The Boy

by Richard Williams

  In Jenkinson’s words, ‘A pale and shaken Moss got out, thankful for the retaining guardrail and for the solid build of the big Maserati, for a normal Grand Prix car would have fallen to pieces under the impact.’

  Hoping to recoup his investment, Signor Zanetti had the repaired Eldorado Special painted black and sent it to Indianapolis the following year for another man to drive, Moss being otherwise engaged and thus denied a crack at a race he would never get a chance to tackle. Afterwards the car was returned to Maserati, hidden away among the company’s collection of old racers until it re-emerged in confusing circumstances.

  In 1968 the firm was sold by Orsi to Citroën. Seven years later it was put into liquidation and acquired for next to nothing by Alejandro de Tomaso, the Argentinian businessman and former racing driver, in partnership with a holding company owned by the Italian government. Eight hundred jobs had been saved, but the company continued to struggle until, in 1989, Fiat bought a stake. Four years later they took over the entire company, buying out de Tomaso and bringing the famous but perennially ailing marque under the umbrella of its old rival, Ferrari.

  Better times lay ahead. But de Tomaso claimed that the company’s collection of nineteen historic cars of all vintages had not been part of the deal, and after a considerable amount of legal argument they were returned to him. His immediate response was to send them to a London auction house, where they were to be sold as individual lots. But swift and concerted action by Italy’s Minister for Cultural Heritage and the mayor of Modena brought an offer from Umberto Panini, followed by the safe return of the cars to home territory.

  Among the beautifully preserved exhibits in the Azienda Hombre, the spectacular centrepiece is the Eldorado Special, restored to its original ice-cream white livery: not just a true one-off with a fascinating and somewhat lurid history but, for good or ill, the first car in top-line European motor racing to be branded and liveried with an outside sponsor’s identity.

  CHAPTER 39 A GAME OF BLUFF

  ‘Pygmy car sent to Argentine for Moss’ – the News Chronicle headline on Christmas Eve 1957 was looking ahead to the first race of the 1958 world championship season. The so-called ‘pygmy car’ was a two-litre Cooper-Climax owned by Rob Walker, who was becoming Moss’s patron away from his works drive for Tony Vandervell’s team. The Vanwalls were not ready for the trip to Buenos Aires: like the BRMs, which also stayed at home, their engines were being adjusted to meet new regulations requiring the use of something close to standard pump petrol rather than the exotic and specially blended alcohol-based mixtures previously employed in Grand Prix racing. But Moss could not afford to miss a round of the world championship, so he, Walker and their small group of mechanics, including Alf Francis, set off across the Atlantic to face the might of the Ferrari and Maserati teams, accepting the handicap of a humble four-cylinder engine increased from its usual 1.5-litre capacity but still half a litre smaller than the opposition, installed in what was basically a Formula 2 chassis.

  Moss had another handicap: during what he described as a bout of ‘fooling around’ with his wife, one of Katie’s fingernails had scratched the cornea of his eye. He turned up at the track wearing an eye patch to blot out his blurred vision, continuing to wear it beneath his tinted goggles.

  To beat their opponents, including three of the impressive new Ferrari Dino 246 models for Collins, Hawthorn and Musso, the Walker team hatched a plan. Although they carried enough fuel to complete an eighty-lap race lasting two and a quarter hours, they had been told by Dunlop that a set of tyres would only last between thirty and forty laps in the high temperatures anticipated on race day. But pit stops would be costly for the team, given that the Cooper’s wheels were secured by four bolts, as opposed to the knock-off hubs on the wheels of the Ferraris and Maseratis, which could be freed with a few blows of a copper hammer. So Moss went around on the eve of the race cheerfully informing his rivals that he had no hope of a win, given the need to make what would be a very slow stop – a matter of minutes longer than their own. He completed only three laps in practice, recording a time good enough for seventh place on the grid.

