Stirling Moss was born in London in 1929 into a motoring family: his father had raced at Indianapolis and his mother in trials. He started in a 500 cc Cooper in 1948, and within a few seasons was the most versatile driver in Europe, as fast in a sports car on an open road as in a single-seater on a circuit. He raced the Jaguar works C- and D-types, Maseratis, Vanwalls, Lotuses and Mercedes, and made a point of driving British cars whenever he could.
On 1 May 1955 he and the journalist Denis Jenkinson drove a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, number 722, around a thousand miles of Italian public roads in the Mille Miglia. Jenkinson read the road from a roll of pace notes in a hand-built holder. They finished in ten hours, seven minutes and forty-eight seconds, an average of close to 158 km/h, and the record was never broken, because the race was never run flat out again.
Moss won sixteen world championship Grands Prix, was runner-up four years in a row from 1955 to 1958 and third three times after that. The year that sums him up is 1958. At the Portuguese Grand Prix his rival Mike Hawthorn was threatened with disqualification for pushing his car against the direction of the race; Moss spoke up for him, and the stewards let the result stand. Hawthorn won the title by a single point.
His drive at Monaco in 1961, holding off the far more powerful Ferraris for the whole race in an old Lotus, is still quoted as a perfect Grand Prix. A year later, at Goodwood on Easter Monday 1962, he crashed heavily, was in a coma for a month and never raced at the top level again.
He remained the public face of British motor sport for another half-century — knighted in 2000, still demonstrating old cars into his eighties. He died in London in April 2020, at ninety.
Foto: Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
The cars
Cars in the catalog he drove, won in, or that were named after him.
