The Boy

by Richard Williams

  Fifty years later he described 44–46 Shepherd Street as his best buy. ‘Even if it were still a bomb site,’ he told the Daily Telegraph with evident satisfaction, ‘it would be worth £10m.’

  CHAPTER 45 DARK BLUE

  Stirling and Katie Moss were in Bangkok when they heard of Mike Hawthorn’s death in a road accident on 22 January 1959. Having announced his retirement a few weeks earlier, the newly crowned world champion was planning marriage to his girlfriend, the English model Jean Haworth. He had been on his way to a business meeting in London in his heavily modified Jaguar Mk 2 saloon when he came across Rob Walker in his Mercedes 300SL coupé on the Guildford Bypass. As could be the way of things in the days before the introduction of an overall speed limit, they started to race each other.

  Some would later recall Hawthorn’s description of his feelings about competing against the Mercedes team at Le Mans in 1955: ‘I was momentarily mesmerised by the legend of Mercedes’ superiority… Then I came to my senses and thought, damn it, why should a German car beat a British car?’ This was not Le Mans, but pride was at stake. As the British racing green Jaguar pulled ahead of the silver Mercedes on a fast downhill section, Hawthorn lost control of his car, which crossed the dual carriageway and finished up against a tree, killing him instantly. For a man who had seen many friends and rivals die on the track, this seemed a strangely sad and even inglorious way to go.

  A few weeks earlier Hawthorn had surprised Enzo Ferrari by telling him that he would not be defending his title in 1959. There was clearly a vacancy for a number-one driver at Maranello, and Vandervell’s withdrawal from the sport had left Moss at a loose end, needing a quick solution to the problem of what to drive in Formula 1. But it was not to apply for the job that Moss wrote to Ferrari in March. The reverse, in fact.

  In the letter he said that he had recently been asked by a journalist why he would not be driving for the Scuderia. ‘I hope my answers were fair, but I feel that I would like you to hear them directly from me.’ The first was that he felt racing benefited when the top drivers were spread between the top teams. The second related to the debacle at Bari in 1951, and his disappointment at the ‘shattering’ blow of being told, having made his way down to Puglia, that there was no car available for him. He finished by expressing his admiration for Signor Ferrari, for his cars and his drivers, and hoping ‘that I shall be able to match your team with my little Cooper’.

  Ferrari responded immediately to what he described as a ‘curious’ letter, his words suggesting it was simply destiny’s fault that he could not include among his squad of drivers the one he had publicly nominated as the best in the world. He signed off with cordial greetings.

  As Moss had suggested with his reference to ‘my little Cooper’, the answer to the dilemma was to resume his partnership with the man whose car he had driven to victory in Buenos Aires a year earlier.

  Born in 1917, brought up in a hundred-room mansion on an estate in Wiltshire, Robert Ramsay Campbell Walker was in the habit of filling in the space in his passport requiring him to describe his occupation with the word ‘gentleman’. He had seen his first Grand Prix at the age of seven, in Boulogne, and over the years he had become a familiar figure on the racing scene.

  Before the war he used part of his fortune from the Johnnie Walker whisky company to buy a Delahaye, which he co-drove with his fellow Cambridge man Ian Connell at Le Mans in 1939. They finished eighth, Walker driving the last twelve hours after Connell’s feet had been burned too badly by leaking exhaust gases to allow him to continue. Walker drove the whole race in a pinstriped suit and stopped before the finish to share his pit crew’s last bottle of champagne.

  While serving with the Fleet Air Arm during the war he promised his new wife that he would not return to driving racing cars in peacetime. But the agreement said nothing about entering them, and in 1949 he took the Delahaye back to Le Mans with two other drivers. The car also finished third in the French Grand Prix at Reims, held for sports cars that year, although the adventure was marred when one of the drivers was arrested for trying to smuggle several thousand watches back to England. The car was impounded and Walker had to pay £300 to get it back. Undeterred, he continued to enter cars in various categories for a cast of drivers including Tony Rolt, Peter Collins and Tony Brooks. Pairing up with Moss for the Argentinian Grand Prix at the beginning of 1958 took him into the top flight of racing, an increasingly professional world to which he brought a reminder of the old amateur ethos.

