Formula One and Beyond

by Max Mosley

  I thought I had absolutely no chance of winning office but might just get on the committee. They used to announce the election results in reverse order and I was very relieved with the confirmation that I hadn’t come last when the first name read out was not mine. When they got to the pre-election favourite for secretary and still hadn’t mentioned me, I was completely astonished. I never thought I could win because of my family name, although I had never experienced any sort of discrimination at Oxford.

  Following the election, we had an interesting term in the Union. Phillip Whitehead, then chairman of the Oxford University Conservative Association but later a Labour MP and MEP, was the president. We secured an outstanding selection of speakers, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Jim Callaghan.

  Would-be physicists had to spend three days each week in the Clarendon Laboratory doing experiments. It wasn’t conducive to learning much about physics, but one did learn about experiments. Apart from the large room where we worked, the laboratory was full of rather eccentric-seeming scientists doing research. Later in life, I again met some of the people from the university’s physics department and remembered why I had chosen the subject. The ideas are utterly fascinating and, in the end, everything is physics. Had I been better prepared when I went to Oxford I might have gone into the world of research and spent my professional life in happy obscurity doing something really interesting. Instead, my life took a dramatic turn in an unexpected direction.

  My first encounter with motor racing came in May 1961, during the Easter vacation. Jean’s employer was a volunteer flag marshal at nearby Silverstone and received a couple of free tickets for big events. He very kindly offered her his two for the International Trophy, a major Formula One race held at Silverstone (though run for the previous year’s cars as the engine formula had just changed). Neither of us had ever been to a motor race. There was the usual traffic jam on the approach to the circuit so we were delayed getting in. After parking the car, I heard an unfamiliar sound and got to the fence just in time to see the Formula Junior race come under the Daily Express Bridge and around Woodcote, then a long, sweeping corner. It was an extraordinary moment. I knew instantly this was something I absolutely had to do.

  Stirling Moss won the main race in the wet, driving a Cooper and lapping the entire field. Bruce McLaren spun off without damage right below where we were sitting, and the conditions were so bad that many leading drivers of the day, including Graham Hill, Jim Clark and John Surtees, followed McLaren off the track. Little did I realise that, seven years later, I would know Bruce well or that he would found a company that would feature prominently in my life for over 40 years. After that first experience, I managed to persuade Jean to come with me to Formula One races in France, including one at Reims when we had to sleep in our car because all the hotels were full.

  After taking my finals in 1961, I went to a rather rudimentary racing drivers’ school at Finmere, near Silverstone. A few laps round an old airfield in an ancient Cooper Formula Junior and an old Lotus 11 convinced me that I had somehow to get hold of a car and start racing. I had no money so I would have to wait, but I was determined that it would only be a matter of time before I found a way.

  I never caught up academically and it became clear I was not going to be a scientist. But I enjoyed debate and I decided to read for the Bar. On graduation, I joined Gray’s Inn, but it was going to be another three years before I could be called and the Bar exams would not be a full-time job.

  Immediately after finishing at Oxford, I decided to have another attempt at the Union. At the end of my term as secretary I had stood for the presidency, but by then it seemed the name had become a problem. There were tiresomely hostile articles in some of the undergraduate press, so I thought why not try again but without the name? With the connivance of a close friend, John McDonnell (today an eminent QC), who later became president, I decided to reappear as an Indian and visited a theatrical costumier to acquire the disguise. They told me to go out and about wearing it, accustom myself to the role and practise the accent. There had been the occasional racist attack in the area where we lived, so I felt slightly uneasy, but went ahead anyway and was immediately fascinated by how differently people treated me in my Indian persona.

  The ultimate test was putting on the disguise, but wearing my normal clothes, and waiting to greet Jean when she got back from work. We only had gas lighting so the room was not brightly lit. She was very surprised and startled to find an Indian stranger sitting in her armchair. ‘Where’s Max?’ she asked. In my Indian accent I said I didn’t know but found her very attractive. I got out of the armchair and advanced towards her. She gave a little cry and rushed out of the room. The landlady heard the commotion and appeared. She had great difficulty understanding what was going on. Jean was tired after her day at work and not very pleased, but at least it proved the disguise worked.

  Next, I went to the Union in my new guise and sat through a debate. Afterwards, in the Randolph Hotel, where all the main participants used to congregate after the debates, John McDonnell introduced me to all sorts of people who, although they did not realise it, knew me quite well. No one seemed to twig and I ended up on a sofa next to Robert Skidelsky. He was very polite and asked what I was doing in the university. I said I was reading for a pass degree in politics, philosophy and economics. He looked slightly surprised – people didn’t usually set out to get a pass degree. I feared he would soon become bored with his new acquaintance, although be too polite to let this show, so I leant towards him and said quietly in my normal voice: ‘You know who it is really, don’t you?’ He jumped. In the end, funny though it would have been, I decided that driving down to Oxford each week to pursue my Union career would be too much like hard work.

