The Boy

by Richard Williams

  At that moment Fangio was coming up behind Levegh. The accident occurred in front of him. He thought he glimpsed Levegh’s raised hand, perhaps a warning to him; but with no time to slow down, he reacted instinctively to find his way through the chaos. He and Moss would race on through the evening and into the darkness, only to be told that their effort had been for nothing.

  The disaster was not enough to dissuade Mercedes from continuing their campaign to win the 1955 world sports car championship. A week after the Formula 1 season had finished at Monza, Moss and Fitch won the Tourist Trophy at Dundrod. The American was required to complete only a handful of laps during a seven-hour race in which Moss demonstrated his speed on the wet and treacherous track, outpacing Fangio’s sister car and Hawthorn’s Jaguar, and leading home a Mercedes sweep of the top three positions. When a rear tyre burst on the winning 300SLR, damaging the bodywork, mechanics had to cut away the torn alloy, leaving a half-exposed wheel. Jaguar’s attempt to protest saw their team manager, Lofty England, striding down to the Mercedes pit, only to be confronted by Neubauer, who took off his trilby and used it to shoo his rival away. When the race ended, three amateur drivers had been killed in crashes during the afternoon, bringing an end to the use of the Irish circuit for four-wheeled competition.

  Success in the sports car championship now hung on the Targa Florio, the historic time trial around thirteen laps of a forty-five-mile circuit in Sicily’s Madonie mountains. Short of drivers for the three-car team, Neubauer asked Moss to nominate a co-driver for a race that would last almost ten hours. He picked Peter Collins, who – as well as being a fellow client of his manager, Ken Gregory – was quick, reliable and easy to get on with.

  Collins’s speed was needed when, with the car going well, Moss ended his first stint by sliding on a wet verge, going off the road and ploughing through the scenery, coming to rest in a field below the track. The 300SLR’s sturdy build and the willing assistance of a group of spectators enabled him to resume with little damage beyond ripped and dented bodywork. Collins took over for five laps at maximum effort, handing the car back to Moss for the final spell with a good lead which Moss held to the end. Their time was almost five minutes faster than that of Fangio and Kling in the second-placed car. And the winning of the championship marked the finish of Mercedes’ involvement in top-line motor racing for many years to come.

  Although Neubauer hinted at a hope that the sports car team would continue its activities in 1956, the directors decided otherwise. Moss had been involved in each of the 300SLR’s victories in its title-winning year, cementing the Englishman’s belief that, although Fangio was the undisputed master of open-wheeled racing, he had the great man’s measure in cars with enclosed bodywork. But for the German company there was also the memory of eighty dead bodies lying on French soil.

  In 1956 Moss returned to Le Mans to finish second again, this time in a works Aston Martin DB3S, co-driving with Collins, having swapped the lead several times with the eventual winners, Ron Flockhart and Ninian Sanderson in a D-type Jaguar. A year later he found himself driving a car he truly detested: an attempt to cloak a Maserati 450S in dramatic bodywork, drawn up at his behest by the English aerodynamicist Frank Costin, but so badly botched in its hurried execution by the coachbuilders at Zagato in Milan that its performance was severely compromised. Worse still, the fumes from the engine, rather than being expelled from the car, were finding their way into the driver’s compartment, along with heat from the radiator. After four hours, before the sun had even set, and to the great relief of Moss and Harry Schell, his co-driver, the transmission broke. That car would never race again.

  Sharing a beautiful Aston DBR1 with Jack Brabham in 1958, he led for the first two hours until the engine failed. A year later Aston Martin sent him out, as Jaguar once had, to set such a punishing pace that the rival Ferraris would be lured into destroying their engines in the effort to match his speed; his own blow-up was the seemingly inevitable price, but the dividend was a victory, the biggest in Aston Martin’s history, for his teammates Roy Salvadori and Carroll Shelby.

