Especially when you consider that in 1961, he managed not one but two astonishing drives, one in May at Monaco, one in August at the Nürburgring – drives which have gone down in history, along with Fangio v. the Ferraris, or Nuvolari v. Mercedes, or Stewart at the ‘Ring in ’68.
What made them so epic? The fact that Moss was driving a hopelessly outdated, underpowered, privateer’s Lotus 18/21: and was pitched against the steaming aggression of, not only Ferrari, but also cunning young upstarts Porsche, making their foray into GP racing.
In some ways, it’s the sheer look of Moss’s car at Monaco which has helped to fix the race in the Pantheon of sporting moments. Time, after all, has not been kind to the aesthetics of the Lotus. The outer skin gives the impression of having been shaped around a loose mixture of cornflake packets and shoeboxes. The pantomime Coventry Climax engine is so small and so shrouded by sheet metal as to be invisible. The roll-over bar appears to have been taken from a pram. For 1961 the whole thing was painted in Rob Walker’s uninspiring dingy dark blue, with a modest white nose stripe and white ‘wobbly web’ wheels, the jellyfish-shaped curiosities Lotus used instead of the more normal light alloys. Even by the standards of the day, the overall effect is like a kid’s home-made go-kart racer in a field full of, say, Triumph TR3s – especially when seen on the grid, parked up against the sexy red sharknose Ferrari 156s, new for ’61 and with success written all over them.
First, though, Moss had to start his weekend by rescuing Innes Ireland – the latter one of the great arms ‘n’ elbows tearaways – when Ireland crashed spectacularly in practice going through the Tunnel just after the Grand Hotel Hairpin. It was a huge mess, and Ireland was sprawled on the ground, bleeding badly, when Moss jumped out of the Lotus to come to his aid, get him a cigarette, generally calm him down. This allowed Innes subsequently to deliver the fabled observation: ‘Ah, yes, ’61; that was the year when I came out of the fucking Tunnel without the fucking car.’
His charity work done, Moss promptly went on to take pole position.
Come race day, more complications. The weather was unusually hot, so Moss had the side panels taken off the chassis (causing the Lotus, minus half its bodywork, to look even more risibly home-made) and had himself drenched with a bucket of water to keep the heat at bay (declaring in passing that he found himself rather fetching in wet-look). Then, while sitting in the car, on the grid, waiting to start, he noticed a crack in the chassis tubes. Typical Lotus, light and fragile as a leaf. Whereupon he called over his mechanic, the legendary Alf Francis, who phlegmatically wrapped some wet towels around the tubing and the neighbouring petrol tanks – containing 30 gallons of explosive AvGas – and welded the car back together there and then with an oxyacetylene torch. Moss kept fatalistically calm. The car was bodged back into more or less one piece as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The race started.
Richie Ginther took the lead for Ferrari, but, before the race was a quarter done, Moss was in front and drove the rest of the race at a speed which was no more than half a second slower per lap than his pole position time. Thus he not only set joint fastest lap, but also found the monstrous cool to humiliate the other drivers by emphasising his head-back, out-for-a-spin, no-pressure, driving style and waving at the spectators as he passed. He was like an electric hare being chased by greyhounds: they could get close, but never close enough to catch. After 200 miles and nearly three hours of unremitting pressure, he won the race, just over three seconds ahead of Ginther. When the American finally came into the pits, he was so shattered by the pursuit that he had to be physically lifted out of his own car. Moss, perched on the ridiculous-looking Lotus 18, got the Champagne. And if you had to choose one race to remember the peerless Moss by, this could be the one.
It was driving of this sort – bravura, dazzling, arrogant – that finally made Enzo Ferrari dissolve with helpless admiration. At the end of ’61, he told Moss: ‘I need you, tell me what kind of car you want and I will make it for you in six months. Put your ideas on paper for me. If you drive for me, you will tell me on Monday what you did not like about the car on Sunday and by Friday it will have been changed to your taste. If you drive for me, I will have no team, just you and a reserve driver. With Moss, I would need no team.’ This was submission enough. But there was more: he was prepared to let the car be entered by Rob Walker – the gentlemanly team manager who had been in charge of Moss’s Lotus up to that point – and run in his colours of dark blue and white. Not a bit of Ferrari red anywhere. That’s how much it meant.
