The Boy

by Richard Williams

  Those who paid for Moss’s presence were always given full value, although he stayed not a minute longer than the contract stipulated. If the fee was right, he would go anywhere and do most things, particularly if they involved judging beauty contests or meeting starlets.

  Moss and Alf Francis (left), formerly Alfons Frantisek Kowalewski, conferring in the pits during practice for the 1954 German Grand Prix (Getty Images).

  CHAPTER 21 THE MECHANIC

  Alf Francis took his work seriously. During a pit stop at one grand prix, he punched a young mechanic for getting in the way as he tried to fill Moss’s car with fuel. He knew what he wanted, and he had a short fuse. In Moss’s search for a car that would give him a chance of winning grands prix, the crew-cut Francis became a trusted helper.

  Born Alphons Frantisek Kowalewski in a village outside Danzig (later renamed Gdansk) in 1918, the son of a garage owner, he arrived in Britain during the Second World War, enlisting in the 1st Polish Armoured Division. When peace came, he anglicised his name and joined the HWM team as a mechanic. Impressed by his enthusiasm and ingenuity, as well as by his strong opinions, Moss had hired him for the abortive Cooper-Alta project; he and Tony Robinson also looked after Stirling’s Formula 3 cars.

  ‘I got on well with him,’ Moss said, ‘but he was a difficult man in every way.’ Nevertheless, they struck up a good working relationship and in 1954 Francis took charge of Moss’s private Maserati, working closely with the factory engineers and mechanics. When Stirling signed with Mercedes a year later, he hoped that Francis would go with him. This would have been difficult to negotiate, if not impossible, but in any case Francis’s detestation of Germany and Germans, against whom he had been fighting ten years earlier, removed all need for discussion.

  When it came to cars, Moss respected his experience and his views, even when he disagreed with them. A shrewd remark from the mechanic in 1954 influenced him to alter his driving style by adopting a lighter touch on the brakes. Francis had been watching the way Fangio drove and passed on his observations.

  He was demanding and sometimes short-tempered but he worked enormously hard and shouldered the burden of driving a transporter the length and breadth of Europe, in the days before motorways. This was the classic ethos of the racing mechanic: an indifference to hours worked or energy expended in the face of the only imperative, which was to get the car to the line in good shape, whatever inconveniences that might entail.

  Sometimes, however, even Francis could find the demands unreasonable. In the summer of 1956 he towed Moss’s Maserati on a trailer behind a Standard Vanguard from London to Modena, dropping it off at the factory for a rebuild before returning in a journey that included a run of 500 miles from Chambéry to Calais in twelve hours. Once home he went straight to work on stripping down his employer’s little Cooper ‘Bobtail’ sports car, which had been suffering from seemingly intractable handling problems. He was in the middle of the job when Ken Gregory phoned, ordering him to have the car at Reims the next day, ready for Moss to take out in practice for the twelve-hour race. Having tried to explain that he had not been warned of this possibility and that there was no time to set the car up properly, he swallowed his frustration and did as requested, enlisting the emergency help of John Cooper, the car’s manufacturer and a kindred spirit: ‘One of those people who look at you blankly if you talk about a 48-hour week or every other Saturday off,’ as Francis put it.

  Once he and the car had arrived at Reims, there were endless demands to change this and that. Then came an order to take the car on to Rouen for the following weekend’s race. Again there were problems, and this time Francis’s exasperation boiled over. He offered his resignation, which was immediately accepted. Moss wrote a cheque for £100 on the spot and told him: ‘If you ever need any help or assistance, don’t forget I am still your friend.’

  They were reunited before the end of the decade, with Francis tending to the race-winning Coopers and Lotuses that Moss drove for Rob Walker’s team. Together they enjoyed finding ways to make these privately owned machines go faster than the cars of the works teams. By virtue of their association, Francis became so well known that his account of his life in racing was published in 1959, with Moss providing the foreword.

  After leaving the Walker team he moved to Italy, collaborating with the gearbox-builder Valerio Colotti and attempting without success to resurrect the moribund ATS F1 team, which had emerged in 1962 after a schism within the Ferrari hierarchy. His last years were spent in the United States, where he built and restored racing cars. He died in Oklahoma City in 1983, aged sixty-five.