  The race was to be run on a 2.4-mile circuit, the No. 2 layout at the Autódromo 17 de Octubre, built in a park to the south of Buenos Aires in 1952 at the wish of President Perón. The crowds had been moved back to a safe distance since the Argentine Grand Prix of 1953, the year in which Perón ordered that the public should be allowed in free; when a fan wandered onto the track, Nino Farina swerved to avoid him and lost control, his Ferrari killing a dozen spectators.

  Moss was pleased to note that the day had turned out a little cooler than expected. Early in the race he worked himself up into fourth place, and then overtook Jean Behra’s Maserati and Hawthorn’s Ferrari, leaving only Fangio’s Maserati ahead. When Fangio stopped for fuel at half-distance, Moss took the comfortable lead that none of his rivals expected to last. Soon Alf Francis was ostentatiously putting out fresh wheels and tyres while showing Moss signals to indicate a pit stop was imminent, with all the time penalty that implied.

  With a quarter of the race left to run, the Cooper still had not stopped and the opposition began to worry. Musso, in the second-placed Ferrari, started to cut down Moss’s lead, which had gone up to a minute. As the Italian hacked away at the margin, cutting it to half a minute with twenty laps to go, Moss could see his rear tyres wearing down. First the tread wore off, leaving them bald. Then he could see the white breaker strips that indicated the rubber was gone. He was now driving extremely carefully, trying to preserve what was left while maintaining a cushion to the pursuing Ferrari. Finally, the breaker strips wore away, leaving the exposed canvas carcass, which began to fray. When the chequered flag dropped, he was just under three seconds ahead of Musso. Almost unnoticed was the fact that he had driven half the race without a functioning clutch. The reports acclaimed a masterpiece of tactical bluffing, one that had given him an immediate lead in the world championship. As he and the Walker team celebrated, the Ferrari pit erupted in a storm of recriminations. They were, in Hawthorn’s description, ‘shattered’.

  CHAPTER 40 THE TEAMMATE

  When he joined Vanwall in 1957, Moss demanded the status of number one in his new team. Wholly focused on the challenge of winning the drivers’ championship, he was intent on making sure that nothing, including his teammates, stood in his way. He had seen Fangio win his title in 1956 by collecting vital points when Collins gave up his car, along with his own chances, after Musso had declined to co-operate. That was the sort of privilege Moss wanted. David Yorke, Vandervell’s team manager, was not a figure of authority comparable to Neubauer at Mercedes. Stirling could make his desires known, and they would be indulged.

  Did he recognise that it would provoke resentment? ‘To an extent,’ he said. ‘It was very difficult to exercise and it caused a lot of friction. If my car blew up, they had to give me another one. We had a good team, the strongest there was. I think Tony Brooks was the best unknown driver there ever was, if you know what I mean. I have great respect for his ability. He was very quick, as was Stuart Lewis-Evans. If you looked at the other teams, they had one driver who was bloody good and the others weren’t close. We were all fairly close.’

  Brooks knew the score from the moment he signed his Vanwall contract. ‘The team spirit at Vanwall was very good, very strong,’ he said, ‘and Stirling was clearly the number one. He had the choice of cars and the choice of engines. The only thing was that David Yorke tended to limit my practice time, once I’d got a respectable time, because if I did a quicker time than Stirling, which did happen, Stirling would grind round until he’d beaten it. He’d try my car. Sometimes he’d have my chassis and his engine, or vice versa. I was messed about a bit in that respect, and it did make life difficult on occasion. I think I started the odd race in a car I hadn’t actually driven in practice, and in those days there were big differences between the chassis. Today they’re produced with such fine scientific precision that you get
into a spare car and it’s identical to your race car. Not so then, not at all.’

  The reality of the arrangement became clear in their first world championship race as teammates, at Monaco. Moss crashed his car at the chicane during the opening practice session, bending the chassis. After repairs were made, he didn’t like the way it was handling. So he tried the car allocated to Brooks, with his own engine hurriedly installed, and set a time that gave him a place on the front row. That was the car he raced.