And if there was any justice in the world, Moss would have driven a Ferrari in ’62, and taken the crown. The 156 which gave the American Phil Hill the ’61 title had plenty of life left in it. If Ferrari had kept his side of the bargain, Moss would doubtless have made the car even better. It was Moss’s best chance. His Formula One career had, up to this point, always described a queasy passage from marque to marque, either ending up in a good car but a subordinate position (Mercedes); or in a good position, but the wrong car (Vanwall, Lotus). Everything could, finally, have been settled with Ferrari.
Then, in April 1962, he smashed up his Lotus in the International Glover Trophy Race at Goodwood, smashed up his career and smashed himself up, very nearly terminally. He suffered terrible leg, arm, chest and head injuries. His personal belief up to that point, with regard to crashing, had generally been that ‘I like seat belts in closed cars, but in a racing car I want to be thrown out, or have the choice, mainly because of fire.’ This time, there was no fire, but the car had wrapped itself around him liked a crushed cigarette packet. Newspapers reported that, while trapped in the wreckage, he had asked someone to tell his mother that he was ‘fine’ and that she was not to worry. He was then rushed to hospital, where he spent weeks in a coma.
The recovery was long and dismal. By the following year, he felt well enough to get behind the wheel again. But when he did drive, he felt that something vital had gone, the irreducible edge that he had always had. In 1963, he announced his retirement – typically enough, framing it with reference to his hero, Fangio. Asked if he had any regrets about never winning the Drivers’ Championship, instead of answering yes of course, he said, ‘None at all. Fangio did it five times. If I won it six times, would it make me better than Fangio? I know it wouldn’t, because I am not. I would rather go down in history, if am to go down in motor racing history, as being a pretty good driver who never won it, because I don’t think you can match Fangio. He is the greatest driver who ever lived.’
Whatever one makes of this, the fact remains that, even today, decades after he last raced in anger, Moss is still being picked as one of the all-time masters of the sport – his greatness somehow endorsed rather than diminished by his failure to take the F1 World Championship. However modern, however career- and business-minded Moss was in his heyday, however many noses he got up, it’s not a big, blatant title that characterises him, it is, rather, the artistry of his individual performances, and the sheer daunting fluency with which he raced whatever car he got into, that speak volumes. Sixty-six starts in F1; sixteen wins; sixteen pole positions. The Mille Miglia in 1955. The Alpine Rally in 1953. The 1957 Sebring 12 Hours. The 1958, 1959 and 1960 Nürburgring 1,000 kms …
Which raises the question: how do we judge the career of a Formula One driver? To put it another way, what does one make of the extraordinary Graham Hill, a driver who even now raises a smile of recognition, a baffled shrug and the acknowledgement of a life lived slightly larger than normal, and who succeeded as much as anyone could hope to succeed, but who has always suffered from his proximity to more brilliant competitors?
Even Hill’s fans would admit that part of the problem was that there were two separate Graham Hills, forced to co-exist within the same body.
First, there was the Graham Hill of popular legend, the sly, humorous party beast, a weird conflation of Sir Henry Segrave and Errol Flynn, who would win at Monaco an astonishing five times, each time attending t
he formal, glamorous, post-race dinner given by Prince Rainier, before excusing himself and, according to Tony Rudd, wandering, like a sailor on shore leave, down to the Tip Top. This was ‘a club on the way down the hill from the Casino, and he would be singing rowing and football songs. It used to be quite a rowdy evening, which went on till dawn.’ From Princess Grace to Eskimo Nell: Hill’s guiding philosophy, in this respect, being ‘You’ve got to have a bit of fun, haven’t you?’
And indeed, fun was to be found all over the place. It could mean getting smashed in a night club; or donning a wig and dancing the can-can; or, infamously, as the decade wore on, jumping onto the table at a dinner and hurling himself at a stripper who was performing at the other end of the room.
This last took place at ex-racing driver Cliff Davis’ do, as it happened, in a mid-1960s knees-up. ‘As I was sitting at the top table,’ Hill later wrote, ‘and she’ – the stripper – ‘was at the far end of the room, it meant running along the table to reach her. Well, unfortunately, as I was tripping daintily between the glasses – the dinner was over of course – one of the tables collapsed and I went with it. I fell onto one of the wine glasses, the tulip broke off and the stem went straight into my leg, just below the knee. Fortunately I was in my underpants at the time or else I would have ruined my trousers.’ It did ruin his leg, however, and once the blood had been staunched, ‘I walked out with my trousers over my arm and hailed a taxi to take me to the Charing Cross Hospital.’ ‘Hill Hurt At Party’ yelped the Daily Sketch, without going into the sordid details; also: ‘Motor Ace Cuts Leg.’
