event in an Austin Healey 3000 and the Tulip Rally in a Mini-Cooper. She was married to the Swedish rally driver Eric Carlsson from 1963 to her death in 2008, aged seventy-three.
Gregory took his managerial duties so seriously that when Moss was racing for the HWM team at Monza on the day before a Whit Monday meeting at Goodwood in 1951, he stayed in England and drove the Kieft in practice in order to secure a place on the grid in the 500cc race. Stirling caught the overnight train from Milan to Zurich, took a morning flight to London, and was in West Sussex in time to jump into the car and win.
CHAPTER 15 THE SNUB
To the left, waste land in front of an abandoned factory; to the right, a container depot built on reclaimed land, stretching towards the glistening waters of the Adriatic. A line of small trees borders the road as it curves away into the distance, heading towards a lighthouse. It doesn’t look much now, just a broad concrete highway leading out of the city. But it was here in Bari, under the same baking late-summer sun, that Enzo Ferrari snubbed Stirling Moss.
In the summer of 1951 Ferrari had offered the 21-year-old Englishman the chance to drive his cars in the French and British Grands Prix. It was a significant invitation, but Moss was already due to drive for HWM in Berlin on the weekend of the French race. Feeling he had to honour his commitment, he told Ferrari that he would nevertheless be available for Silverstone. Instead Ferrari offered both drives to José Froilán González, an Argentinian driver and friend of Fangio, who had arrived in Europe a year earlier. González finished second at Reims, sharing a car with Alberto Ascari on a blisteringly hot day in the Champagne region, and claimed an historic victory at Silverstone, beating the hitherto all-conquering Alfa Romeo team for the first time in a world championship Grand Prix on a day when Moss had to be content with winning the Formula 3 support race.
Nevertheless, Ferrari invited Moss to a meeting in Modena, and would have been amused and intrigued when the young Englishman turned up in his Morris Minor, having driven the little car from London. As they conversed, mostly in very basic French, Ferrari offered Moss a drive in the team’s new Formula 2 car at the Bari Grand Prix in September, possibly followed by a place in the team for the Italian Grand Prix, too – and, if things went well, a full contract for 1952. This was looking very much like his big chance.
‘Stirling Moss is a very important young man,’ Autosport announced when the news broke. ‘His deeds with HWM, Kieft, Frazer Nash and Jaguar this season have not passed unnoticed by those who direct the racing programmes of Formula 1 cars. Already he has successfully tried out the BRM and at the time of writing he is probably being tested in a GP Ferrari, at the express invitation of Signor Enzo Ferrari himself. As one who has chosen to make motor racing his profession, Moss is a perfectly free agent. He cannot possibly be criticised for giving preference to any organisation which gives him excellent terms and the assurance of a regular wheel. It is known that Stirling is intensely patriotic, and would prefer to drive a British car. Nevertheless the time is now ripe for Moss to take the wheel of a Formula 1 car, and no one can possibly blame him for grasping the opportunity with both of his capable hands.’
When he and his father arrived in Bari, having flown down to Rome and taken an uncomfortable overnight train, they headed straight for the local Fiat garage where the Ferrari team had set up a base. But as Stirling tried to get into the cockpit of the brand-new two-litre car to see how it fitted, a mechanic stopped him. It had been reassigned, he was told, to the veteran Piero Taruffi, and there was no spare. No message had been sent to warn them of this change of plans. Enzo Ferrari was in Maranello, far away. Alfred Moss was furious, his son even more so.
A small measure of consolation came from David Murray, a Scottish driver, who offered Stirling the use of his own older Ferrari, but the centrally placed throttle pedal – a traditional feature of Italian racing cars – caught him out and he crashed it in practice. Fangio won the race in his Alfetta, with González second in a Formula 1 Ferrari and Taruffi third in the machine Moss had expected to drive. As he and his father set off on the long journey home, he swore never to drive for the Scuderia Ferrari. It was a vow that would last ten years.
