The Boy

by Richard Williams

  As a sporting event, the Nassau Speed Week was a combination of Royal Ascot, the Henley Regatta and the pre-war Brooklands meetings, but with a much more informal atmosphere, even more social activity and a guarantee of better weather. ‘We like to think it’s fifty per cent racing and fifty per cent fun,’ Red Crise told Sports Illustrated. Each year the event kicked off with a parade of the competing cars and drivers along Bay Street. Throughout the week the night life would be in full swing at the Pilot House Club, Dirty Dick’s and Blackbeard’s Tavern. At the prize-giving dinner, the trophies were presented by the Governor.

  Among those drawn to this festival of speed were wealthy American sportsmen who had acquired the habit of buying European sports cars, either for themselves or for professional drivers to race. That first year saw Austin Healeys, Ferraris, MGs and Jaguar XK120s – one with a Confederate flag on the driver’s door – shipped across the 150 miles of water from Miami to take part. As in succeeding editions, the competitors’ travel and accommodation expenses were met by the Bahamian government. Alfonso de Portago and Masten Gregory were among the winners, both in Ferraris. Greta Oakes, at the wheel of an Austin Healey, finished fourth in a race for production cars, the only woman in a field of fourteen drivers.

  When Moss returned in December, it was to take part himself. He was a member of the Nassau crowd now, watching fireworks from Red Crise’s yacht, dining with Sir Sydney and Lady Greta, enjoying the nightly black-tie parties. Other drivers that year included Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican diplomat, polo player and playboy who had raced at Le Mans and Sebring and would die ten years later behind the wheel of a Ferrari at dawn in the Bois de Boulogne on his way home from a party; the New York fashion photographer Gleb Derujinsky, a friend of de Portago, whose Ferrari he rolled during a race without significant damage; and Isabelle Haskell, an American heiress and racing driver who would later help her husband, the Argentinian driver and entrepreneur Alejandro de Tomaso, to take control of Maserati. The two big races, the Governor’s Trophy and the Bahamas Automobile Cup, were won by the Ferraris of de Portago and Phil Hill. Stirling took part in three events, all in an Austin Healey 100S, one of three entered by Donald Healey, completely outgunned by the bigger machinery.

  In 1956 he took his parents and sister along for a Speed Week holiday. This time he was more suitably equipped, at the wheel of a Maserati 300S owned by Bill Lloyd, his co-driver at Sebring two years earlier. The car had to be patched up after Lloyd hit an oil drum during an earlier race, but Moss kept Gregory and de Portago behind him in the 200-mile Nassau Trophy. The forty starters included three Chevrolet Corvettes entered by the factory, an indication of the event’s growing prestige. By now Sir Sydney and his wife were divorced, although they remained fixtures at the event and both took part in the minor races, while Greta drew admirers like moths to a scented candle, particularly among the visiting drivers.

  For 1957 the Speed Week moved from the scruffy Windsor Field to a five-mile course laid out on the runways of the more modern Oakes Field. Moss was entered in a works Aston Martin DBR2: after finishing fourth in the Governor’s Trophy, he lent the car to Ruth Levy for the Ladies’ Race, only for her to roll and wreck it while battling with the Porsche of Denise McCluggage, who was wearing her signature polka-dot helmet.

  Not wanting the spectators to be deprived of further chances to see their star attraction at work, the committee persuaded a Dutch amateur named Jan de Vroom not only to lend Moss his 3.5-litre Ferrari, but to have the central throttle pedal moved to the right overnight. Moss repaid the generosity with two wins, including the Nassau Trophy. Six years after the humiliation in Bari, these were his first-ever races in a car built by Enzo Ferrari.

  De Vroom had raced the Ferrari at Le Mans that June. The car, and much else besides, had been paid for by his companion, Margaret Strong de Cuevas, a Rockefeller heiress married to a Chilean choreographer. In 1973, addicted to pills and low life, De Vroom was murdered in his New York apartment, his throat cut by two hustlers.

  Now Moss had just about completed his own home in Nassau, a two-bedroomed house he called Blue Cloud. He designed it himself; among its features was a sunken bath. But he missed the 1958 Speed Week, having asked Red Crise for $2,000 in starting money in recognition of the fact that, since he now lived in Nassau, he would no longer be costing the organisers his travel and accommodation expenses. Crise’s response was characteristically brusque: ‘The Bahamas Automobile Club cannot, and will not, pay starting money. We don’t need the name drivers. I would rather field a hundred second-rate cars than eighteen or twenty first-rate cars.’

