The Boy

by Richard Williams

  Of course, he added, the car won races and eventually the constructors’ championship, so it was perhaps unfair to make criticisms. ‘It did what it was built for. But it was not a driver’s car.’

  Brooks agreed. ‘The Vanwall was a car that didn’t particularly like drifting. It was the complete opposite of a car like the 250F. Its basic tendency was to understeer. It was a very solid car in a mechanical sense, and you’d know where you were with it. But it wasn’t forgiving in the sense that a 250F was. You had to be very precise to get the best out of it. Virtually everybody who tried it said the same thing.’

  The gear change, he said, was ‘heavy and ponderous, with a very long travel’. To prove it, at Monaco he returned to the pits at the end of the race, pulled off his left glove and showed Vandervell exactly what that second place had cost him: a bloodied palm worn raw by more than 2,500 of those heavy gear-changes over the 100 laps of the circuit around the houses, although it was later discovered that his car also had a broken clutch plate.

  It was a different injury that cost Brooks a place in the team at the next grand prix, at Rouen-les-Essarts, and a non-championship race at Reims. During the 24 Hours of Le Mans he had crashed his Aston Martin into the sandbank at Tertre Rouge at three o’clock in the morning. The car overturned, trapping him underneath, and only a fortuitous sideswipe from a passing Porsche knocked the inverted Aston off him and allowed him to scramble clear. Severe cuts and bruises put him in hospital for four days before he was flown home.

  Moss, too, missed the races at Rouen and Reims. After Le Mans, he and Katie had headed down to Juan-les-Pins on the Côte d’Azur, where they danced at a night club, gambled at the casino and water-skied. It was while practising a 360-degree turn on a mono-ski that seawater forced itself into his septum. The pain in his sinuses was so intense that injections were needed, followed by a trip back to Paris for hospital treatment that included lumbar punctures. Then came six nights at the London Clinic, where doctors drilled through his septum to release the trapped fluid, and then had to do it again. Eventually the pain receded enough to allow him to travel up to Aintree for the British Grand Prix.

  At the two French races the cars had been driven by Lewis-Evans and Roy Salvadori. The latter shared Moss’s ambivalent reaction to the car. ‘It was very quick, quicker than anything I’d driven before. Nothing like the Maserati 250F that I’d driven previously, but it had lots of power. You were on top of the car, almost. And you just had this feeling that you had to be extra careful. It was too restrictive, as far as I was concerned. It needed a lot of precision. It told you who was the master straight away.’

  For their home grand prix, Vanwall entered three cars, with Lewis-Evans joining Moss and Brooks. Their principal competition came from the four Lancia-Ferraris of Collins, Hawthorn, Musso and Trintignant and the four works Maseratis of Fangio, Behra, Menditéguy and Schell. To the delight of the home fans, Moss took pole position, with Brooks sandwiched between Behra and Fangio on the four-car front row, and Lewis-Evans between Hawthorn and Schell in the second line as they prepared for ninety laps of the circuit.

  Moss hared off into the lead, and stayed there unchallenged until the twenty-first lap, when his engine started to misfire and he came into the pits. But before the start, a deal had been made. Whereas Moss had recovered completely from his sinus problems, Brooks was still suffering from his Le Mans bruises and had lost a stone in weight from his slender frame, along with a great deal of physical strength. Foam-rubber padding had been added to his cockpit to reduce the pain from the inevitable buffeting. It was understood that if Moss had to retire, he would take over Brooks’s car. And on the twenty-seventh lap the second car was duly summoned into the pits. Brooks, who had been lying sixth, was helped out of the high-sided cockpit, and Moss jumped in.

  The lengthy changeover had cost another three places, but now Moss explored the limits of the car, the circuit and his own skill to hunt down his opponents. One by one they were overhauled: first Schell, who pulled in to retire, then Menditéguy on lap thirty-four, Fangio on lap thirty-five, Musso on lap forty, Collins on lap forty-six and Lewis-Evans on lap sixty-nine, putting Moss in third place behind Behra and Hawthorn. Meanwhile, an exhausted Brooks was sent out for a few laps in Moss’s car, but its ignition problem proved beyond immediate repair.