  He was absent from the 1960 race while recovering from an accident at Spa, and the following year, in what would be his last Le Mans, he and Graham Hill were holding third place in Rob Walker’s Ferrari 250GT when their water boiled away and the engine seized. When his career was over, Le Mans would be one of the things he missed least.

  CHAPTER 29 MOPEDS & MINIS

  His love of beating the London traffic lay behind a lifelong fondness for miniaturised forms of transportation. In his home city, his machines for personal transportation were chosen not only because they were nippy but because they were economical on fuel, sometimes didn’t qualify for road tax and could often be parked without payment – or used, in later years, without incurring London’s congestion charge.

  Some of them he was given, others he was promoting, one or two he bought. Over the decades they included the Hercules Grey Wolf, a motorised bicycle; the Trobike, a 95cc moped; the Vespa scooter he used at his holiday home in Nassau; the Triumph Tigress, another scooter; the three-wheeled 197cc Bond Minicar, whose virtues he extolled in a newspaper article in 1955; a Heinkel bubble car in which he drove Katie, his first wife, from London to Goodwood, a distance of 63 miles, in just over an hour and a half before the creation of a motorway; the BMW Isetta bubble car he overturned in central London with the manufacturer’s representative sitting alongside him; a BSA/Triumph scooter he launched with the comedian Harry Secombe in 1959; a tiny NSU Prinz, given to his first wife when they separated; and the Renault Twizy, a two-seater electric car he was using late in his life.

  ‘You don’t have to go fast to get amusement,’ he once said, explaining his liking for his Morris Minor and for the Standard 8 that replaced it, modified to take a hotted-up Standard 10 engine: it would do 85, he claimed, at least before Ken Gregory, his manager, crashed it. ‘The sheer thing of doing 120, 150, 180 in a straight line isn’t nearly as much exhilaration as going round a corner at 75. With these little cars I can have a lot of fun without being a great danger to the public. I don’t drive very fast on the roads. I nip in and out of traffic.’ He also nipped in and out of the magistrates’ courts, allowing the popular press to relish the spectacle of the world’s most famous racing driver being nabbed for minor infringements of the same road traffic regulations that applied to ordinary mortals.

  In the early 1950s he acquired a big Jaguar Mk VII saloon; it was available for longer journeys, particularly between events on the Continent. He even used it to win races for saloon cars at Silverstone, delighting spectators as it rolled alarmingly on its soft suspension while drifting through fast corners.

  Purists were surprised by his approval of automatic gearboxes. Could they not understand that a man who made several thousand gear changes during the course of a single Monaco Grand Prix might want a rest from the chore in other circumstances? ‘My idea of a car for touring in America would be a Lincoln or a Caddy or something,’ he told an interviewer in Nassau in 1956, ‘with air conditioning and a radio and reclining seats and that sort of thing. I can’t see any point in shifting gears. I like automatic gearboxes and servo brakes and electric windows. A very bad thing to say. But I get a lot of driving in cars where I have to double-declutch and shift gears and I have to put earplugs in and the wind is howling around. I reckon if you want to go from A to B, you might as well do it in great comfort.’

  CHAPTER 30 TRIPLE TEST

  It was at an end-of-the-season reception in Stuttgart that Moss was told of Mercedes’ decision to make a complete withdrawal from racing. They had just presented him with the pin in the shape of the famous three-pointed star, made of silver and diamonds, that the firm traditionally gave to their Grand Prix winners. He was shocked by the news. Now he was at a loose end. Still wanting very badly to compete for Grand Prix wins in a British car, but also tempted by an offer to lead the Maserati team, he organised secret test days at Oulton Park and Silverstone in which he wo
uld try out the 1956 Formula 1 designs from Connaught, BRM – now no longer run by a trust but owned by Sir Alfred Owen, chairman of the biggest family-owned manufacturing business in Britain – and Vanwall, a team set up by another industrialist, Tony Vandervell.

