The Boy

by Richard Williams

  He believed that driving fast was an art form, in its way, with similarities to ballet in the emphasis on discipline, rhythm and movement. ‘Certainly it’s not creative in the way that choreography is creative or that composition of music for ballet is creative, but I think that in execution it is comparable.’ And in those two performances in 1961, at Monaco and the Nürburgring, he raised the art to its highest level.

  CHAPTER 51 INDUSTRIAL ACTION

  He was not a natural trade unionist, but at Erlen in Switzerland in 1951 he had led a delegation of English, French and Italian drivers to complain to the organisers about the tactics of Toni Ulmen, an erstwhile German Formula 2 champion, who was exploiting the rule about overtaking only on the left by placing his outdated Veritas in the middle of the track and blocking faster cars, including Moss’s HWM.

  Six years later he became a member of the new Union des Pilotes Professionels Internationaux, an organisation including all the grand prix drivers of the day. Following the terrible crashes at Le Mans in 1955 and the Mille Miglia in 1957, which had taken the lives of spectators as well as competitors and brought widespread condemnation of the sport as a whole, the drivers banded together with the intention of campaigning for better safety precautions. When they boycotted the 1957 Race of Two Worlds on the Monza banking, claiming that it was too dangerous, they were accused of adopting strike tactics better suited to miners or dockworkers. After the American cars and drivers had turned up and put on a spectacular race in which no one was injured, the Europeans looked foolish. And that was more or less the end of the UPPI.

  But when Fangio accepted a present from his fellow drivers to mark his retirement in 1958, his speech at the formal dinner in the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan included the remark that the Italian Grand Prix, held earlier that day, had been a good race because nobody had been killed. The number of fatal accidents in Formula 1 was continuing to increase, prompting the UPPI’s rebirth four years later in the form of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association, which came into being in May 1961. Following an election during the week of the Monaco Grand Prix, Moss was named the body’s first chairman. Its original members were listed on its headed notepaper: Stirling Moss (chairman), Joakim Bonnier (vice-chairman), Cliff Allison, Jack Brabham, Tony Brooks, Jimmy Clark, Olivier Gendebien, Richie Ginther, Masten Gregory, Dan Gurney, Graham Hill, Phil Hill, Innes Ireland, Bruce McLaren, Roy Salvadori, John Surtees, Henry Taylor, Maurice Trintignant and Wolfgang von Trips.

  With only three exceptions – Hans Herrmann, Michael May and Lucien Bianchi, who were not regulars in the series – that list represented the full roll call of drivers entered for the 1961 Monaco race. What is striking is that of the nineteen founder members of the GPDA, no fewer than fifteen had English as their native language: nine were British, four were American, one was Australian and one a New Zealander. Five or six years earlier, before the great cull that removed the likes of Ascari, Marimón, de Portago, Castellotti, Musso, Behra and Schell, the proportions would have been very different, but the shift also told the story of the changing balance of power within the sport, from Italy, Germany and France to Britain. Grand Prix racing was following the lead of the diplomatic world: its working language was now English.

  Moss retained the chairmanship for two years, until the formal retirement that followed his accident at Goodwood. He was succeeded first by Jo Bonnier, who served from 1963 to 1971, and then by Jackie Stewart, whose seven-year term encompassed the time in which the safety of the drivers became a much greater priority.

  There had been scepticism when the GPDA was first formed, some traditionalists believing that such bodies had no place in motor sport. Those same sceptics had derided and perhaps helped smother the UPPI. Now things were different. Stewart, in particular, was appalled by the death rate in the ’60s and early ’70s; he and his wife had mourned the loss of so many friends that he vowed to use the organisation to pressure the governing body into accepting new ideas on safety, from the mandatory use of seat belts, flameproof clothing and certificated helmets to safer fuel tanks and the use of Armco barriers. Circuits considered hazardous were removed from the calendar. This meant the end of such landmarks as the original eight-mile Spa-Francorchamps track, the Nürburgring’s majestic Nordschliefe, the wheatfields of Reims-Gueux and the vertiginous Monza banking.

