Stirling Moss never won the coveted World Championship

This edited article about motor racing first appeared in Look and Learn issue number 564 published on 4 November 1972.

Stirling Moss by Wilf Hardy

What makes a top racing driver? Stirling Moss, who was one of Britain’s greatest racing motorists and won almost everything except the world title in more than fourteen years on the track, believes that the vital ingredient is the will to win.

As a man who always drove for victory, he should know. With his tally of 194 wins out of 290 placings in 307 races, he proved his point. But in spite of this, some of his best races saw him finish well down the field, perhaps because the car was not set up properly or something had gone wrong with the engine. And one saw him terribly injured in a car that had become a total wreck.

This was at Britain’s Goodwood circuit on the Easter Monday of 1962, when a crash at 120 miles an hour brought an end to his spectacular career on the track. Moss’s injuries were severe, but he recovered from them with the help of the surgeon’s skill. However, the effects of the crash were such that he was forced to transfer his interests from racing to business, in which he has become very successful.

Was it a mistake in his driving which nearly cost Moss his life on this occasion? He cannot remember. “I make mistakes,” he says, “but not when my life is at stake.”

It was certainly no mistake of Moss’s which cost him the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa in 1960. During a practice lap at 140 miles an hour in a Lotus, he swooped into a dip, soared up a bump, and then lost a wheel. As the car spun into a bank, Moss saw his missing wheel rolling off into the distance.

Two broken legs, a fractured nose and three vertebrae crushed in his back put Moss out of racing, but only for five weeks. A few days after his release from hospital he was driving a sports model Lotus at Silverstone, and soon after that he was in Sweden driving in a race which had the tension of a sprint start.

It took courage to face danger again after such a severe shake-up. However, Moss dismisses this attribute which he says is well down the list in a racing driver’s make-up.

“The margin between courage and stupidity is so close, that I cannot decide the difference,” he says. “When I was racing, I occasionally did things which were apparently brave, but only because they were a little stupid. Only occasionally did I do something which was a little brave, and this is because what I did was premeditated.” By this, he means that he had analysed his actions and calculated the risks beforehand.

Clearly, Moss was a serious driver, determined to stay alive. This is how he was seen by a man who changed his car’s tyres in the pits, David McDonald whom the drivers called “Dunlop Mac.” But Mac saw another side to his character which softens the image of Moss as a calculated risk-taker. Moss was superstitious.

He would not drive an all-green car, although this is the British colour in international racing. To satisfy him, a dab of some other colour had to be painted on the car. And when he entered for a race, he had been known to ask for the number seven.

Perhaps he recognised that to be an outstanding driver in a perfect car was not enough. You needed one other element – good luck.