The Boy

by Richard Williams

  After the accident he is taken first to the hospital in Chichester and then transferred to the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, where he is attended by a consultant neurosurgeon, Wylie McKissock. He is in a coma and will not regain full consciousness for thirty-eight days. He is paralysed down his left side for six months. His left cheekbone is crushed, the eye socket displaced. His left leg is broken at the knee and ankle, with deep cuts. His left arm is broken, as is his nose. Much worse than any of that, the heavy impact of his head with the steering wheel has jarred his brain so badly that its right side has detached itself. When he finally awakes, his only memory of that day will be of denting his road car while leaving the hotel that morning. The blank spaces will never be filled, the dots never joined.

  The crash made the lead item in the Daily Telegraph. The newspapers vied with each other to provide an explanation, commissioning maps and diagrams to show where and how the Lotus had left the track. A careful examination of the wrecked car by Tony Robinson showed that nothing appeared to have broken before it left the road. One suggestion, from a distant eyewitness, was that Hill had been shown a blue flag at Fordwater to warn him of Moss’s approach and had lifted his left hand in acknowledgement, giving Moss the false impression that he could overtake to the left of the BRM, only to find Hill holding the normal racing line, forcing him to avoid a collision by taking to the grass at full speed.

  Hill had seen the pale green Lotus going off and hitting the bank. The next time round, he slowed to a stop. He saw Michael Cooper and asked, ‘Is he all right?’ Then he restarted and went on to win the race. Later he spoke to Aileen Moss, who remembered him saying something like, ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to do it.’ But there was no definitive explanation of the accident – and, of course, Moss himself was left with no memory of it.

  While he was recovering, Gregory attempted to short-circuit the intense press interest in the condition of the national hero by contacting Basil Cardew of the Daily Express, asking the enormous sum of £10,000 for an interview and a photo session. To his surprise, the newspaper’s management agreed to the deal. Moss was barely coherent in his conversation with Cardew, but the interview glossed over the reality of his recovery and served the short-term purpose of satisfying the public’s curiosity.

  Three weeks after the accident, Enzo Ferrari unexpectedly sent a car to Silverstone for Innes Ireland to drive in the International Trophy. It was painted red, with a pale green BRP stripe down the bonnet. Ferrari had kept his promise, but in the changed circumstances no one really knew why he had made this somewhat enigmatic gesture. It was a 1961 car, and Ireland finished an unspectacular fourth.

  Had the crash never happened, how would the partnership of Moss and Ferrari have worked out? Unexpectedly, 1962 turned out to be as dismal for the Scuderia as 1961 had been triumphant. The British teams, particularly BRM, Lotus and Cooper, benefited from new engines matching the power of the Italian cars, and their chassis were superior. A bout of internal warfare at Ferrari, including rows between senior personnel and Enzo’s abrasive wife, Laura, resulted in the sudden defection of many of the top engineers, including Carlo Chiti, the designer of the Sharknose. Richie Ginther, the team’s most experienced test and development driver, had left for a better deal at BRM.

  Eight months later, with the world championship season over, one second place and two thirds for Phil Hill, the defending world champion, a third for Lorenzo Bandini and two fourth places for Ricardo Rodriguez and Giancarlo Baghetti were all the works drivers could manage as the Scuderia Ferrari plunged to fifth place in the constructors’ table, behind four British teams. Given the scale of that debacle, perhaps by mid-season a disillusioned Moss would have been back in one of Walker’s Lotuses, once more fighting against the odds. On the other hand, he might have stuck it out through two difficult seasons and, in 1964, taken the title that would go to John Surtees in one of the cars from Maranello.

  As it was, his return to something approaching normal life took months. Finally, he went home from the hospital, with eyes that were now slightly misaligned after the surgery to rebuild the left socket. In July he flew off for a holiday in Nassau, trying to recover his strength. All the time he was being asked when he would be back in the cockpit. ‘I’ll race in four weeks!’ had been a headline when he was discharged. Soon he realised that the truth was very different. But almost exactly a year after the accident he persuaded himself to return to a deserted Goodwood and take the wheel of BRP’s Lotus 19 sports car, which he had last raced at Nassau eighteen months earlier, to see for himself whether his powers were now so reduced that he would have to retire or whether he still had a future as the world’s greatest racing driver.

  He circulated for a while, testing his reactions. Although the track was damp after morning rain, his lap times were respectable. But something was missing. For a racing driver, an empty track offers the opportunity to establish a flow, a rhythm, in which everything comes naturally. That wasn’t happening. Things that had felt natural and intuitive for so long now appeared to require conscious calculation. After half an hour, or about twenty laps, he returned to the pits and switched the engine off. When he got out of the car, he had already decided that it was all over. In his mind he was preparing a statement that would be issued to the world within hours. The date was 1 May 1963.

  Some suggested that having taken an insurance payout – it was £8,000 – he didn’t feel like giving it back. A more likely reason is that he didn’t want to risk returning to the top flight as a lesser version of the Stirling Moss everyone remembered. Once, talking about comebacks, he mentioned Fangio and said: ‘I wouldn’t have liked him to come back and not be himself.’