  After leaving Oxford, the first opportunity that came along was political – a by-election in Moss Side, Manchester, that my father’s party decided to contest. He asked me to be the agent, so Jean and I moved up to Manchester for a short but interesting new diversion. Fortunately, the candidate was Walter Hesketh, a former policeman and an entirely reasonable person, who had been a national cross-country champion in his youth and once ran the 373 miles from Edinburgh to London in record time.

  My main job was dealing with the press. At first they were quite hostile but by the end of the campaign relations were good. When the time came to hand in the nomination papers, I checked the Representation of the People Act and set off for the town hall, accompanied by a group of reporters. The returning officer was the lord mayor, who wasn’t there, so I was told to come back the next day at a time he had decreed. No one had told me about this and the act quite clearly said I could hand the papers in there and then, but the officials would not budge. It seemed to me the mayor’s decision to ignore the act without bothering to inform everyone affected was high-handed. I spent a few minutes looking at penalties under the Representation of the People Act and set out for the magistrates’ court with the press still in tow.

  Outside the office of the magistrate there was a small queue of ladies seeking maintenance summonses against husbands who had abandoned them. When it came to my turn to go in, the elderly JP and her clerk were quite startled by my request for a summons against the lord mayor for a breach of the act. After a brief discussion, with me citing the relevant passages in the act, it was obvious the summons had to be granted. Understandably, though, the JP and her clerk felt this was outside their territory and told me to ask the stipendiary magistrate. This I was happy to do, but of course it was in open court. I stood up when invited to speak and made my request. After some discussion and another look at the act, the stipendiary granted the summons, to the delight of the journalists. Traipsing around after me had yielded a story that made headlines in the local evening press. Telephoned at home in France and asked for a comment, my father simply said: ‘Boys will be boys.’

  A few weeks later at the hearing, the lord mayor, a rather grand local solicitor who was dressed very formally in a lawyer’s black
jacket and pinstripes with his gold chain of office around his neck, stood in the dock. The stipendiary invited me to open my case from the witness box. I couldn’t resist referring to the mayor as ‘the prisoner in the dock’. As I had expected, this provoked a furious response: ‘I am not a prisoner!’ he said in a very posh voice. (You have to imagine something like, ‘Ay em nut ah prizner!’)

  I affected to look puzzled and the stipendiary explained gently that the mayor, although in the dock, was not really a prisoner. He was eventually acquitted, having claimed he had delegated his responsibilities to his deputy, which led the stipendiary to note his regret at refusing my request to issue an additional summons against the deputy. Although he never for one moment betrayed what he thought, I suspect the stipendiary found the whole thing very entertaining. The local press certainly did and the candidate eventually got a respectable four-figure vote.

  When the campaign was over Jean and I moved back to London with rather more than a souvenir from our stay in Manchester. There was a garage near the constituency owned by Rodney Bloor, a well-known racing driver who competed in Formula Junior. I went out of my way to get to know him and he sold me a Lotus Elite (one of the original ones, not the later model of the same name). It was way beyond my means but was such a beautiful car I couldn’t resist and persuaded Jean to agree.

  Having been a child during the war I had always felt that some basic military training was important. I didn’t like the feeling that I would have to start from scratch should war break out again. As I now had some spare time but couldn’t afford to start racing, I joined the Territorial Army Parachute Regiment.

  The headquarters of 44 Independent Parachute Brigade Group was at the Duke of York’s Barracks on the Kings Road, near to where Jean and I were living in World’s End, Chelsea. After a fairly tough selection course, I was sent to the Parachute Training School in Abingdon. In those days your first jump was from a balloon, which felt like standing on top of the Eiffel Tower wearing a rucksack and leaping off. It’s much easier from a plane.

  In London, my father suddenly became the target of violence. He had been holding regular meetings all over the place for years with no significant problems, but out of the blue those who disliked him decided to attack. I went with him to a meeting in the East End where we were rushed by a group of people. I reacted as one would and a police superintendent arrested me. Next day in court, I applied to have my case heard immediately on the grounds that my arrest had been widely reported and the facts should come out. The magistrate agreed and I cross-examined the superintendent with some success along the most obvious lines: My elderly father is attacked; the police, though present, do not protect him. Do you say I should stand idly by? Should my reaction have been: well, that’s all right? No? So why did you arrest me? I was acquitted.

  By now, I was working on Part 1 of the Bar exams, which weren’t difficult but meant I had to spend my days in an armchair reading the necessary books. So when the TA Paras were sent to Cyprus for a big exercise, I was completely unfit. The climax was a 48-hour mock battle in the Troodos Mountains against an excellent regular army regiment.

  We were flown around for most of the night, before parachuting with our equipment on to the beach at dawn, a long way from the mountains. As we advanced on foot and the sun got up, I began thinking I’m exhausted, I can’t go any further. I’ll go as far as that next tree and give up. I can’t do that, I’d then think – people would say: ‘Oh yes, I remember Max Mosley, he’s the one who sat down.’ More than 24 hours later I was still going. It was nothing compared to real war but nevertheless a valuable experience for me.

  Back in London, I met some of my father’s supporters, who wanted to know why I looked so fit. Despite the fact that my father had disapproved of me joining the TA, thinking it a waste of time, several of them applied, which inevitably alerted the newspapers. In those days the paras had right-wing connotations, notably in France with Algeria and the OAS. As a result of press stories, the applicants withdrew but the army authorities quite rightly ignored all attempts to undermine my position and I remained in the TA until just after I started at the Bar.