  The disagreement was smoothed over in time for Moss to return with the Aston in 1959, winning a third Nassau Trophy. In 1960 he took part in the only go-kart race of his career, finishing thirteenth, before winning the Nassau TT in Rob Walker’s Ferrari 250GT. On his final competitive visit, in 1961, he repeated the win – same event, same car – but retired from the Nassau Trophy when the rear suspension of his Lotus 19 collapsed.

  The Nassau Speed Week continued until 1966, after which it was decided that a much-needed restoration of the track would be too expensive to justify its survival. Perhaps, too, some of the social appeal of motor racing had started to fade as the playboys gave way to the professionals. Earlier that year, Sir Sydney had been killed when his Sunbeam Alpine crashed on the road between Lyford Cay and the airport. According to the New York Times, his car ‘failed to make a highway curve and hit a pole’.

  CHAPTER 32 THE WILD ONES

  As the second half of the 1950s began, Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins were Moss’s two most prominent British rivals in Grand Prix racing. The pair were also best friends. They had a spontaneity about them that never seemed to be part of Moss’s character. They were permanently up for a lark. If no excuse presented itself, they’d invent one. Fire-extinguisher fights in hotel corridors were not unknown. Meanwhile, Moss would be fretting about tyre pressures and negotiating his starting money. That, at any rate, was the image.

  Hawthorn, the son of a former motorcycle racer who had set up as a garage owner in Farnham, Surrey, made an impact at the wheel of a Riley in 1951 and moved into Formula 2 with a Cooper-Bristol the following year, catching the eye with brilliant performances against formidable opposition. Suddenly the fame of this pipe-smoking, beer-drinking hell-raiser had begun to threaten that of Moss.

  In 1952, the year when they were separated by a single point in the race for the BRDC’s Gold Star, they went head-to-head in identical equipment just once. That was at the British Empire Trophy on the Isle of Man, when both were driving Frazer-Nash Le Mans sports cars. Moss’s gremlins chose that day to strike in triplicate: problems with the car’s ignition, fan belt and petrol pump forced him into retirement, while Hawthorn finished third with a broken exhaust. At the end of the season, Moss made a late comeback to snatch the Gold Star, but only by dint of amassing points through his many victories in Formula 3, in which his rival did not compete.

  By 1953 the fast-rising Hawthorn was a member of Ferrari’s Grand Prix squad and made history when he nosed ahead of Fangio’s Maserati in a desperate sprint for the line at Reims. He was easily identified by his height, his blond hair and his racing uniform, which featured a bow tie and a British racing green windbreaker. Off duty, he favoured sports jackets and tweed caps, looking like the sort of chap you’d expect to find in a country pub. On the way home from Goodwood to Farnham he would stop off for a pint of light and bitter and a game of darts at the Bricklayers, the Coal Hole or the Spread Eagle in Midhurst or the Duke of Cumberland at nearby Henley, or perhaps all of them. ‘My definition of a memorable party,’ he once said, ‘is one that I don’t remember much about.’ As a young Englishman who had inherited an open dislike of Germans from his parents’ generation, he was said to be in the habit, during trips to race in Germany, of leaving a copy of The Scourge of the Swastika, Lord Russell’s best-selling exposé of Nazi war crimes, on the parcel shelf of his car for passers-by to see.


  Collins, whose father owned a garage in the West Midlands, had the looks of a young film star and an easy charm, and worked his way up through Formula 3. He and Hawthorn were quick to form a deep friendship: neither of them took life too seriously, and they were both immensely attractive to women. By 1957 they were together on Enzo Ferrari’s payroll, along with two Italians, Eugenio Castellotti and Luigi Musso, and Fon de Portago, the Spanish marquis and Olympic bobsleigh competitor. Within barely two years, all five would be dead – four of them on the track, driving Ferraris, Hawthorn in a road accident in a Jaguar.

