During the pit stop Ugolini had warned Moss that his left rear tyre was now bald. Nevertheless he had set a new lap record, securing the extra point for the fastest lap of the race, before the sign came out to slow him down, just as a steering arm on Musso’s car was breaking and sending the Lancia-Ferrari careering across the track from the end of the banking to finish up against the pit counter, its shaken driver led quickly away. Now Fangio was on the hunt, cutting the Maserati’s lead from twenty seconds to six as Moss nursed his tyres, but the margin was enough to secure the Englishman his second Grand Prix victory of the season. Three points each from the shared second place for Fangio and Collins gave the Argentinian master his fourth world title, while Moss’s nine points secured him the runner-up position for the second year in a row, with Collins third.
He finished his year with the Italian team by travelling to Australia, where a non-championship Grand Prix was being held at the Albert Park track in Melbourne to coincide with the Olympic Games. No medals were on offer, but Moss dominated the race in his 250F against mostly local opposition – and won both the sports car races held on adjacent weekends in one of the team’s three-litre cars. Of the seven cars Maserati had taken to Australia, three were sold to private local buyers before the team left for home. That was one method by which they subsidised their racing, as well as clearing their inventory in preparation for a new season.
A different destiny awaited Moss’s Monza-winning 250F. It had already passed into the hands of Tony Parravano, who shipped it back to the US and then took it with him when he fled to Mexico to escape the tax authorities, part of his fleet of fugitive racing machines.
Married less than a year, Katie Moss displays the anxiety of the racing driver’s wife as she watches Stirling from the pits at Silverstone in 1958 (Michael Ward).
CHAPTER 34 KATIE
They had met, briefly, during an early visit to Nassau, in 1954, when he was taking a few days’ holiday on his way back from winning at Sebring. They were both water-skiing; she was staying with an aunt and working at the local theatre. She was eighteen years old then, and he was twenty-four. Two years later he was at Le Mans, racing with Aston Martin, when he spotted her on the other side of the track. He waved to her: ‘Come over here!’ She signalled that she lacked the necessary pass. He pointed to his competitors’ armband. It would be all right. And it was.
She was Katie Molson, a member of one of Canada’s most prominent families, with interests in breweries, railroads and banking. Of all the girls he had spent time with, in and out of the spotlight, she was the one. Her looks were not those of the beauty queens and the showgirls. There was no fur stole, no white gloves, no plunging cleavage, no blonde waves. She wore very little makeup. Had she been a movie actress, it would have been one of the more interesting ones – a Pier Angeli, a Jean Seberg, a Leslie Caron. She was slender and neat-featured, her dark hair cut short. Her eyes slanted slightly downwards, lending her an air of thoughtful appraisal and perhaps concealed amusement even when the flashbulbs were popping in her face, the look of someone balancing the value of putting up with it against the desire to disappear.
After Le Mans, they were together almost straight away. ‘She was a tomboy on the one hand and a lady on the other and sexy in both roles,’ he told Ken Purdy. ‘She was most adaptable; she was a good cook, she was a very good driver. We enjoyed a lot of things together. Katie’s taste was different from mine and she was strong enough, if you like, to change my taste in many things, in the way I dress and so on.’
That Christmas he flew to Montreal, where she was with her family. They talked about marriage before going on to Nassau. After she had returned home, he wrote a note in his diary suggesting the depth and complexity of their relationship: ‘I really am very much in love with K but it won’t be easy; I make her miserable and she does the same for me; is it insecurity?’ But she went with him to some of the races in the summer of 1957, pictured smelling a rose he was handing her across a restaurant table before the Mille Miglia, planting a kiss on his head as he sat in the Vanwall’s cockpit, and in a happy group at Le Mans including the drivers Maurice Trintignant and Jo Bonnier in the days when the racers and their partners were friends together, sharing their experiences as they travelled the world.