  The swapping went on at almost every meeting. In practice at Pescara he had a go in all four cars, including the spare. His own car was over-geared and the road-holding felt vague. Lewis-Evans’ car had more satisfactory gearing but was suffering from a fuel-injection problem. Brooks’s car, despite a tendency to overheat, was the fastest. Moss made his choice, and the distinctive white band was painted on its nose. Back in Monaco the following year he was doing the same thing, asking to have his engine removed and installed in Brooks’s chassis because the front end of his own car had been juddering in the first session. For once, David Yorke refused.

  ‘I think it was sometimes counter-productive,’ Brooks reflected. ‘When I was number one with Ferrari, I never took anyone else’s car. I preferred to stay with the same car and really try to get it sorted and concentrate on getting a good lap time. The more you mess about, the more your objectives become non-focused.’

  In 1958 Moss and Brooks were also teammates in Aston Martin’s sports cars. Later Brooks discovered that Moss had asked for a lower gear ratio in his car and had been given it because, the management felt, he could be trusted to stick to the prescribed rev limits. ‘They knew I could be trusted, too, but Stirling could call the shots with Aston as well as Vanwall.’

  Nevertheless, he remembered, there was no falling out. ‘I never had a cross word with Stirling because I knew he was entitled to do what he did. I never, ever complained because if I didn’t like it, I shouldn’t have signed on.’

  Battling for the 1958 world title, Mike Hawthorn’s Ferrari leads Moss’s Vanwall in the opening laps of the Portuguese Grand Prix, with an outcome that would turn on an extraordinary display of sportsmanship (Bernard Cahier/Getty Images).

  CHAPTER 41 CHIVALRY

  In 1958 Moss had the best car – better than the ageing Maserati 250F and at least as good as Ferrari’s new Dino 246 – and an excellent team. Fangio, now forty-seven, was obviously on the brink of retirement, which duly occurred when the five-times world champion quietly walked away after the French Grand Prix at Reims, where he finished a desultory fifth. His departure seemed to clear the way for the Englishman, who had finished second in the final standings for three years in succession.

  By the time they got to Portugal in late August, for the ninth of the season’s eleven races, he had won two Grands Prix, in Argentina and the Netherlands. So had Brooks, in Belgium and Germany. Hawthorn and Collins had won one apiece, in France and Britain respectively. But Collins, after a brilliant victory at Silverstone, had been killed at the Nürburgring, his Ferrari running off the road and tossing him out while he and Hawthorn were dicing with Brooks. Now Moss was starting every race as favourite, a status he confirmed on the streets and boulevards that formed the 4.5-mile circuit of Oporto, where the cars raced along an oceanside boulevard and across a square criss-crossed by tramlines in front of a crowd of 120,000 attending the country’s first world championship Grand Prix.

  His third victory of the season, and the eight points that went with it, was never in doubt. But sitting in second place was Hawthorn, almost a lap behind but ready to collect six points. He was also about to collect the single point awarded for the fastest lap, having beaten Moss’s time. But Moss had been shown a signal from the Vanwall pit that he thought said ‘HAW REG’. This triggered the memory of the sign Alfred Neubauer used to put out: ‘RG’, short for Regulär in German, Regolare in Italian or Regular in English and Spanish, an instruction that meant, ‘Hold a steady pace’. He assumed it indicated that Hawthorn was not speeding up and offered no further threat. In fact, he had misread it. The sign said HAW REC – meaning that Hawthorn had set a new lap record, which would secure him the extra point. Believing he himself had that point in the bag, and with a lead of two minutes and victory secure, Moss thought it unnecessary to speed up before taking the chequered flag.

  On his lap of honour, he saw that Hawthorn’s car had stopped in the escape road at a sharp left-hander halfway round the circuit. The Ferrari’s drum brakes had been fading, and had finally been unable to slow the car in time to take the bend. Hawthorn had stalled the engine and was now out of the cockpit, trying to get going again by pushing the car in the direction of the circuit, as the rules permitted. But it was on a slight uphill incline, making the task impossible.