  The capacity crowd was enthralled by the chase, but even as their hero set new lap records it looked as though he was simply going to run out of time to challenge for victory. But then luck took a hand and, for once, smiled on Stirling Moss. With twenty laps to go, and Behra seemingly on his way to winning his first world championship grand prix, the Frenchman’s clutch disintegrated. As the shrapnel scattered across the track, Hawthorn ran over a piece of jagged metal that punctured his tyre, forcing him to limp back to the pits. Moss swept past, followed by Lewis-Evans.

  There was still time for his surviving teammate to be hobbled by a broken throttle linkage, dropping him down to seventh, but Moss had enough in hand to make a precautionary stop for ten gallons of fuel before taking the chequered flag. Ecstatic spectators flooded onto the track and engulfed the Vanwall as Moss completed his lap of honour. On 20 July 1957, after years of frustration, they were able to acclaim the first victory in a world championship grand prix for a British car with a British driver.

  Or British drivers, in this case. In the victory celebrations Moss was joined by an equally elated Brooks. The first prize of 2,500 guineas plus £500 for the first British car to finish would be divided according to how many laps each had driven: twenty-seven for Brooks and sixty-three for Moss. The eight championship points were shared equally; the rule permitting drivers to switch between cars was about to be removed from the regulations.

  When I asked Brooks whether, given the rate of attrition among their rivals, he would have won the race had he stayed in the cockpit of his own Vanwall and seen it through, he replied: ‘That’s the $50,000 question. If only… As it transpired, it didn’t require a flat-out effort to win. But that’s with 20/20 hindsight. We didn’t know how it would pan out. I never look back. Not in rancour, anyway.’

  There were three rounds of the world championship left on the 1957 calendar. Nürburgring was a disaster for the Vanwalls, whose springs and shock absorbers could not be adjusted to suit the bumps of the fourteen-mile circuit. Buffeted by the constant vibration, Moss finished fifth and Brooks ninth, having been sick three times during the final lap. Fangio won, producing perhaps the greatest drive of his life at the age of forty-six to chase down and slice past Hawthorn and Collins after a long pit stop, securing his fifth world title in the process.

  Pescara was a different story. Added to the calendar at the last minute, when fuel price rises following the previous year’s Suez crisis led to the cancellation of championship rounds in Belgium and the Netherlands, the race started at breakfast time to take account of the extreme August heat. Brooks retired on the first lap with a broken piston and two laps later Lewis-Evans threw a tyre tread when he had just passed the pits, requiring him to drive an entire 15.99-mile lap at diminishing speed before he could get back to have it changed. As a result he finished fifth of the seven cars surviving at the end of a long morning’s racing. Enzo Ferrari, who had vowed not to race in Italy again until he was officially exonerated from blame for de Portago’s crash in the Mille Miglia, had finally given in to Musso’s entreaties and sent a single car. But Moss won virtually without challenge, three minutes ahead of Fangio: another victory for a British car and driver, but this time on Italian soil. The rejoicing at the victory banquet that night was matched by the fireworks marking the Ferragosto holiday in the sky above the city.

  The headlines and editorials were already being prepared by the British newspapers and magazines. ‘In winning his second Grande Épreuve for Tony Vandervell in less than a month’, Autocar would proclaim, ‘Stirling Moss has placed Britain once and for all among the leaders in grand prix racing. It has taken four years of patient effort… and now the
rewards are coming in.’

  Moss left afterwards for Rome, accompanied by his father in a rented Fiat 1100, heading for Fiumicino airport and a flight to London. Halfway there the head gasket blew, and he recorded in his diary that a taxi for the remaining 120km set them back 10,000 lire. They caught a flight at 4.10 a.m. and were in London by 8.15. Moss unpacked, repacked, collected Katie and her friend Margot, and set off again to catch a flight to the US, where he had an appointment with an MG in Utah. Later he would collect a cheque for £1,850 17s 6d for his efforts in Pescara, including a proportion of his retainer, starting and prize money and trade bonuses and minus the amounts advanced to pay the hotel bill for himself and his father.