They announced their engagement in July (with a specially posed picture on the cover of Illustrated magazine), and on 7 October, a Monday, they were married at St Peter’s Church, Eaton Square, attended by TV news crews and Fleet Street photographers, with Ken Gregory as best man and Stirling’s sister, Pat, completing a trio of bridesmaids with his secretary, Judy Noot, and Katie’s friend Margot Beaubien. The ushers included Collins, Hawthorn, McDonald Hobley, David Haynes and the rally driver Peter Jopp. Other drivers were present, including Tony Brooks, Archie Scott-Brown, Duncan Hamilton and Jack Brabham. The couple left the church in a blizzard of confetti and a storm of flashbulbs. After a wedding breakfast for 600 guests at the Savoy, they spent the night in the Harlequin suite at the Dorchester and left the next day for a short honeymoon at the Amstel Hotel in Amsterdam, where their room was filled with flowers.
In a rather unorthodox conclusion to a honeymoon they were back in London a week later for Stirling – accompanied by his new wife – to adjudicate at the Miss World contest once again, on a panel including the actor Trevor Howard and the dress designer Norman Hartnell (‘Judging bloody awful! Miss Finland 1st. Not in my first six’), before setting up home in his existing flat in Barons Court. Two days later, after he had tested an Aston Martin at Silverstone, they went to see Judy Garland at the Dominion Theatre and dined afterwards with the singer and her husband at the Dorchester. In November they were in Caracas, where all four works Maserati sports cars, including his, were destroyed in a series of accidents. In December they were in Nassau, where he won the big race at the Speed Week and they worked on the plans for the house they were building.
She was with him in Buenos Aires in January 1958 when he won the first Grand Prix of the season: their post-race kiss gave the Argentinian sports magazine Goles the image for its front cover. She was with him in Havana in late February when Fangio, his teammate in the Maserati sports car squad, was kidnapped and held overnight by pro-Castro rebels. Two weeks later she was trespassing on the pages of his diary to scribble ‘Katie loves you more today!’ At the Targa Florio, he took her for a lap in his Aston, completing the forty-five-mile circuit through the Sicilian mountains only ten seconds slower than his best practice time in the official sessions, or so he said. She was not with him everywhere: after winning the Caen GP, he travelled up to Paris to meet her.
But the way their life together was punctuated by the death of one friend or rival after another – like that of Collins at the Nürburgring in August – gradually eroded her resilience. ‘Stirling couldn’t have the emotional involvement,’ she reflected. ‘He just moved on. It was just the next race. I couldn’t do that.’ You would make friends with the drivers and travel from race to race with them, she said, and one day you’d have breakfast with them in the morning and that evening they’d be gone. And she would be left with the job of comforting the wife or the girlfriend. Yet it was something they avoided discussing. ‘All that had its effect on me. I couldn’t take that life.’
She was finding married life difficult in other respects, too, from the trivial – Alfred Moss, who often travelled with them, disapproving of her liking for a glass of wine with dinner on the grounds of cost – to the more serious – Stirling not allowing her to employ a maid at their home, denying her a say in interior decoration and giving her an allowance while forbidding her to spend her own money – to the utterly dismaying experience of having her words distorted by the journalists who clustered around them everywhere they went. Once, on the way to meet Stirling in a downpour, she was delayed for a minute or two because she had been getting soaked and stopped to buy a cheap plastic mac, only to hear him object to what he saw as a waste of money.
Over the new year they
travelled to New Zealand, where he won the Grand Prix, via Los Angeles, where they attended a Hollywood party filled with stars. Then came two weeks’ skiing in Switzerland – Katie was an expert, as she was at water-skiing, fly fishing and skeet shooting – followed by a visit to Buckingham Palace for Stirling to receive his OBE from the Queen, who asked him the question to which everyone wanted an answer: had he decided which car he was going to drive in the coming season?
They were living in his old flat in Challoner Mansions, but he had begun the search for a site on which to build a new house. In April, Katie’s appearance on television when he was the subject of This Is Your Life prefaced a season during which she was gradually less in evidence at his races. He took his pal David Haynes to Syracuse. Katie was with him at Monaco and Oporto and Nassau, but was not on the plane to South Africa, where he saw in the new year with a race at East London. They exchanged greetings by cable.