  Moss stopped and shouted across, telling him to turn it round and fire it up by going downhill on the broad pavement. Hawthorn followed the advice and then continued, still in second place, to the finish. There, however, he was told by the race stewards that he was being disqualified for having push-started the car on the track against the direction of the race. As soon as Moss heard about it, he went straight to the officials and told them what he had seen. When Hawthorn restarted the car, he said, the Ferrari had been on the pavement – not on the track. So he had not broken the rules. After some discussion they accepted Moss’s testimony and a grateful Hawthorn was reinstated that evening, along with his six points for second place and the one for the fastest lap.

  In Motor Sport, Denis Jenkinson observed, with a hint of disapproval, that if Moss had just kept going and left Hawthorn to it, Stuart Lewis-Evans would have finished second, giving Vanwall their first one–two. But that gesture of chivalry towards a rival would have much greater consequences in the weeks ahead.

  Hawthorn finished second again at Monza, the next race, this time behind Brooks. Moss had led from pole position, but his gearbox had broken. In Casablanca for the Moroccan Grand Prix, the last round of the series, Moss would need to win and make the fastest lap in order to take the championship, with Hawthorn finishing no higher than third. During the five-week gap between Monza and Casablanca, the tension rose as the newspapers made the most of the duel between the two men vying to become Britain’s first world champion.

  Moss did his bit in Morocco, leading without challenge from start to finish on the very fast circuit close to the sea, recording the fastest lap and finishing the race with nine points: a flawless performance. His teammates had hoped to help him by finishing ahead of the Ferraris, but both retired after accidents caused by engine failures. Hawthorn was sitting in third place until Phil Hill, the young American who had been drafted into the Italian team after Collins’s death, slowed to let him through and get the result he needed to win the title by a single point.

  So the title belonged to a driver who had won one grand prix in the season to Moss’s four (and Brooks’s three). Such was the peculiarity of the scoring system, which tended to reward consistency: eight points for a win, six for second, four for third, three for fourth, two for fifth and one for sixth meant that three second places were better than two wins. However distorted they seemed, the rules were the same for everyone. Hawthorn, Britain’s first world champion, retired from the sport a few days later, his decision coming as a shock to everyone but himself. Collins’s death had struck him hard, and he was coping with persistently debilitating kidney problems.

  But the real tragedy that occurred amid the sand dunes of Casablanca’s Ain Diab circuit was not the loss of a championship. It was the death of Lewis-Evans, who had crashed after his Vanwall’s engine seized, the car sliding off the track and into a tree. The petrol tank ruptured, trapping the driver in a blazing car. After basic treatment at a local hospital, Lewis-Evans was put in the Vickers Viscount chartered by Vandervell for the trip to Morocco and flown back to England, where he was admitted to the specialist burns unit at East Grinstead Hospital. On the journey, Vandervell told his team manager, David Yorke, and his c
hief mechanic, Lofty England, that his enjoyment of the sport had gone. ‘He wouldn’t be lying in that stretcher if it wasn’t for my bloody stupid hobby,’ he said. After six days in hospital, Lewis-Evans died.

  A month later, having just been asked, via a letter from Buckingham Palace, whether he would be prepared to accept the award of an OBE in the New Year Honours list, Moss was shocked by the news that Vandervell had decided to withdraw the Vanwalls from further immediate involvement in Grand Prix racing. In a reaction that would never have occurred to his greatest rival, whose entire being was bound up with motor racing, the English industrialist had been so profoundly affected by the loss of a promising and likeable young man in one of his cars that he no longer wished to continue. There would be a couple of token attempts to return in the following years, but they came to nothing. His heart had gone out of it.

  ‘He didn’t achieve what Ferrari had done,’ Moss said. ‘Let’s face it, that was something quite different. He was gruff, certainly. I didn’t mind him, I must say, because he was actually quite patriotic and I think the fact that he could make a green car that would beat the Italians gave him a tremendous kick.’

  Moss had played his part, and he would go through the rest of his life without uttering a single word of regret over a decision that had made him the runner-up in the drivers’ final standings for the fourth year in a row, and by the narrowest of margins: the closest he would ever come to the highest of honours.