Did any of this matter? After all, Hill was doing no more than enjoy the traditional racing driver’s birthright of partying and crumpet; Hawthorn would have approved.
On the other hand, there were now new, added, dimensions of hedonism and media invasiveness, which changed the mood somewhat. Naturally, Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins and Stirling Moss had all surrounded themselves with pretty girls at one time or another: but the figure of the Racing Driver was starting to acquire some larger symbolic purchase on the popular imagination. Drivers were becoming jet-setting social animals, rather than filthy toilers in the grime and dust of provincial race tracks. Hill, with his appearances on radio and TV, his newspaper-worthy partying, his international presence, embodied the change. Moss said of Hill at the time: ‘He is the archetype of the driver of the future, precise, smooth, knowing. Graham is just as smooth as he looks.’ And it was a kind of smoothness that led to more partying, and even prettier girls. As his incredibly long-suffering wife, Bette, observed, ‘Many girls threw themselves at him, they were so obvious – but often very beautiful.’ How relaxed was she about this? Not terribly. She soon got ‘sick of listening to these girls telling Graham how absolutely marvellous he was at motor racing – so fantastic and all that.’ And yet there was nothing she, nor the other drivers’ wives could do. ‘We disliked the dolly birds. They were always around.’ Hill, on the other hand, took their attentions as due tribute, and if there were no dolly birds to dance around him at the end of a race, or at a social function, he would be quite out of sorts.
There was another distinction between past and present. Whereas Collins and Hawthorn partied and raced and crashed through the 1950s and gave little thought to the future, Hill had a gloomier alter ego, sitting uneasily alongside Hill the party beast. This was Hill the joyless, grim-faced grafter, the man with his eye on the prize, the Hill of 1962, who, having joined the monumentally unsuccessful BRM in 1960, went on strike – as team leader – to make sure that the properly professional Tony Rudd was given full technical control, at the same time seeing to it that Raymond Mays (him, indeed) was sidelined. This was the Hill who listened seriously to Sir Alfred Owen (who had let it be known that he was sick of bankrolling a laughing-stock, and that if more success was not forthcoming – after a solitary victory at the Dutch GP in ’59 – he would ditch the concern) and put his back into making the team work. This was Hill, not of the Tip Top Club, but of BRM.
What were BRM up to, at this point? The BRM P48 had appeared at the end of the 1950s, a flurried response to the Cooper revolution and predictably unsuccessful. The Formula, meanwhile, had been tampered with yet again, leaving normally aspirated engine capacities at a miserly 1½ litres, and creating a new breed of dainty, somewhat compromised machines. But BRM, directed by Rudd and badgered by Hill, produced a potent enough little V8 with dragster-style stack pipes (which tended to break off in the heat of a race) and a neat green chassis for it to go in. It was called the P57 and, what do you know, thanks to the hard work and tenacity with which Hill helped to straighten it and the team out, BRM got their second-ever win in May 1962, at the Dutch GP at Zandvoort.
Bruce McLaren (Cooper-Climax), Jim Clark (Lotus-Climax) and Dan Gurney (Porsche) then took the next four GPs, before Hill surged back at the Nürburgring, followed by Monza, where ‘a clear-cut and solid victory for Great Britain brought engineers and mechanics lining the Monza pits to their feet.’ Clark took the US Grand Prix at Watkins Glen; and the pummelling season-long fight only ended when Hill won the last race in South Africa, sprinted twelve points clear of Jim Clark in the tables and took his first (and BRM’s only) Championship. Fifteen years of breathtaking underachievement were wiped out, and all the ‘Intrigue, jealousy and backbiting,’ as Raymond Mays tragically characterised BRM’s prinicipal features, were, for a time, forgotten.
This was a funny thing. Here, at the close of ’62, was Moss, thirty-three years old, the most gifted driver of his day, nursing his injuries, now resigned to never landing the title. And here was Hill, thirty-three years old, solid but not dazzling, a bit of a wild card, in a BRM, up against the brilliant young Jim Clark in an equally brilliant Lotus, taking the Championship with four convincing wins to Clark’s three. How had he managed it?