  Like Stewart, Moss had taken part in races and meetings in which drivers had died; nevertheless he deplored many of the changes being made in the name of safety, believing that a willingness to risk life and limb was intrinsic to the sport. ‘I think part of the attraction of motor racing was the danger,’ he once said to me. ‘That was part of the reason you wanted to do it.’ He gave Ken Purdy his opinion on featureless artificial circuits: ‘To go flat out through a bend that is surrounded by level lawn is one thing, but to go flat out through a bend that has a stone wall on one side and a precipice on the other – that’s an achievement.’

  Tony Brooks, the least macho and most thoughtful of racing drivers, drew another parallel. ‘It’s the sociological factor. You’re not supposed to risk your life these days. It’s more than fifty years, thank goodness, since we’ve been involved in what you might call a proper war, so people no longer understand that life can involve a high degree of risk. Think about what happened in London during the Blitz. There were bombs raining down constantly, every day you could be killed, and people took it in their stride. “It could happen,” they thought, “but it probably won’t.” Now people think it’s abhorrent to do anything that involves risk.’

  Brooks and Moss shared a love of circuits that presented the greatest challenges, but not everyone agreed. Brabham hated a place like Pescara, with its natural hazards. So did Hawthorn, who once said of the Targa Florio: ‘I can raise no enthusiasm for rushing up and down mountains with hairpins all over the place and sheer drops on one side.’

  In an interview in 2009, Moss compared motor racing without danger to cooking without salt: ‘It’s still a lovely meal, but, my god, salt would have jazzed it up a bit more.’ He added that he was scared of dying. ‘I didn’t want to die. I had no death wish. I thought I would drive as fast as I feel safe and that would be my limit, and I stuck with that all the time.’

  Another of his remarks seemed to sum up his philosophy: ‘One of the reasons one races is because one wants to frighten oneself. If you go round and you’re fully safe, what exhilaration are you getting?’

  CHAPTER 52 FOUR BY FOUR

  Curiosity was always a salient feature of Moss’s character, particularly when it came to technical innovation. ‘He was always looking for a technical advantage,’ Ken Gregory said, ‘even though he didn’t need it.’ In his quest for machinery that would give him a winning edge, sometimes his eagerness tripped him up. Occasionally, as with Ferguson’s Project 99, it pointed him towards the future.

  At the beginning of the ’60s, road cars were driven either by the wheels at the back or, in a few slightly eccentric exceptions, such as the Citroën 2CV, the Saab 96 and BMC’s Mini, at the front. Four-wheel drive was practically unheard of for anything other than utility vehicles like tractors and Land Rovers. The Ferguson-Climax P99 was the novelty of the 1961 season, a front-engined Formula 1 single-seater with an engine driving all four wheels.

  Conceived by Tony Rolt, Moss’s former teammate in the Jaguar sports car team, it was commissioned by Harry Ferguson, whose company was better known for manufacturing farm tractors but who wanted to demonstrate the application of four-wheel drive to other types of vehicle. When the project began, Formula 1 cars had 2.5-litre engines located in front of the driver. By the time it made it to a racetrack, all that had changed. But, unlike Aston Martin’s DBR4 and Lance Reventlow’s Scarab, it was not rendered immediately obsolete by the wholesale switch to a rear-engined philosophy and new regulations requiring 1.5-litre engines.

  The all-wheel drive meant that the car’s balance was sound even with the engine in its outdated location, and its weight was not greatly different
from that of a Cooper or a Lotus. Naturally it required a very different driving technique, calling on Moss’s unmatched powers of adaptability. He found it fascinating, particularly appreciating the pronounced advantage it gave in wet conditions.

  Entrusted to Rob Walker (for whom Rolt had raced a Connaught) and painted in his colours, it was driven by Jack Fairman at Silverstone in the British Empire Trophy in its original 2.5-litre form and in the British Grand Prix at Aintree with a 1.5-litre engine, failing to finish in one and being disqualified for receiving a push-start in the other. Moss briefly took over from Fairman at Aintree after his own Lotus had retired, giving him the rare distinction of driving two makes of car in a single world championship race and the unique one of driving front- and rear-engined and two- and four-wheel-drive cars in the same Grand Prix.