  CHAPTER 22 SEBRING

  Rob Walker, the whisky heir who would later become Moss’s patron, attended the 1954 Sebring 12-hour race with the Aston Martin team. It was almost as much a social event as a sporting contest, and Walker was delighted to note, in an account of the trip written for Motor Sport, the arrival of Gerald Lascelles, a first cousin of the Queen of England and a future president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club, and his wife Angela. They had flown in from their sugar plantation in Barbados and agreed to keep the British team’s lap chart.

  Walker, who had raced at Le Mans before the war and tended to do things in style, travelled from Palm Beach to Sebring in transportation arranged by the wealthy sportsman Briggs Cunningham: ‘We were a party of seven, so nothing very much in the way of cars was required. We only had two Continental Bentleys, a Vignale-bodied Cunningham, and one of the very latest Ghia V8 coupés…’

  Sebring had begun hosting its sports-car race, which started in daylight and finished at night, in 1950. Just as Britain’s post-war racing drivers had exploited the availability of disused airfields, so the Sebring circuit was laid out on the wide concrete runways of a former US military air base in central Florida. Four years later, on his first trip to race on the other side of the Atlantic, Moss had become the first non-US driver to win the race, after being invited by Briggs Cunningham to take the wheel of a little 1.5-litre OSCA, imported from Italy. His co-driver was Bill Lloyd, a cousin of Cunningham’s wife, who had raced MGs and Porsches for several years in the US and had finished fifth at Sebring a year earlier, sharing the same OSCA with Cunningham himself.

  Moss and Lloyd wore out the car’s brakes early in the race, requiring the drivers to throw the car sideways into every sharp corner in order to slow it down. Despite that handicap they managed to outlast the more powerful but less reliable cars of the works Lancia and Aston Martin teams, the victory extending Moss’s fame into a significant new market – one in which he would feel very much at home. He had driven the last four-hour stint, after nightfall, not only with no brakes but no clutch either.

  Rob Walker concluded that the Moss/Lloyd victory had been generally popular. ‘It ought to have been, anyway, as it should have satisfied and consoled all participants. It was an American entrant, with a British and an American driver in an Italian car. What more could you want? I know – an all-British win.’

  CHAPTER 23 THE GREEN MASERATI

  ‘I will never go foreign so long as there is anything on wheels produced in England,’ he had told the press towards the end of 1953. But now, while he was aboard the Queen Mary, returning home from a Jaguar-sponsored trip to Mexico and California, followed by a brief holiday in the Bahamas, a cable from his father announced the purchase of a new Maserati 250F with which he could take part in the 1954 Grand Prix season.

  According to Ken Gregory, Moss’s morale had been ‘at rock bottom’. They had applied without success to Mercedes-Benz for a seat in their new Formula 1 team, and had tried all the available British cars at a special test session, concluding that none would be competitive. Another invitation from Enzo Ferrari, who had lost Ascari – the reigning world champion – to Lancia’s new team, was declined. They had asked for a place in the Maserati team, but were rebuffed: Omer Orsi, the team’s owner, already had a full complement of three drivers, all from Argentina – Fangio, Onofre Marimón and Carlos Menditéguy �
�� and indirectly subsidised by the Perón government, with which he had business arrangements. Instead Orsi was willing to sell them one of the two machines being built for private owners. Moss’s manager and his father agreed the price of £5,500, for which Stirling himself would be liable.

  Alf Francis made the journey to the Maserati headquarters in Modena, where he spent six weeks watching the factory personnel build up the car. After some argument, the company’s chief mechanic, Guerino Bertocchi, agreed to get his men to move the throttle pedal from its traditional Italian position in the middle, between the brake and the clutch, to the right. Further grumbling preceded an agreement to move the seat back to allow for a straight-armed driving position. Moss also flew in to observe the final work. The bodywork was painted, as he had specified, in a pale version of British racing green – albeit a sicklier shade than he had specified – with red and white rings around the nose. A lucky horseshoe and small Union Jack stickers would be added to the flanks. Francis set off back to London with his precious cargo loaded into the team’s Commer transporter.