  He returned to Europe in time for the final round of the championship, at Monza, where the Vanwalls rubbed in their new superiority. The trio set the three fastest times in practice, with Lewis-Evans in pole position and Moss and Brooks alongside him in the brilliant sunshine. They were ahead of Fangio, who filled the fourth slot on the front row, and of the entire Ferrari team, now back to full strength. ‘A truly wonderful sight,’ Denis Jenkinson wrote in Motor Sport. Even more enthralling was the dicing in the opening laps between the three green cars and the Maseratis of Fangio and Behra, the quintet slipstreaming each other and going through the fast curves two and three abreast before misfortunes started to strike.

  Of the Vanwalls, Brooks suffered from a sticking throttle, a gearbox oil leak and vapour lock in the fuel system, eventually finishing seventh, while a cracked cylinder head forced Lewis-Evans into retirement. But by half-distance Moss was almost a lap ahead of Fangio, his nearest pursuer, and that was how they stayed. As Moss came into the pits at the end of the lap of honour, his car was covered in a giant Union Jack. ‘To beat the Italians at Monza is surely the greatest achievement ever made by a British racing car of any type,’ Jenkinson wrote. Down in the Maserati pit, he reported, there was ‘an air of bewilderment’.

  Over the season, Vandervell’s team had won three Grands Prix to Maserati’s four. Moss had finished runner-up to Fangio in the drivers’ championship for the third year in a row. The tide was turning.

  CHAPTER 36 SALT FLATS

  Speed records had been a big thing before the war, when the exploits of such Brooklands habitués as Henry Segrave, George Eyston, Malcolm Campbell and John Cobb made headlines. The world land speed record was on a par with the world heavyweight boxing title: everyone knew who held it. Schoolboys drew these aero-engined monsters – Segrave’s Golden Arrow, Eyston’s Speed of the Wind and Thunderbolt, Campbell’s Bluebird and Cobb’s Napier-Railton Special – in their sketch books.

  In the immediate pre-war years the two big German teams, Mercedes and Auto Union, had hired a stretch of the Frankfurt–Darmstadt autobahn for a week in the winter to set new class records with their specially built streamlined cars, driven by the likes of Rudolf Caracciola and Bernd Rosemeyer for the greater glory of the Third Reich, which was paying most of their bills. Rosemeyer, the hero of all Germany, was killed during one of those events in 1938. The following year, on an autobahn near Dessau, the British driver Major Goldie Gardner – who had lost the use of his right leg after being shot down on a reconnaissance mission in 1917 – drove his own highly developed MG to new records in the 1100cc and 1500cc classes.

  Record breaking still had some appeal to the newspapers and their readers during the 1950s. Beginning with his 24-hour and seven-day exploits in a Jaguar XK120 at Montlhéry, Moss went on to attack records for 1100cc cars with a streamlined Lotus Eleven on Monza’s banked oval in 1956, the day after winning the Italian Grand Prix. They had set 50-kilometre and 50-mile records at around 130mph when the bumps of the track fractured a rear chassis member and the back of the car fell off. Before that incident, Moss had appreciated the effectiveness of its slippery shape, drawn up by Frank Costin. The Lotus’s Perspex bubble canopy and smoothly shaped body panels and undertray helped the car’s passage through the air, while strategically placed vents kept the driver cool. It was this car which impressed Moss so much that he persuaded Maserati to invite Costin to design a special aerodynamic coupé for Le Mans in 1957, only for the job to be ruined by careless execution.

  Two months after that debacle, Moss left Europe for America, and the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. In 1952 Goldie Gardner, then aged sixty-two, had set new marks in a new MG special, the EX-135, at Bonneville. Now Moss was heading there to undertake an attempt on the same records in a rear-engined MG called the EX-181.

  A teardrop-shaped body with a small rear fin enclosed a supercharged, methanol-burning four-cylinder 1.5-litre engine based on those used in the British Motor Corporation’s modest family saloons, the Morris Oxford and the Austin Cambridge, as well as the MGA sports car, already a success in the US market. On the nose of EX-181, a Union Jack and a Stars and Stripes were emblazoned together.