  Moss was friendly enough with the two Englishmen. He shared their interest in girls, but not in drinking beer or practical jokes or staying up late the night before a race. ‘Stirling’s approach to motor racing is no doubt the right one,’ Hawthorn once said, ‘but mine is much more fun.’ Moss’s close male friendships were formed away from the circle of Grand Prix drivers; they included McDonald Hobley, the former actor and TV presenter of Come Dancing, and David Haynes, a motor trader from Kent who dabbled in racing. But the rivalry, although fierce, was mostly amiable. When Hawthorn came back to London for a kidney operation at the end of 1954, Moss visited him at Guy’s Hospital. Both Collins and Hawthorn were among the squad of ushers at his wedding in 1957. In the summer of 1958 he gave Hawthorn a lift from Paris to Reims for the Grand Prix.

  Of the two, he was closer to Collins. Having co-driven a Mercedes to victory in the 1955 Targa Florio, they were reunited as teammates in Aston Martin’s sports cars the following year. After Moss had been introduced to an American actress named Louise King in Nassau during one of the Speed Weeks, he advised Collins to look her up while passing through Miami, where she was appearing on stage in The Seven Year Itch. Collins and King, the daughter of a senior United Nations diplomat, met for a drink on a Monday evening in February 1957; the following Monday they were married.

  For the newspapers and magazines, the three young aces were perfect material: their exploits on the track were matched by their availability to the paparazzi. But although Hawthorn, a more mercurial personality in and out of the cockpit, was affable enough on the surface, privately he left friends in no doubt that he didn’t care for Moss. And there is a story from Reims in 1958.

  One night during the French Grand Prix meeting the drivers and team personnel were gathered at their favourite bar in the town. Drink had been taken, and Hawthorn made a bet with Stuart Lewis-Evans, Moss’s teammate, to see who could climb faster up a couple of trees in the courtyard. Off they went. Standing below them, one of their more illustrious colleagues suddenly felt liquid falling on him. Looking up, Stirling Moss heard a voice. ‘I’ve always wanted to piss on you from a great height,’ Hawthorn shouted.

  CHAPTER 33 MAESTRO

  Nello Ugolini had been the team manager of the Scuderia Ferrari in the 1930s, talent-spotted by Enzo Ferrari when he was assistant manager of Modena’s football club, which Ferrari supported. Running the team’s Alfa Romeos, he supervised some of Tazio Nuvolari’s greatest triumphs. Vastly experienced and a highly sympathetic character, Ugolini had returned to Ferrari in 1952, watching over Alberto Ascari’s two world titles and Hawthorn’s historic win at Reims. ‘Among the drivers Ugolini is looked upon as a wizard who has everything under control,’ Hawthorn wrote later, ‘and it is quite a normal thing to find drivers working for his biggest competitors going along to consult him about their practice times, because they know he will have timed them all and will produce the figures accurate to a tenth of a second long before the official times are announced. They say he can time every car in a race with one stopwatch and he has a capacity for unruffled concentration which enables him to keep track of everything that is happening to his own and his rivals’ cars so that he can react at once as the situation develops.’ In 1954 Ugolini tried to persuade Moss to join the Scuderia. Then he returned to Modena FC as a successful head coach, taking them to third place in Serie A. Now it was he, universally known as Il Maestro, who welcomed Stirling back to Maserati as the team’s new number one driver for 1956.

  The Modena factory was a place where Moss felt at home. The chief designer was the brilliant Giulio Alfieri, and Guerino Bertocchi was a head mechanic of the old school who took out all the cars – whether destined for racing or road use – to test them himself before placing them in other hands. By 1956 they had brought the 250F close to its evolutionary peak, and were also producing a series of excellent sports-racing cars.

  For Moss, the first assignment of a full season as their designated team leader was a busy fortnight in Buenos Aires, where the Argentine Grand Prix kicked off the Formula 1 season. He led Fangio’s Lancia-Ferrari in the early stages of the race, but his engine began to smoke and a piston failed. There was consolation when, in one of Maserati’s three-litre sports cars, he beat the massed ranks of the Ferrari works team, led by Fangio, to win the Buenos Aires 1,000kms and then took the non-championship Buenos Aires Grand Prix in the 250F, again ahead of the reigning world champion.

  Wins with a works 250F in the Glover Trophy at Goodwood and with his own car in the Aintree 200 gave his home supporters something to cheer about, followed by even bigger applause when he won the International Trophy at Silverstone in a Vanwall. Since Maserati had decided not to send a car, he was able to accept Tony Vandervell’s offer of £1,500 for this one-off drive. He claimed pole position and, after a poor start, led the race from the second lap to the finish, outpacing the Lancia-Ferraris of Fangio and Collins in both practice and the race. It would be his only outing in the green car that season, but a marker for the future had been laid down.