Well, in the years following the war, Hill trained as an engineer, and ever after kept a succession of little black books in which he noted down all aspects of his cars’ setups, plus endless items of interest about the tracks he drove on. Having done his background preparations, he then turned into a pit-lane martinet, driving his mechanics mad, checking and rechecking mechanical details, insisting on things being done his way and his way only. (‘He could be very, very demanding, very brief and abrupt.’) He would go out and practise a single corner twenty times in succession, just to get it right. He liked his cars set up as hard and solid as they could be: no slack, no unnecessary give. Once in his overalls, he was as uptight and pedantic as his Armed Forces appearance suggested. John Surtees diplomatically put it like this: people thought ‘Perhaps he was a little wavy in things he did off the track, but generally on the track he was at his steadiest.’
All of which was given an extra sharpness, an extra relief, by the fact that he had Jackie Stewart as team-mate at BRM, followed by Jim Clark as team-mate at Lotus – two of the greatest drivers ever, forever breathing down his neck. There he was, not only wrestling his way to the top of his profession, fighting his own imperfections, but doing it under the noses of two of the most naturally talented drivers of the post-war period. One feels he ought to get a special award for keeping cool in such company: but even allowing for that, his record is one that any driver would be proud to claim, including two World Championships, fourteen wins, thirteen pole positions, ten fastest laps, five Monacos, plus the unequalled triple – Formula One World Champion, winner of the Indianoplis 500, winner of the Le Mans 24 Hours. Noone else has managed this, not Moss, Fangio, Clark, Prost, Senna, Schumacher. And it beats the achievements of his contemporaries John Surtees, Denny Hulme, Phil Hill – and, by a mile, those of Mike Hawthorn. And he did it without compromising himself. ‘He was a team-mate,’ said Stewart, with evident affection, ‘he was a friend, and absolutely always a gentleman.’
And yet, and yet. What was really going through gentleman Rob Walker’s mind when he declared, ‘My view of Graham as a driver was that he was definitely not talented. He did it by pure hard work and
guts and slog’? Tony Rudd, likewise, argued that ‘Graham, on his day, could beat Jimmy [Clark], but he wouldn’t have those days very often,’ which sounds pretty niggardly, coming from your former team director. ‘Graham would have to be provoked to do really well,’ Rudd would also say, as if he had a grudge against him. Moss may have called him ‘smooth’ and ‘precise’, but it was the guts and slog handle which would stick. Even when the great Walter Hayes, Vice President of Ford Europe, lauded Hill, it came out seasoned with reservations: ‘Graham Hill was a great driver. Nobody will ever persuade me that he wasn’t. I doubt if anybody else had more true grit and determination.’ Typically enough, Hill announced after his successful 1966 Indy 500, ‘I’m a bit surprised to have won,’ thus ruefully pre-empting the jokes at his expense. It was a strange way to be successful.
And why did none of this ever seem to happen to Jack Brabham, Hill’s rival and contemporary?
Brabham’s record is virtually the same as Hill’s, except that he managed to get three Championships out of his fourteen Grand Prix wins; and he never won at Indianapolis.
No question, Brabham was not only a redoubtable driver – having learned his trade on the dirt ovals of Australia, where the drivers ‘were all lunatics’, and the conditions were ‘terrific driver training’ – but was also a talented engineer, and made himself indispensable to Coopers soon after his arrival in Britain. And in 1966, he became the only driver to take the Championship in a car bearing his own name – a feat unlikely to be equalled. But why is it that diehard race fans are often happier to raise a toast to Sir Jack than Graham Hill?
A crucial, even decisive, factor, was that Brabham was always reticent to the point of taciturnity. This is a sensible way to be, in a sport in which garrulity can draw criticism (see Jackie Stewart) and manly modesty delights (see Fangio, Jim Clark). Once in a while, he would come out with the observation that there was ‘No way you could call those 1,500-cc machines Formula One,’ or that ‘For two seasons, 1966–1967, Repco and Brabham had been on top of the world.’ And he would make a dour joke at his own expense at the ’66 Dutch GP, appearing on the grid leaning on a walking-stick and wearing a W. G. Grace fake beard, mocking the fact that he had turned forty a few days before. But these were only temporary lapses. The rest of the time he was famously cautious with money, and never anything less than plain-dealing, keep-his-own-counsel Jack Brabham, just as Denny Hulme was only ever a tough, balding racer who took the title – in a Brabham – in 1967.
Burning Rubber: The Extraordinary Story of Formula One Page 6