  He found the new BRM powerful but awkward in its handling. Although the Connaught was slower, it had just won at Syracuse in the hands of Tony Brooks, a young man taking time off from his dental studies to secure the first victory in a continental Grand Prix by a British driver in a British car since 1923. The quickest of the three cars was the Vanwall, and Moss was impressed by the team’s professional approach; they had taken the trouble to invite him for two seat fittings at their factory before the test.

  There were also conversations and meetings with a wealthy American named Tony Parravano, producing a story in the Daily Mail which claimed that Moss, Collins and Brooks had been signed up to drive for a new F1 outfit. The idea seemed to be that Parravano would subsidise the Maserati team, who were always looking for someone to pay for the cost of racing. Moss and Collins flew to Modena to test the latest version of the 250F and discuss the idea with Omer Orsi, the Maserati boss, and his would-be American backer.

  Parravano, born in Naples in 1907, had emigrated to the US and made a fortune from building tract homes – what the British would call housing estates – in Southern California, profiting from the huge post-war demand. The source of his initial capital was never clear. In 1950 he got the motor-racing bug and started buying cars for professional drivers to race. Eventually he began spending time in Modena, becoming close to Ferrari and Maserati and buying cars from both to be shipped home and used by drivers such as Carroll Shelby, Phil Hill and Masten Gregory. By 1955 the two Italian manufacturers saw him as a very valuable customer – particularly Maserati, who had been promised half a million of his dollars to develop a car for the Indianapolis 500.

  Moss was under pressure to make a decision. Should he take a chance on a British team, risking a repeat of the frustration of 1952 and 1953, or should he opt for Maserati, a team with experience of winning Grands Prix? The daily press and the motoring magazines fizzed with speculation. To help make up his mind, he took the unusual step of hosting a dinner at the Royal Automobile Club on Pall Mall for a group of leading British journalists from Fleet Street and the motoring press, inviting them to hear and discuss his thoughts and then vote on whether he should sign for a British team or opt for the Italians. It was an unconventional idea, but a clever one: it made the journalists feel they had a stake in a story that was attracting national interest.

  ‘Money doesn’t come into this,’ he told them. ‘Whatever you earn – here or abroad – the taxman takes.’ Six of his listeners, including the representatives of the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the News of the World, voted for the purely patriotic choice. Nine, including Harold Nockolds of The Times, Peter Garnier of The Autocar and Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport, whose opinion probably counted for more with Moss than all the rest put together, went for the hard-headed option.

  More offers were still coming in. Enzo Ferrari again let it be known that there was a place for Moss in his Scuderia. Jaguar made an impressive offer – £1,000 a race – for him to return to the sports car team alongside Hawthorn. Had he chosen to race for one of the British teams in Formula 1, that would have made good sense since none of them competed in the major sports car events, although the idea of Moss, at 5ft 5in, and Hawthorn, at 6ft 2in, sharing the car in an endurance event would probably have been a non-starter.

  In early December the press received a statement from Alfred Moss, announcing his son’s decision to join Maserati as the Italian team’s number one driver for the 1956 season. While Stirling and Ken Gregory were in Nassau, Alfred had travelled to Modena with a lawyer to negotiate a contract with Omer Orsi. He told the media of his son’s belief that no British F1 team was yet ready to challenge the established foreign powers. ‘Stirling would very much have liked to drive solely for Britain,’ the statement read, ‘but as he has decided that he cannot do so this year, he has insisted that he should be free to drive British cars in six of the major sports car events, and the Maserati company has agreed to release him for this purpose.’

  Of Tony Parravano there was no mention. After the talks in Modena, the American had drifted out of the picture. A year later, under investigation for unpaid taxes in the US, he would flee to Mexico, attempting to take nine assorted Ferraris and Maseratis – not even half of his collection – with him; four of them got across the border. In 1960 he finally gave himself up and was ordered to appear in court to enter a plea for tax evasion. Three days before the hearing, he simply disappeared. He was never to be seen or heard of again.

  Apart from its night life and the absence of currency restrictions, Nassau offered Moss the scope to refine his skills on water skis (Getty Images).