  There were frequent exercises, mainly on Salisbury Plain, including the odd night drop. We enjoyed it when, as sometimes happened, the opposition was trainee police. However, my most enduring memory is stepping across an electric fence, getting stuck and ending up straddling it, a leg each side. I think it gave unusually powerful shocks.

  In the first year or two after Oxford, I often received invitations to debate in various universities, which were sometimes about my father and his ideas, sometimes the usual undergraduate issues of the day. But my interest gradually declined. I wanted above all to go motor racing, my spare time was taken up with the TA and, though still sympathetic to my father’s ideas, they seemed to me increasingly unlikely ever to be relevant in the real world. I remained on excellent terms with him, but by late 1963 I was working for my Bar finals and destined to take no further part in his politics. My father decided to stand for parliament one last time at the 1966 general election but I did not get involved or visit the constituency. He realised I had moved on and never held it against me.

  Our holidays were usually spent with my parents, sometimes in Ireland, more often at their house in France. Very many of their friends lived in Paris or nearby; others would visit them when passing through. My mother’s sister, Nancy Mitford, was almost a neighbour and they were very close despite Nancy’s denunciation of my mother early in the war. When skirts suddenly became very short and they were both about 60, they had a discussion and agreed the choice was dowdy or ridiculous. Both unhesitatingly opted for ridiculous. Towards the end of the 1960s Nancy was diagnosed with cancer. My mother used to visit her every day at her house in Versailles. She died in 1973.

  Other frequent visitors were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who lived further down the Vallée de Chevreuse. She and my mother got on well, while he and my father liked to discuss how things would have been had they been respectively king and prime minister. One Christmas we were all in the Paris house of one of my parents’ friends and the Duke announced he wanted to dance ‘the twist’. Except for Jean and me, everyone there was elderly and, apart from the Duke, none of them had ever heard of the twist. Jean bravely volunteered and they were off. He didn’t want to stop. The Duchess became more and more anxious because he had a detached retina that she feared he was about to lose altogether. But it was a success and the ‘Dook’, as he was known (because of his acquired semi-American accent), certainly enjoyed himself. It was a long way from World’s End and Salisbury Plain.

  3

  THE BAR AND RACING

  After my Bar finals, Jean and I went on holiday in the Lotus. We got back to London in time for me to be called to the Bar in June 1964, and in the autumn that year I started a pupillage in Lord Hailsham’s chambers with Maurice Drake, who later became a High Court judge. It was excellent experience because he had a very diverse practice – divorce, crime, defamation, planning, just about everything – very different from the modern Bar which increasingly tends to be specialised.

  Apart from my work as a pupil, the chambers used to get briefs from the RAC to defend motorists, some of which came to me. They paid a mere two guineas but were a good way to learn what to do in court. The cases were always difficult to defend, but sometimes one could secure an acquittal. My strategy was to try to make the police witness say something improbable or, ideally, if there were two, say different things. They all gave evidence in the same formulaic way and had clearly been taught to do so as part of their training. In local magistrates’ courts there was usually an older police sergeant in charge, who would think it all quite funny, saying things like, ‘The lads didn’t do so well today, did they?’ when my tactics worked.

  But in talking to traffic police while waiting for cases to come on I learned a lot about their work and the horrific effects of some road accidents. In my later professional life, police in all c
ountries were always supportive of our safety work. They are the ones who have to deal with the aftermath of accidents that most people never see. It is grim and unpleasant work; often very sad, too.

  Shortly after I started, the Tories lost the general election and Lord Hailsham returned from his cabinet position as Secretary of State for Education to practise law again. He was an eccentric figure and used to bicycle to chambers with clips on his trouser legs. He had known my mother in the 1930s and I had met him when he came to the Oxford Union. He was very kind and friendly and delighted me one day when I heard him through the wall shouting into the phone: ‘I’ll give you until I count to three to come to the point: one, two, goodbye!’ I think he was talking to a solicitor. He used to write his opinions by hand so his clients would know it really was his opinion and not something drafted for him by someone more junior.

  Once qualified, I was able to start teaching law in the evenings to earn money to go racing. Jean was still working so we didn’t see much of each other during term time, except at weekends. I also began to get more serious cases, including some jury trials, which I found fascinating. Had I started off in common law chambers where there was a big criminal practice, I might have stayed there, but in the end I joined patent chambers. This was partly because I had an introduction to R.G. Lloyd QC, a trademark expert and head of a well-known set, and partly because I knew it would give me the flexibility to go racing. In common law chambers you could never get the clerk to postpone a hearing if you had a race somewhere on the Continent.

  By early 1966, I had earned enough money from teaching to buy a racing car and started looking at ads in Autosport. I went to see someone near Birmingham who was selling a racing version of the Lotus 7 that had a 1.0 litre engine and was (he claimed) road legal. He took me for a ride in it on local roads and it seemed very fast but, he explained, it was far from the quickest in an actual race.