Soon after the start of 1960 the news leaked out that their marriage was over. He was distraught. ‘She left me, I didn’t leave her,’ he said, many years later. ‘I was very much in love with her.’ For a long time, even after she had gone back to live in the place where they had first met, he believed that the marriage might be repaired. Eventually, as his distress eased, he accepted the finality of his loss and began seeing other women. As part of their settlement, he gave her the house in Nassau. After a while, they rebuilt a lasting friendship.
In 1964 she married an American artist, Don Seiler, with whom she lived in Miami and the Bahamas until their divorce in 1970. Kate Seiler, as she was thereafter known, became a patron of art and music in Nassau and worked with charities providing scholarships for young Bahamians. When a film crew arrived in Nassau to shoot scenes for the James Bond film Thunderball in 1965, it was she who shot the clay pigeons at which Sean Connery appeared to be aiming. In 2015 she returned to Montreal, where some of her time was spent serving food in a women’s shelter. She died there of cancer on 17 April 2020 – three days after Stirling’s death.
CHAPTER 35 MADE IN ACTON
Tony Vandervell offered Moss a retainer of £5,000, paid in monthly installments, plus a fee of £1,000 a race to lead his squad of Vanwalls in 1957. Out of that he would have to pay his own expenses, including travel and hotels. Thirty years older than Moss, Vandervell was used to driving a hard bargain; this would not be the cushioned five-star treatment the driver had received at Mercedes, but it put him behind the wheel of a British car that might be capable of winning Grand Prix races. And he respected his new team owner: ‘He appeared a difficult and gruff man, but he was very kind and fair, deep down.’
Born in 1898, Vandervell had served as a young engineer in the Great War. Like Alfred Moss, he had raced and won at Brooklands, in a Talbot, and also competed on a Norton in the Isle of Man motorcycle TT. But most of his energies had gone into taking the reins of the company his father had founded, originally making electrical equipment for horse-drawn carriages. Its breakthrough came in the 1930s, when Tony Vandervell acquired the British licence to an American patent for a revolutionary design of ‘thin wall’ engine bearings, which became widely adopted around the world. In a sign of his persistence, he travelled to Cleveland and slept for six nights in an outer office before securing the necessary approval. Manufactured in a handsome modern factory on Western Avenue in Acton, in west London, the bearings secured the company’s prosperity.
Soon after the war, along with other representatives of British industry, Vandervell was persuaded by Raymond Mays to join the advisory board of the BRM project. Quickly frustrated by an evident lack of progress, he offered to buy the team a current Formula 1 car from Italy to get them started. Using the Board of Trade import licence granted to BRM, in 1949 he paid just over £5,000 for one of Ferrari’s latest Formula 1 cars, which arrived in time to be entered in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Renamed the Thin Wall Special, the car performed poorly and was then stripped down and examined. Soon Vandervell was writing to Enzo Ferrari, pointing out its many shortcomings. Since Ferrari used Vandervell’s bearings and knew of his qualifications as an engineer, this did not cause the explosion it might otherwise have done. He agreed to supply a new car, in exchange for the old one, for the 1950 season. This time Ferrari also sent Alberto Ascari to drive the car at the Silverstone International Trophy, but the result was no more impressive.
Communications between Acton and Maranello grew spikier. Nevertheless Ferrari sent a new engine for 1951, to be installed in the modified 1950 chassis, and at the International Trophy its driver, Reg Parnell, was leading the Alfa Romeos when a rainstorm halted the race and the Thin Wall Special was declared the winner. A win at Goodwood and a close second behind Farina’s Alfa at Dundrod provided further encouragement for Vandervell to end his involvement with BRM and forge ahead with creating his own team, with a very clear ambition in mind.
‘He was a sort of English version of Ferrari, or trying to be,’ Moss said. ‘He didn’t like Ferrari, he didn’t like what he called “the bloody red cars”, but there’s no doubt that he was very Ferrari-ish in his temperament. I suppose he was influenced by Ferrari, but he’d never admit it.’
It took Vandervell another half-dozen years to reach his goal, fielding a succession of good drivers – Farina, Collins, Hawthorn, Schell – in increasingly effective machinery. When he built a car, renamed the Vanwall, for the new 2.5-litre Formula 1 in 1954, its power unit was effectively four single-cylinder 500cc Norton motorcycling engines joined together in a design by the engineer Leo Kuzmicki. Having ridden a Norton competitively before the war, Vandervell had acquired an interest in the company.