  Reflecting on the decision years later, he thought he might have been wiser to wait a little longer. Before the accident, he had intended to continue racing at the top level all the way through his thirties and even beyond. Had he left it another year, perhaps two, his senses might have knitted themselves together into the old neural network of perception and response. He might have been able to charge down the hill to the Mirabeau corner in a Formula 1 car once again and change gear and steer while waving to a pretty girl watching from a café terrace, doing everything at racing speed. Maybe he had cheated himself of that chance.

  CHAPTER 55 A TOY STORY

  Towards the end of the race in Pescara in 1957, the half-dozen cars still running passed by at such infrequent intervals that parents who had come out of their houses to watch the Grand Prix were allowing their children to play on the road – the racetrack! – knowing that the sound of a high-revving racing engine would give them plenty of warning to get out of the way. The Vanwall, however, approached in something close to silence, its exhaust note nearer to the purr of a Rolls-Royce than the yelp of a Ferrari. And two decades after its heyday, the sound of the four-cylinder engine still gave little indication of the power lying beneath its graceful bonnet.

  Too young to see a Vanwall in real action, I’d spent many childhood hours lying on a bedroom carpet, pushing a Dinky Toy version of the car, with its white-helmeted driver, around imaginary Monacos and Monzas, a ghostly crowd cheering on the British hero. For the Italian Grand Prix of 1979, twenty-two years after his win at Monza with Tony Vandervell’s team, Stirling Moss had been invited to take part in a parade of old Formula 1 cars. They would assemble in the square in front of the Duomo in Milan before making their way to the circuit on roads closed for the duration of the cavalcade, a very Italian spectacle.

  Moss would be driving a Vanwall, while Fangio would take part in an Alfa Romeo 159, the car with which he had won his first world championship in 1951. There was also a little Gordini to be driven by Maurice Trintignant, once a double winner of the Monaco Grand Prix and subsequently the mayor of Vergèze, a village in southern France. Trintignant’s nickname was Le Petoulet – a reference to the rat droppings which had clogged the carburettor of his Bugatti when it emerged from wartime storage for Coupe de la Libération in 1945. When
he began producing wine from his vineyard in Vergèze, Le Petoulet was the name emblazoned on the label of his bottles. Now sixty-two years old, he smiled at a group of us standing nearby in the Piazza del Duomo, admiring the neat blue car, and invited us to give him a push-start: the realisation of a small boy’s dream.

  The next day I was sitting with a friend in a grandstand between the two Lesmo corners, awaiting the start of the race in which Jody Scheckter could secure the points that would make him Ferrari’s seventh world champion. And so it came to pass, with Gilles Villeneuve in the second Ferrari sitting diligently on the South African’s tail, almost certainly the faster of the two but loyally aware that, on this occasion, the priority was a title for the team’s number one. Villeneuve’s unselfishness evoked the gestures of earlier days. He was not yet thirty years old and his time, he felt sure, would come.

  Sadly, Villeneuve would not live to reap the reward for his gesture. He and Scheckter stayed with the team for the following season, but the Ferrari of 1980 proved no match for its English rivals, whose understanding of the new science of ground effects left the Scuderia floundering and the South African unable to mount a defence of his title.

  When Scheckter retired at the end of that season, Villeneuve was naturally seen as the heir apparent, but a season of struggle with Ferrari’s first turbocharged car yielded only wins in Monaco and Spain.

  The following year held out greater promise, but after a bitter and unresolved dispute over team orders with Pironi at Imola, where they finished first and second, he was killed in practice at Zolder, aged thirty-two. There would be no world title, but many had admired the way he put a championship second to the simpler desire to win every race he started. The chequered flag, not the accumulation of points, was the vision that motivated him.

  He had established a special place in the affections of Enzo Ferrari, who saw in his displays of high-wire daring and inexhaustible competitive spirit some of the qualities he associated with Nuvolari and Moss, and for which he could forgive the occasional indiscretion. ‘His generosity, his enthusiasm, not to mention the way he broke stub-axles, gearboxes, clutches, and brakes on his way to the finish line, taught us a great deal about how to defend a driver when some sudden need arose,’ the Old Man would write. For the little French-Canadian’s exhibition of unselfish loyalty on this day at Monza, Ferrari was probably as grateful as he had been twenty-three years earlier, when Peter Collins gave up his car at the same circuit so that Fangio could win his fourth title.

  An hour before the start of the Grand Prix, we were cheering the other sight for which we’d come. First Fangio blasted past in the supercharged Alfetta, a sight from the black-and-white images of the immediate post-war years now visible in full colour: the deep red of the bodywork vivid against the green of the foliage in the Monza park and the sombre grey of the track. Soon, heralded by that low murmur, came the dark green car, its cockpit occupied by the man in the white Herbert Johnson helmet. The Vanwall was never a dramatic sight, but its smooth aerodynamic shape, as profound a tribute to the 1950s idea of stylish design as a Hawker Hunter or a Parker 51, possessed a kind of dignity befitting its age, even as Moss guided it at what seemed close to racing speed through the two right-handers and off down towards what was once known, before the introduction of chicanes, as the Curva Vialone. The Dinky Toy had come to life.

