Five things you didn’t know Stirling Moss did

Put aside the record of 16 wins from 66 world championship grands prix. Between 1947 and Easter Monday ‘62, Moss competed in 529 races (not including hillclimbs and speed record attempts), winning a remarkable 212 of them in single-seaters of all shapes and sizes, sports racers and GTs, and even family saloons on rallies. This is his real record of remarkable achievement.

As a snap-shot of what it really meant to be Stirling Moss, here’s a few examples of ‘alternative’ landmark achievements from a man for whom the words ‘weekend off’ appeared to have no meaning.

Learning his trade in hillclimbs

Beyond circuit racing, Moss gained vital experience as a teenager driving his Cooper-JAP 500cc on UK hillclimbs, where he immediately made a strong impression. Having made his first appearance at Prescott in May 1948, Stirling returned twice more to the Gloucestershire hill that season, winning his class on July 18^th. Then in September at Shelsley Walsh, the world’s oldest still-active motorsport venue, he topped the 750cc class – and would take the Fastest Time of the Day (FTD) a year later in his Cooper-JAP 1,000cc MkIII. ‘The Boy’ was already making his mark.

Rallying: a pleasing, if demanding, diversion

During the early 1950s, a dearth of competitive top-line opportunities frustrated Moss and knocked his morale – which is where some of his other activities came in as a welcome diversion. Rallying in particular was something he enjoyed, as his mother Aileen had and his sister Pat would in the future, as one of the most accomplished drivers of her day.

Norman Garrad, head of the small motorsport department at the Rootes Group, offered Stirling a crack at the Monte Carlo Rally in January 1952, and he was glad to accept, rounding up John Cooper of Autocar and Desmond Scannell of the British Racing Drivers’ Club as a three-man crew. They were entered in a humble Sunbeam-Talbot 90 and despite the obvious three-up weight penalty, finished second overall in a discipline that rewarded correct average speeds over outright pace.

He would return to the Monte twice more, but it was his trio of attempts at the punishing Coupe des Alpes that would truly test him, across 31 of Europe’s highest mountain passes over six days. Notably, he won coveted Gold Cups for penalty-free runs – but in his diaries, Stirling admitted it almost broke him. Having driven for “24 hours solid” over one final section, he “collapsed from nervous strain and couldn’t stop shaking”.

A brake-through in sportscars

Moss notched up a number of significant ‘firsts’ in his career: first British driver to win his home grand prix in the world championship era, at Aintree in 1955; first British driver to win his home world championship grand prix in a British car, with Tony Brooks and Vanwall back at Aintree in ’57; first win for a rear-engined F1 car (Argentina, 1958); first grand prix win for Lotus, in Rob Walker’s privateer Type 18 at Monaco in 1960. But there’s another that is perhaps overlooked, but one that had wider-world greater significance for the development of the motor car.

Stirling’s win, shared with Tommy Wisdom, in a 50-lap sportscar race at Reims on June 29^th 1952 marked the 54^th of his career, but on the surface was fairly unremarkable. He and Wisdom were largely unchallenged other than by the sweltering conditions, as they took a pale green Jaguar C-type to victory. What was significant, however, were the ‘anchors’ fitted to XKC005 – for this marked the first win for a car fitted with what would come to be known as disc brakes. Moss had joined Jaguar tester Norman Dewis in the development of the Dunlop innovation, which like the monocoque chassis was an idea borrowed from aeroplanes.

Why did it matter? Traditional drum brakes had to be ‘managed’ through races to avoid excessive fade, but with discs – or plates as they were then known – Moss could see the advantages of racing harder for longer without the fear of losing significant stopping power. Fast, sweeping Reims had enough long, straight bits to allow the brakes to cool between usage, and Stirling recognised it was the ideal place to try them. On that hot day in France, Moss could have had no idea that this quiet revolution would be the start of one with such fundamentally significant consequences for us all.

Speed records at Bonneville

You can see why to a man like Moss going as fast as possible would have an appeal. His best known straight ahead campaign was in August 1957 at the Bonneville salt flats in Utah, the home of this most extreme form of motorsport.

MG had built an experimental aerodynamic device, the EX181, specifically for the purpose – and Stirling being Stirling, he was game. The intention was to raise the class F (1,101cc to 1,500cc) record to a mighty 240mph. To reach such speeds, the 1,500cc twin-cam engine was heavily supercharged and ran on methanol to produce an impressive 290bhp. What made it rather hairy was that the driver was unable to open the cockpit unaided, in the event of anything going wrong – and the horizontal seating position made for a claustrophobic experience. Oh, and as Phil Hill told Stirling after his experience in the thing, the only way to stop it safely was to hold his breath, switch off the engine, floor the throttle and ease on to the small brake pedal, all in the hope that the cockpit wouldn’t fill with unburned methanol fumes.

Sounds like fun? It didn’t stop Moss over-achieving, as usual. He managed 245mph for one mile, 235.69mph for five miles and 224.7mph for 10 miles to set a new batch of records.

A final unique achievement

On September 23^rd 1961, Stirling Moss achieved one more ‘first’ – and one that will forever stand as unique. It would also be the last such achievement of his career before it was cut short so violently against the bank at Goodwood’s St. Mary’s on Easter Monday 1962.

At the Oulton Park Gold Cup that September day, Moss raced the ungainly and dated-looking front-engined Ferguson P99 in Rob Walker’s colours, stroking to a comfortable win in a rain-affected race. What was novel was the four-wheel-drive powertrain that carried him, developed by a company best known for his tractors. The system was designed specifically to improve road safety and this development for use in an F1 car was purely for promotion. But while the P99 would go on to claim a British hillclimb title in Peter Westbury’s hands and the technology would find its way into Novi’s IndyCars at Indianapolis, four-wheel-drive for road cars wouldn’t catch on in the mass market for another 20 years.

As for F1, despite a late-1960s flurry of 4WD grand prix cars from Lotus, McLaren, Matra and even Cosworth, Moss’s achievement in actually winning a race in one would remain unique. Just like the man himself.

Images courtesy of Motorsport Images.