  To some, Moss’s decision seemed like madness. No one had ever won the world title driving for a private entrant. Not having a works car meant no access to the latest technical developments, to the full array of a factory’s services, or to the help of teammates. Walker bought the Cooper-Climax, now fitted with a 2.5-litre engine, and had it painted in his own colours, those of Scotland – dark blue with a white stripe around the nose, which coincidentally acknowledged Moss’s lineage on his mother’s side. But the private entry would always be one stage of development behind the works machines. John Cooper, too, had refused to sell Walker one of his modified Citroën gearboxes, which his number one driver, Jack Brabham, had developed into a perfect and reliable fit with the Climax engine. The solution was found by Alf Francis, now installed as Walker’s chief mechanic. Francis recommended that they order special gearboxes from the Modena workshop of Valerio Colotti, familiar to him from his former role as Maserati’s transmission expert.

  Moss had acquired a liking for the status of underdog – or at least a relish for the challenge of taking on the superior might of the factory teams, particularly Ferrari. By this stage, too, his priorities seemed to have changed – or so he argued long afterwards, in an interview with Philip Porter. ‘I raced because I enjoy racing,’ he said. ‘At the time I was lucky enough to be good enough to make some money, so therefore it was not necessary for me to go anywhere else. Rob was a lovely man. The whole crew were a great team, and at the time we were as good as any other team, I reckon. And of course the freedom I got with Rob was important. If I wanted to go anywhere in the world, if he half-agreed he would send the car. Also I could race any other cars I wanted to race wherever I wanted to race them. We would test and do all the things we normally did. I just found it more enjoyable.’

  It could be said that Moss’s reputation for having an excessive interest in money was undermined by his arrangement with Walker. In five years together, their agreement was based on nothing more than a handshake. And, as he said, the non-exclusive relationship allowed him to go off and do other things outside Formula 1, such as sharing victory in the 1959 sports car championship as the lead driver in the Aston Martin team. Midway through that season, after gearbox failures with the Cooper in the first two rounds of the world championship, Moss was even able to switch, with Walker’s blessing, to a BRM run by the British Racing Partnership, a team recently formed by his manager, Ken Gregory, and his father, and in which he had an interest.

  He had tried BRM’s latest model, the P25, in a private session at Goodwood over the Easter weekend, posting the circuit’s first 100mph lap. He agreed to drive it at the International Trophy at Silverstone, and was going well until the front brakes failed at 130mph, giving him a nasty moment. When BRM finally won a world championship grand prix, at Zandvoort in May with Jo Bonnier at the wheel, an agreement was made to borrow a car, paint it in Moss’s old favourite colours – pale green with white wheels – and enter it for him in two Grands Prix in July. On a hot day at Reims the car went well, although unable to match Tony Brooks’s winning Ferrari, until Moss spun on melting tar and could not restart, the clutch already having broken. He tried pushing it back to the pits, as he had done with his Cooper in 1951, but this time the car was heavier, the distance was greater and the heat got the better of him. At Aintree, where the field was depleted by the absence of the Ferrari team, thanks to a labour dispute in Italy, he finished a slightly devalued second to Jack Brabham’s Cooper after fuel-feed problems and a lon
g pit stop.

  Back in Walker’s Cooper for the German Grand Prix at AVUS, he had qualified second on the high-speed track in Berlin, managing to clock 196mph on one of the long straights in the little car. The gearbox broke during the race, which was at least a gentler fate than the one awaiting BRP’s BRM, which ejected its new driver, Hans Herrmann, while cartwheeling to destruction after its brakes failed at the end of one of the long straights. But the Cooper redeemed itself with wins from pole position at Lisbon – where he lapped the entire field – and Monza, representing a considerable feat for the single-car team against the more powerful Ferraris of Brooks, Phil Hill and Dan Gurney. The Colotti box had defied Moss’s critics by holding up for two victories in a row.