  Moss was aiming at 240mph. That would be 60mph or so faster than he had driven before. Not such a huge gap, but the conditions were very different, both in and out of the vehicle. He would be lying on his back, guiding the car by means of an almost horizontal steering wheel as he made a timed run before turning to make a second run in the opposite direction, the average being taken from both. Before he set off, the mechanics would fasten the bodywork and the clear plastic canopy over him and close it with fasteners that would not be accessible from the inside. In front of him was an endless vista of pure white salt, the remains of a lake from the Pleistocene era, its crystals glinting in the clear air at 4,000ft above sea level.

  It was a simple enough job, as long as he remembered to follow a strip of dark dye laid in a straight line down the course and not to destroy the special treadless tyres by accelerating too fast through the gears; as long as he could avoid being distracted by mirages appearing in the heat haze above the shimmering salt; as long as he could ignore the howl from the supercharged engine behind his head; and as long as he could overcome the loss of third gear on his second run.

  After unexpected rain had forced them to hang around for two wasted days while the salt dried, the attempt was a success. Moss got the pretty little teardrop speeding over the endless white tablecloth fast enough to set world records for the mile, the kilometre, five miles, five kilometres and ten kilometres, all between 224 and 245mph. Then, slightly relieved to be out of that claustrophobic pod, he was on the plane and back home in time to be best man at Ken Gregory’s wedding.

  CHAPTER 37 KIDNAP IN HAVANA

  While the racing engines revved, the small boy sat with his mother on a grass bank in the gardens of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, taking in the noise and the colours: red cars, blue cars, white cars, lined up on the Malecón, Havana’s seafront boulevard.

  The city’s finest hotel had been built in 1930 on the site of the Santa Clara Battery, two of whose artillery pieces remained as ornaments, pointing out into the Gulf of Mexico. Its guest book recorded the passage of countless figures from the world stage: Errol Flynn, Ernest Hemingway, Marlene Dietrich, Winston Churchill, Rocky Marciano, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. In 1946 it had hosted a Mafia summit convened by Meyer Lansky and the exiled Lucky Luciano. Sinatra provided the evening’s entertainment as the mob bosses spent a week discussing how to develop their casino interests in Havana and Las Vegas.

  Lansky now owned a piece of the Nacional, a gift from Fulgencio Batista, the President of Cuba. He and his North American partners had enhanced the hotel’s appeal to foreign visitors by adding the Casino Parisien nightclub, opened by the singer Eartha Kitt in 1956, its gambling facilities staffed by personnel brought in from Nevada. Within a couple of years the casino’s takings were said to rival those of any Las Vegas establishment. A Grand Prix, with its aura of glamour and danger, was just the thing to lure more high rollers to Cuba.

  And so here by the side of the sunsplashed boulevard, on Sunday, 23 February 1958, sat the young Philip Targett-Adams, better known a few years later as Phil Manzanera, the guita
rist with Roxy Music, one of the most influential British rock groups of the 1970s. He was accompanied by his mother, who had appeared with her husband in a photograph in the previous day’s newspaper, socialising at a pre-race function with Stirling Moss and his new wife and members of the staff of the British embassy.

  ‘Obviously everyone was terribly excited because of Stirling Moss,’ Manzanera says, looking at the newspaper cutting in his west London recording studio and imagining himself back in 1958, ‘but my parents also knew all about Fangio – they’d lived in Argentina, where my brother was born. He and my sister were at boarding school in England. So I got plonked with my mother on the grassy knoll of the Hotel Nacional, and we watched the race – and it stayed with me. It was that wonderful and incredibly dangerous period – the drivers with flimsy little helmets and white overalls and the beautifully shaped cars, red and white and blue and black, and that amazing noise, so loud and exciting…’

  His father, Duncan Targett-Adams, had arrived in Havana with his family a few months earlier. As a young man he had joined the British Council and during his first posting, to the port of Barranquilla in Colombia, he met and married Magdalena Manzanera. Spells in Argentina and Uruguay were followed by a return to London, where he joined the staff of British South American Airways, with the job of opening up new routes.