  CHAPTER 31 NASSAU

  ‘Nassau’, the American journalist-turned-racing driver Denise McCluggage wrote, ‘was a string of coloured lights across a tropical night. Nassau was the sharp blip of racing engines on a sun-drenched dock, the soft boiling-fudge speech of the Bahamians selling straw hats along Bay Street. Nassau was an umbrella-drink concoction of star-dipped nights, white sands, conch fritters, a sea rimmed in turquoise (and as clear as gasoline), and racing, racing, racing.’

  On Moss’s first visit, before there was any racing there at all, he fell in love with the place. He enjoyed it so much during the short visit at the end of 1953 that he returned a few weeks later, and paid regular visits in the following years. It was a place where he could polish his water-skiing skills and learn deep-sea diving. It was also part of the sterling area, a group of countries – mostly attached to the Commonwealth – which pegged their currency to the British pound, and within which there were no restrictions on how much cash could be taken in or out, a particular convenience in the days before the invention of credit cards.

  The main town of New Providence island, Nassau had been founded in 1670 by British settlers who initially named it Charles Town, after their king. Fourteen years later it was burned to the ground and rebuilt under its new name. Occupied at various times by the Spanish and the French, in the eighteenth century it became the headquarters of more than a thousand pirates, including ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham and Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, to whom its harbour offered a safe anchorage between raids on shipping throughout the Caribbean. Recaptured from the Spanish for the last time in 1783, it finally settled down under British colonial rule. The town gradually expanded and by the 1930s its pleasant climate in the months of the European winter was making it an alternative to the French Riviera.

  On his second visit, in February 1954, Moss spent a fortnight at the British Colonial Hotel. In conversation with the people he met there, including the hotel’s owner, Sir Sydney Oakes, and the holidaying English sports car manufacturer Donald Healey, talk turned to the possibility of staging a motor race on one of the island’s airfields. The initial idea belonged to an energetic and volatile American, Sherman ‘Red’ Crise, who had made his money from filling stations and importing liquor from the Bahamas during Prohibition, and had promoted midget car racing in his native New Jersey before the war. A keen sailor and a frequent visitor to Nassau, he invited the English driver to take a look at the disused Windsor Field. Clearly the advice was positive, because, when Moss returned in February 1955, taking Ken Gregory with him, he was given reports of the first Nassau Speed Week, held three months earlier.

  The newly created Bahamas Automobile Club was chaired by Crise, and its president was Oakes, who was also a member of the Nassau Development Board. Sir Sydney owed his hereditary title to his late father, Sir Harry Oakes, a gold-mining tycoon who had moved to Nassau in 1935 to escape Canadian taxes. For his investments in local infrastructure, including an airfield, a golf course, a country club and housing developments, and various philanthropic endeavours, he was granted a baronetcy by King George VI in 1939.

  When he
was murdered four years later, struck by a miner’s pick, his corpse burned with insecticide and covered with feathers, Nassau became a focal point of international attention. The Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, who had been appointed Governor of the Bahamas during the war in order to keep his pro-German sentiments at a safe distance from Europe, took charge of the investigation. One theory was that Sir Harry’s resistance to attempts to build a casino on the island had displeased the mobster Meyer Lansky, but other possibilities emerged. In particular, suspicion fell on Count Alfred de Marigny, a French yachtsman who had eloped with Sir Harry’s beautiful daughter, Nancy, making her his third wife two days after her eighteenth birthday in New York, where she was studying dance. De Marigny was arrested and tried, but acquitted after evidence emerged that he had been framed. The crime remains unsolved.

  Even with a war going on, the scandal added a certain dark glamour to Nassau’s reputation, which blossomed in peacetime. Sir Sydney, who succeeded to the baronetcy, was keen on the idea of a race meeting as a splashy start to the tourist season. He had married a strikingly good-looking and vivacious Danish woman, Greta Hartmann; the couple became a symbol of the resort’s growing appeal to the international jet set.