  In September he was again at the wheel of the Ferguson for the International Gold Cup at Oulton Park. Conditions were wet at the Cheshire track, suiting the car’s characteristics perfectly and enabling Moss, after a poor start, to come through a field including the Coopers of Brabham and McLaren, the BRMs of Brooks and Graham Hill, and Clark’s Lotus. By the time he took his lap of honour, the rain had stopped and the parkland circuit was bathed in autumn sunshine. He had just become the only driver in history to win a Formula 1 race in a car with four-wheel drive.

  Harry Ferguson had died a few months before that victory and the project lacked the backing needed to turn it into a serious proposition in Grand Prix racing. The P99 was taken to New Zealand at the end of 1962 for Graham Hill to drive in the Tasman series, and in 1963 it was sent for tests at Indianapolis, where it inspired a succession of 4WD challengers for the 500 Miles races. In 1964 Peter Westbury used it to win the British hill-climb championship, and the principles of its patented transmission came into widespread use in 4x4 vehicles from major manufacturers. Twenty years on from that Oulton Park win, with BRM, Lotus, Matra, McLaren and Cosworth all having toyed with Ferguson’s innovation, four-wheel-drive was banned completely from Formula 1.

  Moss retained a memory of the car as one of his favourites among the 108 he raced during his career. Its traction, he said, was so good that he could overtake even his quickest rivals around corners – on the outside. And Harry Ferguson’s four-wheel-drive patent turned out be a world-beater. From west London to West Hollywood, all those supersized SUVs clogging the streets – the Range Rovers, the Q5s, the Cayennes, the X5s, the Bentaygas and the Levantes – carry a little bit of the P99’s DNA.

  CHAPTER 53 LUNCH AT THE CAVALLINO

  In the autumn of 1961, between the Modena Grand Prix and the Italian GP, Moss was invited to test the prototype Ferrari 250GTO, so new that its alloy bodywork was unpainted, at Monza. He liked it very much. It was clearly a successful evolution of the old 250GT in which he had enjoyed success. In early April 1962 he and Rob Walker had lunch with Enzo Ferrari in Maranello, in the old man’s private room at the Cavallino restaurant opposite the factory gates, where they discussed the possibility of a collaboration.

  Ferrari received the two visitors from England in his office, a few yards from the entrance to the factory on the Via Abetone. It was through those gates that he had driven the first car to bear his name for a test run in March 1947, a couple of weeks after the teenaged Moss had made his competition debut in his father’s BMW. French would have been their common language. As well as taking them across the road for lunch, where he would have shown them the genial side to the ‘terrifying old man’ he said had been invented by journalists, Ferrari showed them around the factory where the road cars were built alongside the racing department, then gearing up for a new season.

  In his memoirs, Ferrari would bracket Moss alongside Tazio Nuvolari as men ‘who, on any kind of machine, in any circumstances and over any course, risked everything to win and, in the ultimate analysis, appear to stand out amongst the rest. They knew how to give of their best whether at the wheel of a saloon car, a sports two-seater or a single-seater racing car.’

  Now he was impressed by the Englishman’s interest in and technical understanding of what he was being shown as he stopped to watch workmen casting aluminium cylinder heads and welding chassis tubes. ‘He asked if he could look over the workshops, and showed himself astonishingly expert in the numerous things he asked about. We had a long and friendly talk. The conclusion was rather unexpected.’

  Ferrari’s offer was surprising. He would build a Grand Prix car according to Moss’s requirements, he said – it would, of course, be an evolution of the Dino 156 which had just won the 1961 drivers’ and constructors’ championship – and place it at his disposal. It could be run by the Walker team and painted in the dark blue and white colours, as would a GTO to be entered in the major sports car races.

  A works-supported privately entered Ferrari was not something entirely new in Formula 1. Ferrari had lent cars to the Equipe Nationale Belge, painted Belgian yellow for the drivers Paul Frère and Olivier Gendebien. He had lent one to a team called FISA, organised by a group of Italian enthusiasts promoting the country’s young drivers, with spectacular results when Giancarlo Baghetti became the first man to win his debut Grand Prix at Reims in 1961. But it was still an unusual arrangement, and a unique one in the sense that here was Enzo Ferrari lending a car to a driver better than any in his own team – even though Phil Hill, the new world champion, was staying on.

