Reflections on glory

Matt Majendie

• Last Updated: October 23. 2009 9:43PM UAE / October 23. 2009 5:43PM GMT

Sir Stirling Moss pictured at Dundrod Circuit in Northern Ireland in 1955. Moss had just driven to victory in an Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR to claim the RAC Tourist Trophy title. Courtesy of Stirling Moss

Sir Stirling Moss still goes through the same routine every time he gets into a race car, first offering a quick prayer before taking to the wheel.

The fact that the routine hasn’t change since his debut in 1947 is unremarkable; the fact that Moss is still racing shortly after his 80th birthday is.

The octogenarian talks with regret that his last race of the season has now past – two weeks ago, in fact – but waxes lyrical like a new racer to the grid when discussing plans to race a Porsche RSK in selected sports car races next season. In short, retirement is far from his thoughts.

“I will retire when I feel like I’m getting in people’s way, but I don’t really feel like I’m slowing people down right now,” says Moss, generally regarded as the greatest driver never to be the Formula One world champion.

The problem is that Moss is an addict and readily admits that, at a time when many of his peers are a few years into their spell at a retirement home, he is still hooked by the passion of motor racing.

“It’s the adrenalin, I love it and always have,” he said. “It’s a bit like a drug. I just love going fast and have done since I was six-years-old driving around in fields at the family farm. As a kid, I loved the speed and the danger of it all, and the buzz of that danger element never really left me.”

It just so happened that driving fast came very easily to Moss, who raced competitively for the first time as a 17-year-old and has never completely understood what sets him apart from others.

“I used to be surprised that people couldn’t seem to get closer to me, particularly in sports car racing,” he explained. “And I guess I’m not really sure why I used to beat a lot of people. I could get up to speed very quickly at any circuit and I used to break very late, much like Lewis Hamilton does now.”

In Hamilton, Moss sees a kindred spirit and says the former world champion is the current driver most similar to him in terms of driving ability.

Hamilton will never match the level of success enjoyed by Moss, such are the rigours of Formula One and the lack of opportunities to race in other events.

And for that, Moss does not envy his 24-year-old countryman.

“My quality of life was so much better than Lewis Hamilton’s, for example,” he said. “Whereas he has to do a lot of publicity and stuff with the sponsors, when I wasn’t racing, I could just chase the girls. It’s all a lot more serious now and I feel eternally grateful that I got to race in the era I was.

“For me, I could just go out there and race. I would put absolutely everything into each race and then collapse back at the hotel or whatever. OK, well, I’d save just enough energy to chase a bit of crumpet afterwards.”

Moss loves watching Hamilton race and getting the absolute maximum from his McLaren, whether it be in the midfield position of earlier in the season or else up front as has been the case for much of the second half of this year.

However, he believes he would have been more than a match for him. “For me, there are three stand-out drivers in F1 right now: Hamilton, Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel,” says Moss, “and I’d like to think I’d have been more than a match for any of them.”

Judging by Moss’ CV, few would disagree. He has recently published a book, Stirling Moss: All My Races, to tie in with his 80th birthday and mark his 529 races. Incredibly, he won 212 of them, ranging from the prestigious Mille Miglia road race through to two British Grands Prix as well as the much-coveted Monaco Grand Prix.

Picking a highlight is not easy, but the moments that have defined his career clearly stand out. The 1955 Mille Miglia was, to his mind, the most dangerous, Monaco possibly the most special and Britain “a sheer delight”.

He recalled: “The Mille Miglia was perhaps the only race I was ever scared of, except for perhaps Spa [in Belgium], where we used to average 135mph [217kph] which in those days was damn quick. At the Mille Miglia, you were going so phenomenally fast and you knew that one slip-up and you were in trouble. I ended up averaging 165.1mph [265kph] for the last 83 miles of that and that was pretty bloody quick, so that remains pretty special for me. For me, that was one of my great drives.

“But it’s difficult to beat the satisfaction of winning at Monaco [in 1961]. It was such a special race for me in Formula One with everything so close to you and such little room for error. There’s nothing like the prospect of driving into a wall to focus your mind!”

His career, though, is as much defined by the defeats – most notably to Juan Manuel Fangio, still in Moss’ mind the greatest driver of all time – as for his plethora of victories.

The greatest defeats, though, were continually in the Formula One championship, where he was runner-up for four successive seasons, particularly in 1958. Moss would have been crowned world champion had he not intervened.

At the Portuguese Grand Prix, rival Mike Hawthorn was penalised for pushing his car after spinning. Moss interceded and ensured Hawthorn suffered no penalty. As a result of his actions, he lost out on the world title by a single point.

To this day, Moss is bemused that people make so much of his actions. “It was the right thing to do,” he says, “and you’ve got to do what’s right in life. Mike won the world title fair and square.”

Moss’ race actions make the events of “Crashgate”, when Nelson Piquet Jr intentionally crashed into a wall in order to help Fernando Alonso to victory at last year’s Singapore Grand Prix, all the more remarkable. It’s perhaps the one subject in a lengthy interview to anger the otherwise unflappable Moss.

“I still can’t believe that – it was a truly terrible thing to do,” he says. “It’s pathetic really; more than that, appalling. Never in my life have I come across something like this and I sincerely hope I never do again as it’s been so damaging for the sport.”

Moss’ career ended without any black marks and he has very few regrets from his career. He remains mildly disappointed he did not get more opportunities to drive for Ferrari but, intriguingly, losing out on the F1 title does not rank as a lifetime regret.

He did, however, still feel he had not peaked as a driver when his front-line racing career came to a premature end in 1962 with a notorious crash at Goodwood, which left him in a coma for six weeks.

“I don’t remember anything about the whole thing,” he says, “but what’s sad is that I felt I was just getting to my peak as a driver and perhaps my best seasons were still ahead of me. But I’ve got to be pretty happy with my lot because, as a young man, I had the very best job in the world.”

At 32, though, he had to look for other work, and readily admits he was unqualified for any other employment, which briefly left him stumped.

“To my mind, there are only two jobs you don’t need any qualification,” he says. “One is being an MP and the other is an estate agent. Well, I’ve never much been one for politics so I went into property instead and that worked out OK.”

Moss did return to the track, although never quite to the same level but, remarkably, he still has goals as an 80-year-old.

“My goal is just to prove I can be competitive, even at my age, and also to go out and enjoy every race I’ve got left,” he says.

“There aren’t so many ahead of me now, I guess, so I have to enjoy them while I can.”

mmajendie@thenational.ae