  There would be a three-month wait before the final round of the championship. At Sebring, Moss, Brooks and Brabham were all in contention for the title. Once again Stirling needed to win and take the fastest lap. Brooks was removed from contention when he was rammed in the rear by his young teammate Wolfgang von Trips on the opening lap. Keeping a promise he had made to his wife, he stopped to check that there was no significant damage, thus putting himself out of contention and incurring the wrath of the team’s management for what was seen as his excessive caution. After five laps Moss held the lead, comfortably ahead of the works Coopers of Brabham and Bruce McLaren, when the gearbox failed again, handing the title to the Australian.

  Defending his driver against widespread accusations of being a car-breaker, Walker wrote in Autosport: ‘I’m sure all those for whom he has driven will tell you that Stirling takes it out of himself, not the car. People forget the times he has won with no water, no clutch, no oil pressure.’

  Still there were many who claimed that this anticlimax represented just the latest example of Moss paying dearly for what they saw as his fatal flaw: a seemingly incurable need to complicate things in the desire to find a winning edge, when all he really needed was to be in a factory team that put him on level terms with his rivals and then to let his genius make the difference. But it was too late to change now, or so it seemed.

  CHAPTER 46 THE PRICE

  The week before Ivor Bueb died at Clermont-Ferrand in 1959, he and his wife Betty had stayed at the Moss family farm in Tring with Stirling and Katie. When it came to long-distance sports car races, Moss always needed another driver to share the work in the cockpit. Since the early ’50s, the regulations had required the participation of at least two drivers per car in endurance events. Occasionally his partner was someone close to his own level of performance: a Collins, a Brooks or a Gurney. More usually it was someone of lesser stature who could be relied on to keep his end up without damaging the car or losing too much time. Bueb was one of those, and a very good one.

  The owner of a garage in Cheltenham, he came late to motor racing. Aged twenty-nine when he made his debut in Formula 3 in 1952, he created a good enough impression to win a seat in the Cooper works team three years later, finishing second in the British championship. He started a handful of Grands Prix between 1957 and 1959, without scoring points, although he managed a third place in the non-championship Pau GP of 1957 at the wheel of a Connaught. In sports cars, though, he distinguished himself – particularly at Le Mans, where he co-drove a factory-entered D-type Jaguar with Hawthorn to win the tragic 1955 event, which happened to be his first race in a big sports car. He repeated the win in an Ecurie Ecosse D-type two years later, sharing the drive with Ron Flockhart.

  After Archie Scott-Brown, the works Lister-Jaguar driver, had died in a crash at Spa in 1958, Bueb became his replacement. In February of the following year he was teamed with Moss for the Sebring 12 Hours, in the latest three-litre Lister-Jaguar with an aerodynamic body designed by Frank Costin. Briggs Cunningham, who had entered Moss’s winning OSCA in 1954, was the official entrant, and the car was painted in his team colours: white with a double blue stripe down the bonnet.

  Bueb took the first stint and was holding fifth place when he handed over to Moss after two and a half hours. Steadily Moss worked his way past the works Ferrari Testa Rossas into the lead, increasing his margin when, unusually for the Florida circuit, heavy rain began to fall and turned into a prolonged cloudburst. After six hours he was still at the wheel when the car ran out of petrol on the far side of the circuit. The mechanics had missed one of the churns during the last refuelling stop. Moss jumped out and persuaded a marshal to give him a lift back to the pits on his motor scooter, hoping to grab a can of fuel and take it back to the car. To the team’s astonishment, the car was disqualified on the grounds that its driver had contravened the regulations by failing to return to the pits on foot.

  Four months later Moss and Bueb were both on the start line for the Trophée d’Auvergne, a Formula 2 race at the Charade circuit in the hills outside Clermont-Ferrand, a mini Nürburgring offering a challenge and a spectacle. Both men were in Coopers fitted with Borgward engines. Moss’s car was entered by Rob Walker, Bueb’s by Ken Gregory’s British Racing Partnership, which was funding its efforts by pioneering the idea of title sponsorship of a team, in this case from a hire-purchase company called Yeoman Credit. Taking his place on pole position, Moss was forced to back off when the starter, the notoriously erratic Toto Roche, dropped his flag while standing directly in front of the Englishman, who gesticulated furiously for Roche to get out of his way. Bueb’s Yeoman Credit teammate, the brilliant 21-year-old Chris Bristow, led the opening laps, but eventually Moss took over and cruised to victory.