  Import duty, which would have significantly increased the car’s cost, was avoided by the application for a temporary permit issued on the understanding that its owner would be spending a minimum of half the year out of the UK. Given Moss’s commitment to an increasingly international schedule, both with his own team and with Jaguar, that seemed straightforward enough, as did the stipulation that any future sale could not be to a British buyer.

  Moss liked the car straight away, but its debut in Bordeaux taught them one swift lesson. In wet conditions, Dunlop’s tyres were not good enough. A switch to a set of Pirellis, bought on the spot from the Italian company’s representatives and fitted halfway through the race, gave an immediate improvement, allowing Moss to make two laps back on the leaders and finish fourth. Before the next race, Silverstone’s International Trophy, there was another on-the-fly switch, this time from Italian brake linings to Ferodo, although rear suspension failure led to his retirement. At the Aintree 200, Moss tested Francis’s patience by insisting on a higher gear ratio; the switch took twelve hours to accomplish and turned out to make the car slower, requiring a change back to the original. After finishing the work at six o’clock on the morning of the race, Francis handed the car over to Moss, who walked away from the field to record his first victory in a 250F, and his first in an F1 car of any kind.

  In recognition of the mechanics’ efforts, Moss and Gregory gave them train tickets to London and had the transporter driven down to meet them. There they would take over for the road journey to the next race, in Italy the following weekend. That was the Rome Grand Prix on the Castel Fusano circuit, where the final drive failed when Moss was in second place. At Spa for the Belgian GP – where Francis decked a Maserati mechanic for trying to help during a pit stop – he finished third and scored the first world championship points of his career, after Bertocchi had lent them a spare set of Pirellis, again replacing the Dunlops. But he was disconcerted to find out that Fangio, the winner, had been allowed to run the engine of his works 250F up to 8,000rpm, whereas his own strict limit, prescribed by the factory for private owners, was 7,200.

  Returning to Silverstone for the British GP, he was told by Omer Orsi that he could now run the engine up to 7,800; if it blew up, the factory would rebuild it and bear the cost. Making good use of the extra revs, he had overtaken Fangio, now in the cockpit of a Mercedes, and was about to challenge González’s Ferrari for the lead when the transmission broke with ten laps to go. A week later, in the non-championship race at Caen, he finished a disappointing second, losing the lead to Maurice Trintignant’s Ferrari after the Maserati’s handling deteriorated in the closing stages.

  The problems could not disguise the quality of his performances and Orsi, now looking for a replacement for Fangio and impressed by what he had seen, offered him a deal: they would enter his car under their banner, allowing Francis to enlist the support of the works mechanics and giving access to the latest modifications. The arrangement began with the German Grand Prix, where the 250F appeared in the factory’s red livery, distinguished by green and white bands around the nose, although the engine ran its bearings on the second lap, when he was lying third. For the team, the weekend was marred by the death of Marimón, Fangio’s protégé, after his car went through a hedge and plunged down a steep bank.

  While Moss’s engine was being rebuilt and the car generally refettled in Modena, Orsi lent him a works car for the non-championship Gold Cup at Oulton Park. It arrived too late for the practice sessions, forcing him to start from the back of the twenty-car grid, but by the fourth of the thirty-six laps of the Cheshire circuit he was in a lead that he held comfortably to the finish. ‘Moss’s luck changes,’ Motor Sport reported, adding that his success had earned ‘a splendid ovation from the northern crowds’.

  A week later his own car was ready for another non-championship race, the Circuito di Pescara on the 16-mile track used before the war for the Coppa Acerbo races. His diary recorded the trip in detail. En route, he visited Modena to negotiate with Orsi and to try out Maserati’s new two-litre sports car at the Imola circuit. Late that afternoon he drove the car down the Adriatic coast to Pescara, arriving in time for dinner with Pete Ayles, a flying instructor who had arrived in a single-engined Cessna with which Moss was trying to accumulate enough air miles to get his pilot’s licence.