  ‘It was the car to have,’ Moss told Autosport’s Maurice Hamilton many years later. ‘Apart from anything else, I couldn’t think of anyone who’d been killed in a Ferrari because of a mechanical failure. Not one. And that was saying something in those days. I’d been driving Lotus cars and there was a ten-to-one chance that something was going to fall off.’ The plan was for the combination to make its debut in the non-championship Daily Express International Trophy at Silverstone in May, followed by a full grand prix season. Given Ferrari’s dominance in 1961, during which the Scuderia’s cars and drivers had won six of the season’s nine grands prix and both titles, surely this was Moss’s opportunity to set the seal on his career.

  At Goodwood on Easter Monday 1962, track marshals and medical personnel gather around the crushed Lotus in the aftermath of the accident that will end Moss’s career as a professional racing driver (Getty Images).

  CHAPTER 54 EASTER MONDAY

  Any court reporter knows that there are as many sides to a story as there are witnesses. That is as true of a humdrum road traffic accident as it is of a president’s assassination. Or of the crash that ends a hero’s career. Stirling Moss’s accident at Goodwood on 23 April 1962 has its own Zapruder film, the frames from an amateur’s movie camera showing the car with the number seven on its nose and flanks coming out of Fordwater, a fast right-handed curve at the back of the circuit, at about 140mph. Far away from the spectator enclosures, its driver is preparing to shape for St Mary’s, the left-hander named after the parish church in the nearby hamlet of East Lavant. He is halfway round his thirty-sixth lap, with six and a half to go.

  The driver’s white helmet is at its usual distinctive angle. But then something unexpected happens. Instead of following the line of the track, the car heads straight onto the grass, bucking violently as its front wheels hit a hidden gully, losing speed but still travelling at about 70mph when it smashes virtually head-on into the earth bank. Soil and grass and pieces of bodywork are hurled into the air.

  Among the first to arrive on the scene is a 24-year-old photographer. Michael Cooper is a regular at the Steering Wheel Club and acquainted with most of the top British drivers, who sometimes buy prints of his work. Unusually, he has been taking photographs from this rather remote part of the circuit rather than the more obvious locations. Within seconds of the accident, he runs across the track towards the wrecked car. He thinks he sees Moss momentarily trying to lift himself out of the cockpit before his head falls sideways.

  When track marshals arrive, they find the car has crumpled at the front, the radiator and suspension smashed back toward
s the cockpit, where the unconscious driver is slumped over the twisted steering wheel. The tubes of the car’s frame are bent around him. As the race goes on, a St John ambulance arrives with the medical crew. Alfred Moss is there quickly; his wife remains in the pits. Moss’s helmet is removed, revealing the effects of a blow to the left side of his face. There is blood on his overalls.

  A 19-year-old nurse, Annie Strudwick, from St Richard’s Hospital in Chichester, is there as a volunteer; she sees his face turning purple, guesses that he has swallowed a piece of chewing gum and reaches into his mouth to hook it out. Now she holds his gloved right hand as the chassis tubes are cut and bent. (They will stay in touch: ‘You were there when I needed you most,’ he writes when dedicating a copy of his autobiography to her years later.) Miraculously, although petrol is pouring from ruptured pipes, there is no fire throughout the forty-five minutes it takes to free him and lift the unconscious body onto a stretcher. By that time the race is long over.

  The car is Rob Walker’s hybrid Lotus 18/21, now with sleeker bodywork and a V8 Climax engine. For this race, the Glover Trophy for Formula 1 cars, it has been passed on to the British Racing Partnership and a pit crew run by Tony Robinson and painted pale green. Stirling has raced it twice already in the recent weeks, in the Brussels GP and the Lombank Trophy at Snetterton. This morning, while leaving his hotel in Chichester, he has reversed his Lotus Elite into a concrete post. In the race, he gets a poor start. He has been lying third in the opening stages, behind Graham Hill’s BRM and Bruce McLaren’s Cooper, before John Surtees goes past in his new Lola, pushing him down to fourth. There are problems with the Lotus’s gear linkage. He stops at the pits to get it fixed and sets off again, now a lap down on the leader. He matches Surtees’ fastest lap, but he is still in seventh place as he comes out of Fordwater, closing on Hill, the leader, and preparing to unlap himself.