He was putting together a team capable of taking a car that had begun life as an ugly duckling and turning it into a winner. Moss tried a Vanwall at Oulton Park in November 1955 and was impressed – although not quite enough to accept an offer to sign up for the following season. He put a toe in the water in 1956, however, when Maserati gave him permission to drive Vandervell’s latest car in the non-championship International Trophy at Silverstone. By that time Colin Chapman, the brilliant young Lotus designer, and the aerodynamics expert Frank Costin had collaborated on modifications to the suspension and the bodywork that would bring the car to its peak.
The Costin bodywork had a strikingly smooth shape, resembling a wingless jet fighter, with a small oval opening in the streamlined nose and a high, rounded tail; its performance was even more impressive, not least because Vandervell had opted to use disc brakes on the car at a time when Ferrari and Maserati were sticking with old-fashioned drums. Moss put the car on pole at Silverstone and outpaced Fangio’s Lancia-Ferrari, Hawthorn’s BRM and Schell in a second Vanwall to take the victory. At Reims in July, after his Maserati retired early, he was able to watch Schell mixing it on equal terms with the Italians. Soon his mind would be made up. Omer Orsi’s team had given him a good season, and he had finished second in the championship again, but it looked like Fangio was on his way back to Maserati and now he knew that at last there was a car in British racing green capable of competing for the title. And it would not be BRM, a team Hawthorn had left in mid-season, dismayed by its incompetence, or Connaught, which was in the process of going bust, with its assets up for auction.
At Vanwall the 27-year-old Moss was joined by two young men of great promise. Tony Brooks had abandoned his career as a dental surgeon in order to become a professional racing driver. A quiet and modest but determined 25-year-old, he had followed his victory for Connaught in the 1955 Syracuse GP with good performances for the Aston Martin sports car team, showing impressive speed in all conditions and on all kinds of circuit, although a Formula 1 season with BRM had proved highly unsatisfactory, not least when he escaped serious injury after the brakes failed at Silverstone and the car somersaulted before incinerating itself.
Stuart Lewis-Evans arrived in the middle of the season. A Kent-born driver with Welsh ancestry, he was twenty-seven and had come up through Formula 3. A congenital spinal problem a
nd troublesome duodenal ulcers put his strength and stamina in question; like Brooks, however, he was quick enough on his day to keep the number-one driver on his toes. He also had a manager: a young second-hand car and motorbike dealer in Kent named Bernard Ecclestone, who had bought a couple of the Connaughts to run as a team but soon discovered they were too slow.
The early months of the 1957 season were full of so many disappointments that the Moss jinx seemed to have been transferred to his latest team. The car was fast – Moss set a new lap record at Syracuse and Brooks finished second to Fangio at Monaco in the opening weeks of the season – but unreliable. Although the engine delivered impressive horsepower, the drivers had to spend a long time persuading Vandervell, who considered his engineering knowledge superior to theirs, that it suffered from a serious flat spot. It took even longer to cure the problem. Vibration from the four-cylinder unit tended to break throttle linkages and fuel-injection pipes until fixes were made. But the biggest disappointment was not mechanical: it was Moss’s crash at the Monaco chicane, when he led the race from the start but hit the barrier at the chicane on the fourth lap, taking the pursuing Ferraris of Hawthorn and Collins out of the race with him and breaking his nose, opening the way for a Fangio victory, with Brooks in pursuit.
Strangely, since it became so closely identified with his career, Moss was never a great fan of the Vanwall. ‘It was no 250F, I’ll tell you that,’ he said. ‘Aerodynamically it was pretty good, which helped at places like Monza, and the brakes were good, too. The engine was good, once they’d sorted out the dreadful flat spot, but the gearbox was very difficult to synchronise and in general, being a Colin Chapman design, the car was not user-friendly. Chapman’s designs may have been the best, but they were not easy to use. They were not constant cars, that was the trouble. They were prone to both oversteer and understeer, and they’d just switch from one to the other. I don’t know enough technically to be able to say how or why.’
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