Later in the year, during a lull in a test session at Monza, he was given the chance to try out the Alfa Romeo in which Fangio had just won his first world championship. Gianbattista Guidotti, Alfa’s team manager, took him to tea in Como and offered him a place in the squad for 1952, with the present of an Alfa 1900 sports model as a lure. However irresistible it might have seemed in October, the offer would turn out to be worthless a few weeks later when Alfa suddenly announced the immediate closure of their Grand Prix team. Enzo Ferrari, too, had sent a telegram with the offer of an exclusive contract, but after what had happened in Bari he was wasting his time.
CHAPTER 16 SOUND AND FURY
The Monza test at the end of 1951 had been set up to allow Moss to try the BRM, the great white hope of British motor racing. The brainchild of Raymond Mays and Peter Berthon, who had built the ERAs before the war with backing from a wealthy businessman, the British Racing Motors project was being subsidised by a combination of sponsorship from British companies – about 300 of them – and public subscription. And everything about it was wrong.
An attempt to give Britain a real Grand Prix car of its own to compete with the Italians and the French, it aroused immediate enthusiasm but was riddled with misjudgements. At the end of the war Mays had been granted access to the blueprints of the Mercedes and Auto Union cars which had dominated grand prix racing from 1934 to 1939. What he didn’t have were the designers and engineers who could make sensible use of them. The BRM’s principal flaw was its technical complexity: a supercharged sixteen-cylinder 1.5-litre engine made a splendid noise and produced a lot of power but failed to achieve anything like drivability or even basic reliability until it was too late. And the BRM was, indeed, always late.
Mays had begun to approach backers in 1945 but the car’s first run in front of the press – and other interested observers, including Moss – did not take place until December 1949, at Folkingham airfield in Lincolnshire. Six months later, the programme for the Royal Silverstone meeting announced that the day’s schedule would feature a three-lap demonstration of the car with Mays himself, a successful driver before the war, at the wheel. Three months later the car was entered for the International Trophy at the same circuit, only for the driveshaft to break on the line, meaning that its competitive debut could be measured in inches. Two cars would be produced for the 1951 British Grand Prix, starting from the back of the grid after arriving on the morning of the race – late, as ever – and finishing fifth and sixth, a lacklustre result from cars that the public had been assured were world-beaters. When they were taken to Monza two months later, gearbox problems meant that neither car even made it to the grid. To the British press and their readers, the entire BRM adventure, for which so much had been promised, was now a laughing stock.
Mays had seen enough of Moss at work to be convinced that here was the brightest star of the new generation, with a strong appeal to the public, and he became intent on getting the young man’s signature on a contract. Moss was wary, however, and even more so after he tried the car for himself at Folkingham. Although the engine produced an abundance
of power, it was difficult to use. The brakes and gearbox were decent, but the chassis and steering were a disaster – ‘unstable and alarming’ in his view – and the cramped cockpit made it impossible for him to adopt his normal relaxed stance at the wheel.
There were meetings at the team’s headquarters in Lincolnshire, and he agreed terms for one race in the car, the forthcoming Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona. So he was surprised when Mays issued a press release the next day announcing that Moss would be driving for the team throughout 1952. He had told Mays that hundreds of miles of testing and development would be needed in order to satisfy himself that the car was both competitive and, more important, safe before he could think of making such a commitment.
In another reverse, the entry for Barcelona was withdrawn following the problems experienced during the Monza test. But if Moss was intent on making the jump to full Grand Prix racing while maintaining his insistence on driving British cars, the BRM looked like the only option available, and in September 1951 he accepted an invitation to try it out in a full-scale test at Monza. Broken pistons and constant overheating did nothing to improve his opinion of the car, and there was a lot of waiting around for repairs to be made and spare parts to arrive. He also listened while Mays told the public of his supreme confidence that ‘next year will be a BRM year’ while, in a measure of his own status, the chairman of the BRM Trust, the industrialist Alfred Owen, reassured the growing number of critics that ‘there must be something to the car, otherwise Moss would not bother with it.’