  Now a former racing driver, Moss pursues a new career as a commentator for ABC’s Wide World of Sports at the Daytona International Speedway in 1964 (Stanley Rosenthal/Revs Institute).

  CHAPTER 56 BEING STIRLING

  ‘It would be very difficult to give up motor racing,’ he’d told John Freeman during their Face to Face interview in 1960. ‘I don’t know quite what would be a substitute for the exhilaration, the excitement, the travel and all the other things. I’m not really qualified for any particular business, so it’s going to be hard to give it up.’

  What he did was construct a life that allowed him to carry on being the Stirling Moss everyone remembered, earning a living from their residual affection and respect. It took a while to adjust to that new life, and the transition was difficult. To hide the scars on his face while they healed, he grew a beard. He and Ken Gregory parted company after ten years of a close and successful relationship. Strains became apparent when Moss, struggling to recover from his injuries, began to question the way BRP and Stirling Moss Ltd were being run.

  Ivor Bueb, Chris Bristow and Harry Schell had been killed in BRP’s Coopers: each one through driver error or bad luck. BRP tried building their own cars, first for Formula 1 and then for Indianapolis, but with little success. Moss and Gregory finally severed their business partnership in 1965. Later Gregory went into the air taxi business, but his career would always be defined by one relationship. His biography, on which he collaborated with the writer Robert Edwards, was called Managing a Legend. His former client, a man now denied his accustomed means of self-expression, would not be easy for anyone to live with for a while, no matter how much freedom he had been given to pursue his other interests.

  He had been retired from racing for four or five years when I was sent, as a cub reporter for a local evening newspaper in the English Midlands, to report on the opening of a new car dealership, normally the most uninspiring of assignments. But the promise of an appearance by Stirling Moss lifted it out of the regular reporting schedule of funerals, golden weddings, juvenile court hearings, road traffic accidents and the occasional factory fire. He was there when I arrived, and so was a pre-war Bugatti in which he was giving joyrides. I settled into the passenger seat and we set off for a spin up and down a dual carriageway. It was almost as much of a thrill as if I’d been riding alongside him in his Mille Miglia victory in 1955, as the journalist Denis Jenkinson so famously did.

  Giving others a vicarious taste of what that might have been like became part of his job, in all sorts of settings and circumstances. Thirty years after the jaunt in the Bugatti, by which time I was working for a national newspaper, he gave me a ride down the hill at Goodwood during a press day for the annual Festival of Speed. Sitting behind him in a beautifully finished silver-bodied two-seater soapbox cart, powered only by gravity but steered by a master, feeling like a 10-year-old again, I told him: ‘You be Moss and I’ll be Jenks.’ The man in the white helmet had the grace to chuckle.

  His links with the sport were maintained when he joined ABC’s Wide World of Sports, commentating on Formula 1 and the NASCAR series for the American television audience between 1962 and 1980. From 1963 to 1966 he ran his own team, called SMART (Stirling Moss Automobile Racing Team), entering Sir John Whitmore, Innes Ireland and other drivers in cars including a Lotus Elan, a Porsche 904 and a Lola sports car; a BRP was driven in non-championship F1 races by Richie Ginther.

  Eventually, without a great deal of fuss, he returned to racing. He was to be seen in historic events in the 1970s, sometimes – in an example of cognitive dissonance for those to whom Moss in a red single-seater meant a Maserati – at the wheel of a Ferrari Dino 246 replica, an exact recreation of the last front-engined car to win a world championship Grand Prix. He also tried a return to contemporary racing in Audi’s team of saloon cars, but faced the discovery that the old driving techniques were no longer applicable to modern cars with wide slick tyres, and that etiquette among racing drivers had taken a turn for the worse.

  He wasn’t used, he said, to motor racing being a contact sport, as it had become for those who had grown up racing karts. In his era, the likes of the cold-blooded Nino Farina and the hot-headed Willy Mairesse were the rare exceptions to the rule of drivers racing hard but knowing they held each other’s lives in their hands. In his two years in the British Touring Car Championship, the only time he enjoyed the Audi was when it rained and the slick tyres were replaced with treaded rubber, enabling his special touch to show itself once again.

  Later still he acquired a series of his own historic cars to drive at suitable meetings, choosing from a gene pool of pret
ty sports-racing cars from around 1960 with small-capacity engines and good handling. There were cars he’d never raced in anger, like the Wiki, built by a Belgian enthusiast, and a lovely Lola Mk 1. And those which evoked great moments from his personal history, including an OSCA, which reminded him of the car he’d used to win at Sebring in 1954, and a Porsche RS60 like the one with which he and Graham Hill had almost won the 1961 Targa Florio. These were cars in which he could display an artistry easily appreciated from the grandstands.

  Max Mosley, president of the FIA, the international governing body, waived the usual strict regulations on safety equipment by giving him permission to wear his original helmet and overalls in historic races, and to compete in cars without seat belts or other safety devices, making him the only man ever to receive such a dispensation. Thus were the crowds who flocked to see him in historic car events around the world allowed a glimpse of how he looked in his prime, as well as the chance to appreciate the sight of a perfectly controlled four-wheel drift.