  Bueb, however, lost control during a sequence of high-speed curves and smashed into an earth bank while trying to fend off Maurice Trintignant in the second Walker Cooper. Thrown out as the car rolled, he lay motionless on the track next to his wrecked machine, his helmet torn off. Three gendarmes and a marshal took one limb each and carried him away from the circuit while the remaining competitors continued to roar past. An ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital in Clermont-Ferrand, where a ruptured spleen was diagnosed among his injuries. Bristow, to whom he had been something of a mentor, stayed on with him until he died there six days later.

  Betty Bueb was looked after by Katie Moss, who remained in France while her husband went off to Berlin to prepare for the next race. The victim in Germany that weekend would be Jean Behra, Stirling’s former Maserati teammate, thrown out of his Porsche over the rim of the AVUS banking and killed when his flying body hit a flagpole. When Stirling got home from Berlin, he and Katie stayed up talking until four in the morning in what may have been their only proper conversation about her inability to live with so many deaths. ‘The drivers were detached,’ Katie told Philip Porter. ‘The wives couldn’t be.’

  ‘Fear is a lack of understanding of what is happening’: John Freeman’s questions on Face to Face in 1960 lead Moss to talk about crashes, money, God and marriage (BBC).

  CHAPTER 47 FACE TO FACE

  The news of the end of Moss’s marriage had broken a few weeks before he was accorded an honour almost the equal of his OBE: an appearance in June 1960 as the subject of Face to Face, a weekly half-hour BBC television series in which famous people were interviewed by John Freeman, a pioneer in the art of interrogation on the small screen.

  Moss was the seventeenth of the programme’s thirty-five subjects during its three seasons, his turn coming after Bertrand Russell, Dame Edith Sitwell and Adlai Stevenson, and only three weeks after the riveting (and, to many, disturbing) edition in which the comedian Tony Hancock had been stripped bare, psychologically speaking, in front of the cameras. Freeman’s most memorable success would come when he reduced the TV personality Gilbert Harding to tears by questioning him about his relationship with his mother.

  For the programme’s makers, the timing of the Moss interview could hardly have been better. He had also just been banned from driving on the road for a year and fined £50 after being found guilty of dangerous driving by a court in Shrewsbury, following a head-on collision. Freeman would not miss the opportunity, but he was shrewd enough to take hi
s time.

  After the title sequence, featuring charcoal sketches of the subject by the artist Feliks Topolski, he began by asking whether Moss ever thought about death while racing. ‘Not when I’m driving,’ came the reply. ‘But I am frightened of death. It’s something which I think every driver should… or possibly it helps him to be frightened. Because if you’re not frightened of an accident, then what is your limitation?’

  From the start, Moss was responding in his slightly clipped voice – a reminder that, near the start of his career, he had taken elocution lessons – with swift, fluent and thoughtful answers, occasionally correcting himself or going back to amplify a point he was trying to make. ‘Fear is really a lack of understanding of what is happening,’ he continued. ‘Like when you’re a child, you’re frightened of the dark because you don’t understand what’s there. If you come into a corner and you’re going at what you consider is fast enough, and suddenly something happens, then you get frightened. Or at least after you’ve tried to sort out the mess you’re in, then you get frightened.’

  Was he conscious that death was very close if he made a mistake? ‘No. Not when I’m driving. I am when I think about it, but I prefer not to. Death is something which frightens me, but thinking about it doesn’t make it any less likely to happen, therefore I don’t think about it.’ Was it all as risky as spectators imagined? ‘It’s a calculated risk, but there are unfortunately things which you can’t calculate for, which are mechanical failure or oil on the track.’