At the end of the first set of Monza sessions he sent Mays and Berthon a detailed summary of the car’s problems. His analysis was not entirely negative: he praised the rear suspension and the disc brakes. Hoping the faults would be rectified, and having turned down another approach from Enzo Ferrari, he declared himself ready to drive the BRM in competition for the first time in the non-championship Turin Grand Prix in April 1952. With that in mind, he had thrown himself into a further series of tests at Monza when, at the last minute, Mays and Berthon cancelled the Turin entry and ordered the personnel and the cars to return to England. They had been trying to persuade Fangio and González to join the team, and had been told that the Argentinian pair would be available to try the car at Folkingham that same weekend.
While leaving Moss frustrated, the abrupt cancellation had wider repercussions. Together with the withdrawal of Alfa Romeo, BRM’s failure to show up in Turin persuaded the international sporting commission of the FIA, the governing body, that since a decent field of proper Formula 1 cars could not be guaranteed for the coming world championship, the series should be contested by Formula 2 cars, of which there were far more. The BRM was about to be rendered obsolete before it had become remotely competitive.
In June the two Argentinian stars went with the team to Albi, where both retired, and a week later Moss, still clinging to the hope that something could be salvaged, joined Fangio for the Ulster Trophy at Dundrod, to be run to the old Formula 1 rules. Once again the team arrived late, in time for no more than a couple of laps of practice, during which Moss discovered that the wandering front end made the car a terrifying prospect on a real road circuit. When he got into the cockpit the next morning, he discovered that – without telling him – Mays had switched the two machines, Fangio being given the one that had seemed to be the more likely to last the race. The trip turned into a fiasco on the starting line when Fangio stalled his engine and Moss’s clutch burned out. Although both eventually managed to get going, neither finished the race. When Moss’s gear knob came off in his hand during the third lap, he threw it away in disgust.
Others were getting fed up, too. ‘Winston Churchill spurred on our troops during the war with his famous Victory sign,’ Motor Sport’s correspondent wrote, ‘but if Raymond Mays isn’t careful he will see more vigorous signs of this sort directed at the BRM around the circuits of Europe.’
Hawthorn had led the early stages of the Ulster Trophy in his Cooper-Bristol and finished second after Taruffi recovered from a bad start to take the win in Tony Vandervell’s Thin Wall Special, a barely disguised Formula 1 Ferrari. Meanwhile Mays was assuring journalists that, had the race been held four days later, the BRMs would have won easily. Once Moss was back home, he wrote to Mays to tell him that he was no longer interested.
Happy to be snapped by a newspaper photographer, Moss with Sally Weston, his girlfriend of the early 1950s, in a West End restaurant (Getty Images).
CHAPTER 17 CRUMPET
One evening in Monaco in the 1990s, strolling down the track between the Mirabeau and what was once the Station hairpin on the eve of the Grand Prix, the veteran Swiss journalist Jabby Crombac talked about his friendship with Stirling Moss. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘I remember particularly one year here, when we both caught the train back to Paris on the day after the race. I had my girlfriend with me. By the time we got to Paris, she was with me no longer.’
When Stirling was sixteen, his mother returned to the house unexpectedly one day and found him trying to surrender his virginity to a dental nurse named Sylvia. Ten years later, as he was nearing the peak of his fame, a newspaper columnist would write: ‘Moss changes girlfriends as often as he changes gear. And he performs both feats with the ease that comes of long practice.’
In the early years of his career he was often photographed with Sally Weston, of Wimbledon, who liked it to be known that she was a member of the celebrated family of biscuit makers. Her real name was Jenifer Clair Tollit and she was the daughter of a British accountant who lived in New York, where she and her mother had visited him from their home in London each Christmas; her parents divorced in 1948.