  The Maserati team had begun the year in something of a mess, but Ugolini had restored order by the time Moss rejoined them for the Monaco Grand Prix. He started from the middle of the front row, between the Lancia-Ferraris of Fangio and Castellotti, and was ahead of the pack by the time they came out of the first corner. While the others squabbled behind him, he drove with smooth authority to pull out a lead that was never challenged. It was his first victory in a world championship race on foreign soil, and a very convincing one. For all the encouraging success with the Vanwall at Silverstone, his decision to chase the world championship with a foreign team now seemed fully justified.

  In Maserati’s sports cars, he collected wins in the Nürburgring 1,000kms and the Bari Grand Prix. When the 300S he was sharing in Germany with Jean Behra failed early in the race, they were switched to the car of Harry Schell and Piero Taruffi and won after Moss had made up a minute on Fangio’s Ferrari in the final twelve-lap stint. But in Formula 1, the middle of the season yielded nothing better than a second to Fangio’s Lancia-Ferrari at the Nürburgring before the circus reached Monza for a finale in which Fangio, Moss, Collins and Jean Behra all had at least a statistical chance of winning the world championship.

  That was one battle in prospect. Another was the Ferrari versus Maserati rivalry, on home ground. A third was the internal fight between the young Italian drivers of Enzo Ferrari’s team. To the massed ranks of the factory teams – five Lancia-Ferraris, four Maseratis, three Vanwalls, three Connaughts and three Gordinis – were added six private Maseratis: a field of twenty-four cars full of colour and contrast. And from the start, the narrative of the fifty-lap race lived up to its dramatic potential.

  In front of a full house, on a track that had dried after morning rain, Eugenio Castellotti and Luigi Musso raced into the lead, duelling so fiercely that within five laps both had destroyed their tyres. Castellotti had managed only another four laps on a new set of tyres before one of them burst, sending him spinning into the infield and out of the race. De Portago had retired on the sixth lap after a burst tyre had damaged his suspension. The Lancia-Ferraris were on Englebert tyres, a Belgian make whose rubber clearly was inadequate for the job – at least when the young drivers were pushing them beyond their limits on a poor surface. On the eleventh lap Collins, too, came in to replace a burst tyre. A second weakness was revealed when Fangio, batt
ling with Moss and the Vanwall of Harry Schell, had his steering break under the stresses imposed by the banking. He got out and sat on the pit counter, seemingly out of the championship battle, which now appeared to be in the hands of Moss, who had established a comfortable lead as the result of others’ misfortunes and the durability of his team’s Pirelli tyres. Schell had retired, as had Behra. But Fangio, it was remembered, needed only a single point to retain his title, and plans were being laid.

  Castellotti returned to the race in Fangio’s car, which had been fitted with a steering arm from de Portago’s machine but was now too far back to be in with a chance of a points-scoring finish. Musso, having worked his way back up to second place, came in for fuel and tyres on the thirtieth lap and refused a demand from the team manager to hand over his car to the team’s number one driver. The pride of Italy, or so his gesture seemed to say, was at stake. The pride of Argentina was no concern of his. Five laps later Collins, in third place, made a stop and gave a different answer to the same request. He hopped out, Fangio hopped in. Whatever points they won would be shared. Had Fangio remained out of the race and Moss failed to finish in the points, Collins would have become Britain’s first world champion. But the etiquette of the droit de seigneur, and sheer respect for Fangio’s standing in the sport, were uppermost in his mind. It was a decision challenged only by the correspondent of the Sunday Express, who voiced the firm opinion that he should have followed Musso’s example, sat tight and won for Britain. Others understood the meaning of his gesture and told themselves that, at twenty-five, Collins had plenty of time.

  But there was drama still to come. Five laps from the end, Moss ran out of fuel. The car was travelling at speed on the long straight leading to the last corner of the road circuit when the engine died, but he would not have enough momentum to coast all the way to the pits. Up behind him came Luigi Piotti, in a privately entered Maserati. Quickly appreciating the situation, the Italian slowed down and, with the nose of his car against the tail of Moss’s 250F, shunted the silent car towards the pits. After a few gallons of petrol had been urgently splashed into the tank, Moss howled back into the race, still with a good lead over Musso and Fangio.