  The next morning he set out to learn the long, very fast circuit, completing five laps in the 250F. There were only thirteen entries for the race, including works Maseratis for himself and Luigi Musso. On Saturday he rose at a quarter past seven for breakfast and headed to the circuit for the second practice session. He noted all the settings – axle ratio, carburettors, plugs – and the fact that the engine was letting water into one cylinder. Nevertheless, he set the fastest time, more than twenty seconds quicker than the nearest challenger, and a new engine was to be brought down from Modena and fitted before the race.

  On Sunday he was again up early for a race that began at five past nine. After a poor start, he recovered quickly to take a lead that looked certain to give him victory before a small oil pipe broke and stranded him out on the circuit. His teammate Musso won, ahead of the Gordini of Jean Behra and Harry Schell’s private Maserati, while Moss went for a swim. ‘Called in at the race dance, dead loss. Bed at 12.30,’ he recorded in his diary.

  Early on Monday morning he and Pete Ayles took off in the Cessna for Rome, where they refuelled before heading for another stop in Florence. In the late afternoon they arrived in Cannes, where Moss was staying at the Gray d’Albion, a nineteenth-century hotel which had enjoyed its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. Used as a hostel for refugees after the Second World War, it had not quite recaptured its former glory. Dinner with Prince Bira and his wife was followed by a trip to the cinema to see The Conqueror, a vastly expensive flop starring a spectacularly miscast John Wayne as Genghis Khan. The next day he was up early: ‘On the beach at 10, water-skied twice, lunch and left at about 3.10 and to Geneva at about 5.30.’

  As heavy rain fell on the tricky Bremgarten circuit, where trees lined the roads and some stretches were cobbled, he set the fastest time in the opening practice session for the Swiss GP, ahead of Fangio’s Mercedes and González’s Ferrari. In the dry the following day he was still fast enough to book a front-row starting position and he was in second place behind Fangio when his oil pump failed. But this, he felt, was the weekend on which his performance had really impressed Alfred Neubauer, who was supervising Mercedes’ successful return to the sport.

  At Monza, in front of the Italian crowd, he qualified once again for the front row, this time alongside Fangio and Ascari, who had made a temporary return to Ferrari while awaiting the completion of the new Lancias. A spectacular dice in the opening stages between these three and Villoresi’s Maserati appeared to have been settled in Moss’s favour, and he was leading Fangio by twenty seconds with only a handful of laps to go when a pipe from th
e oil tank broke, robbing him of his first victory in the world championship. Coasting to a halt just short of the line, he pushed the car home to finish tenth. In his disappointment, there was the consoling thought that now he was a Grand Prix winner in all but name.

  While leading from first lap to last in the 1954 Goodwood Trophy, Moss and the Maserati 250F demonstrate their complete command of the four-wheeled drift (George Phillips/Revs Collection).

  CHAPTER 24 THE DRIFT

  Earlier generations of grand prix stars – the Nuvolaris and Caracciolas – had driven while hunched forward in the cockpit of their heavy cars, needing to exert all the power of shoulders and forearms to turn their large steering wheels without any form of power assistance. Dr Giuseppe Farina, the first world champion, was different. His personal interpretation of racing etiquette may have left much to be desired – and was certainly not something for younger drivers to copy, as Moss had discovered on his first visit to Bari in 1951 – but his style at the wheel was a different matter. The young Englishman had been watching the way the Italian veteran sat back, with his arms straight out in front, looking completely unruffled. Not only a more elegant posture, it was also more effective.

  As racing cars became lighter and the track surfaces smoother, a more delicate touch began to pay dividends. ‘The veteran who designed the New Look of modern race-driving technique’ was how Moss described him in his Book of Motor Sport in 1955. ‘Now everybody does it. At an early point in my own career I made no bones about copying Farina’s smooth, relaxed style.’ He became the Italian’s most successful disciple, particularly after he had got his hands on the Maserati. The open cockpits of the 1950s allowed spectators a clear view of the drivers at work, so Moss could be seen to be achieving his fast lap times in an unusually serene style for a racing driver. This, as much as the white helmet, helped create his image and contributed to the response he evoked from the public.