Doug Nye – Moss's Magic

In any case, Lewis Hamilton won after a triumphant-yet-tense and nerve-tingling drive which he described as the most “full on” of his glittering career thus far. This immediately reminded me – as so much of what Hamilton achieves on track is also likely to do – of Stirling Moss.

After he won the Monaco Grand Prix for the second year in succession, in 1961 – driving a Rob Walker Lotus 18 – Stirling wrote in his diary: “I had a fair start. 3^rd Clark (2^nd)… & I took Ginther for 1^st at lap 14.  Led to finish with gap 3secs or less.”  In fact he had held off a slavering pack of the new ‘Sharknose’ Ferraris to win that race and, although Phil Hill of Ferrari would put that in perspective by saying that “Around Monaco it was like trying to see which is quicker around a living room – a racehorse or a greyhound”, it really had been a tremendous drive, and a wonderful win. Years later, when we put together his book ‘My Cars: My Career’, Stirling explained: “… it was the works Ferraris of Richie Ginther, Phil Hill and Taffy von Trips which worried me. I resolved that if they wanted to win this race they would have to fight hard for it. I might be in a year-old car, with an inferior engine, but it suited the tight Monaco street circuit, and I would make them go – go all the way. I won, by 1.2 seconds at the end of 100 laps. It was, I believe, my greatest drive…”

I wonder if – perhaps in his 80s – Lewis Hamilton will look back on Monaco 2016 as having been his greatest drive? Moss always maintains that there was only one matter on which he did not see eye-to-eye with his great sometime team-mate, exemplar and mentor, Juan Manuel Fangio. “Fangio always said it was wise to win at the slowest possible speed – but my approach to racing wasn’t quite like that. I always wanted to go out there and really go for it, to have a right old tear-up – to me that was what motor racing is all about…”

Lewis Hamilton has always appeared to me to have the self-same approach. Both great drivers will be remembered for tempering their instinctive competitiveness with good racing brains – it remains to be seen whether the modern man’s is quite as bright as that of our 1950s-‘60s hero.

Pondering on this today, I opened a file of Moss photos, to reveal a lovely Fred Taylor startline shot from the 1955 Monaco GP.  There are two Mercedes-Benz cars on the front row, Fangio on pole closest to the camera, Moss on the far side, but in the 3-2-3 grid formation of the day the two silver cars are split by Alberto Ascari’s cheeky scarlet Lancia D50 which had qualified between them. That wasn’t a race any of them would recall particularly fondly, particularly poor Ascari for he only had four days of life left to him in which to recall anything.

Here he would inherit the lead after both Fangio and Moss’s Mercedes had broken, but before he could learn he was in the lead he overshot the quayside chicane, smashed through the trackside straw-bale barrier, and toppled down into 12 or 15-feet of Monaco Harbour seawater. Ascari bobbed up and struck out strongly – he was a fine swimmer – before being pulled aboard a rescue boat with nothing worse than a broken nose, shock and a soaking.  But just four days later while testing reactions to his crash in Eugenio Castellotti’s works Ferrari sports car at Monza, he would crash again – this time both inexplicably – and fatally.

Other photos sitting in that file are reproduced here, because we thought they might interest you. Here’s Stirling on July 31, 1949 – very early in his International career – on the startline at Monza, being joined in the cockpit by an unwilling passenger…  This was John Habin’s mechanic who had been trying to scramble clear of the starting grid when the Dutch starter dropped his flag, and the field rushed off. Stirling collected him fair and square in the 500cc Cooper and knocked him flying. The poor chap was treated in hospital for bruising and shock, while Moss got his head down – enjoyed “a right old tear-up” – and won regardless.

It was not always as easy, as with the intended “world-beating” Cooper-Alta Special built up for him by Ray Martin and Alf Francis. “It took twelve weeks to build. It was the first Formula 2 car with disc brakes. And it was a catastrophe.

“The car was dropped off the trestles onto its wheels for the first time at 4am on the Monday preceding Easter Goodwood (1953). Its front suspension promptly collapsed because the coil-springs were far too weak. Three hours work put supplementary coils inside them to jack it all up, and then they found the car was too big to fit into our brand-new transporter. After some surgery and a lot of cursing they got the car to Goodwood, where I drove it briefly. It was entered in three races, ran badly in the first and we scratched it from the rest…”

This misbegotten special was abandoned and its powerful Alta engine went instead into a standard Cooper-Bristol-type Mark II frame. Of course Moss’s greatest successes, not least at Goodwood, followed in rear-engined Cooper cars, most notably those entered by Rob Walker and prepared by the same Alf Francis.  Moss again: “Possibly the least-known and least recognized, yet probably the best, of all my Coopers – a very forgiving car; a beaut to drive and one with the power to make it really go…” – this was the 1961 InterContinental Formula 2.5-litre Cooper-Climax T53P ‘Lowline’ in which he won the Easter Monday Goodwood, 21-lap Lavant Cup race.

And a final photo which has caught my eye from the same file shows the two best British racing drivers of the 1950s, deep in discussion at Goodwood on Easter Monday 1956.  To the left there stands the tall figure of Mike Hawthorn, ‘The Farnham Flyer’ no less, in his familiar corduroy cap, polka-dot bow tie and green zip-up jerkin, while Stirling to the right is a smaller figure, confidently hands in pockets, wearing his BRDC-badged knitted cardie. Between them is pre-war racing ace Raymond Mays, father of both the ERA and BRM projects, and here in the foreground can just be seen the object of their discussion – the 2.5-litre works BRM Type 25. Mike Hawthorn looks somehow apprehensive.  He was right to be so, a driveshaft joint gaiter-failure would cause a sudden seizure which would spin him off into the ploughed infield at Madgwick, where the BRM dug in and overturned, throwing Mike out. Fortunately the ploughed soil provided a soft(ish) landing, and he walked away from the incident.

In those days it was all in a day’s work for the world’s leading racing drivers.  Some you survived… and some you did not.  It didn’t bear thinking about…too much.

Images courtesy of The GP Library