She was nineteen and Moss was twenty-two when she told the Daily Mail in September 1951: ‘Sometimes I’m engaged to Stirling and sometimes I’m not. Are we engaged now? You’d better ask Stirling. My mother says I don’t know my own mind. Maybe it’s true. I’ve been going about with Stirling since last April.’ Moss himself added a comment: ‘Just say Sally is an acquaintance.’
She was still around two years later, after he had broken his right shoulder in a crash at Castle Combe, when he sat on the pillion of his motor scooter with his arm in a sling as she took him from his west London flat to St Thomas’s Hospital. The following year she was still being quite erroneously described by the Sunday Express as ‘a relative of Garfield Weston, the millionaire biscuit-maker’ and telling reporters asking about her relationship with Moss: ‘We’re just good friends.’
They travelled to races together, from Rome to the USA, and she was his frequent companion in London restaurants, at regular cinema visits to see films from Johnny Guitar to Seagulls over Sorrento, and at the Moss family home in Tring. Sometimes, on long drives between European races, she would take the wheel of his Jaguar saloon. She was there when he won the Mille Miglia in 1955, and at the tragic Le Mans a few weeks later, where Moss believed that Fangio had a brief dalliance with her. ‘If he did, good luck to him,’ he told a BBC Great Lives programme in which he paid tribute to his former teammate. ‘He was a very charming man and he certainly had an eye for pretty girls.’
After the Dutch Grand Prix later in June they set off for a holiday in the South of France. En route they stopped off in Paris, where they broke up. She was not present at his next race, the historic triumph at Aintree. It did not end quietly and it was not, for a while, a clean break. Before the final Grand Prix of 1955 the Fleet Street papers carried stories about her apparent disappearance after flying from London to Nice on the way to a holiday in Italy. The English and Italian police were soon on the case, and Interpol was called in. An anxious Moss spoke to her mother on the phone, and the story ran for several days before she eventually turned up on the French Riviera, her presence at Mandelieu-La Napoule, where Moss had earlier spent his holiday, announced by Princess Chelita, the wife of the Siamese driver Prince Bira, with whom she was staying. After refusing to speak to reporters, Sally issued a statement expressing surprise at the furore: ‘
Everyone knew perfectly well where I was,’ she said.
Moss was soon to be seen with Jean Clarke, a 22-year-old model and beauty-contest winner (‘Miss Televisual’) from Coventry, and Claudia Hall, an American actress in London looking for film parts. That August, a week after Clarke had described Moss to the Evening News as ‘my steadiest date’, he was meeting Hall. She had just flown in from New York when, after dinner at the Colony Club in Berkeley Square, his Mercedes 300SL – his company car, as it were – collided with another vehicle at the corner of Earls Court Road and Cromwell Road in Kensington.
His companion spent a night in hospital, being treated for bruising and shock. He told the newspapers that he had been taking her back to her hotel, but the location of the accident was on a direct line between the Colony Club and his flat at 8 Challoner Mansions in Barons Court. He collected her the following morning in a very different machine, his hotted-up and wire-wheeled Standard 8, whisking her to Snetterton in Norfolk, where – according to the press – they stayed in separate hotels and he came third in the Redex Trophy in his Maserati.
Curiously, Moss described himself as shy by nature. ‘I wouldn’t go into a room full of people if I was by myself,’ he once said, blaming a lack of confidence that perhaps went back to his schooldays, and – with women – a fear of failure. If he approached a girl at a party, she might be thinking, ‘I can’t stand racing drivers. They’re a lot of idiots.’ He also placed restrictions on himself. He took his job so seriously that, for all his very public crumpet-chasing, until the end of his first marriage he made it a rule to abstain from sex for a week before a race, a challenge for a man racing on thirty or forty weekends of the year. Nevertheless, his pursuit of women, whether by more direct or indirect means, was enthusiastic and highly successful. He didn’t drink, but he liked to take them to dinner at good restaurants, followed by dancing at various West End clubs. There would be visits to Les Ambassadeurs, Hélène Cordet’s Saddle Room club or the Morocco.
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