About this tribute What it is, and where its facts come from

An independent tribute

On 7 August 1960, at Karlskoga in Sweden, Stirling Moss raced for the first time since his crash at Spa seven weeks before, and won. Many of the places where he raced are gone now, or are streets and roads again. What survives is what was written and photographed at the time, and what he and the people around him said afterwards.

This is an independent, non-commercial tribute to him, made from those records. It is not affiliated with the Moss family, Stirling Moss Ltd or any rights holder, and it speaks for none of them. It follows his life from his birth in 1929 to the service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey in 2024, in three parts and a page for each of his 11 World Championship seasons, with the reference pages of which this is the last.

Where the facts come from

The results of the World Championship races, his grids, laps, points and fastest laps, come from F1DB and are checked against Jolpica, grandprix.com, ChicaneF1 and the official archive of Formula 1. His sports-car races come from Racing Sports Cars, his other single-seater races from ChicaneF1, and the stories of the races from the reports printed at the time, above all in Motor Sport, whose archive holds Denis Jenkinson’s accounts of most of the races that matter here. His life comes from the obituaries, from The London Gazette, from the family’s own statements and from the captions of the press agencies that photographed him.

Where two independent sources agree, a fact is printed plainly. Where only one reliable source gives it, it may still be printed. Where the sources disagree, the page says so, and gives the versions with who says what; a detail that rests on nothing better than a lead is left out.

Moss told his own stories for 60 years, and some of them grew in the telling: the roll of notes in the Mille Miglia, the evening at Oporto in 1958, the policeman’s question. Where a later telling adds to what was written at the time, the pages give the contemporary account first and say what the later ones add.

The counts

His championship record is 66 World Championship Grands Prix started from 67 entries, 16 wins, 16 pole positions, 19 fastest laps, 24 podiums and 185 9/14 points counted. For his whole career, from 1948 to 1962, this tribute uses the count of his book All My Races: 212 wins from 529 races, races only. Other counts include hill climbs, sprints or rallies, and come to other totals; Records sets them out with what each includes.

Quotations

Every quotation is printed as its source printed it, and words left out inside it are marked; a quotation set apart from the text names its speaker, the occasion and the date. Words read in the interview, report, article or book where they were first printed, or in a full reprint of it, stand without comment. Words known only from someone else’s account, or from a book quoted by others but not seen, are marked as attributed. The quotations that circulate in his name but could not be traced, or that turn out to be someone else’s, are gathered in one place, among the misattributed quotations in In his words, with what was found about each. The few in Italian are given in Italian first, with a translation.

How it is written

Names are written in their own form: the Nürburgring, Reims-Gueux, Wolfgang von Trips. Cars are named as the records of the time name them, and “Mercedes-⁠Benz” in full. Dates are local. Speeds are in miles an hour, as the British press of his day gave them, with kilometres an hour after them, except for the Mille Miglia, which was timed in kilometres. He is “Moss” in the racing years and Sir Stirling only after his knighthood, in March 2000. His family appears only as far as its members have spoken in public.

The photographs

The photographs are from public archives and from photographers who have shared their work under open licences: the Dutch national archive’s pictures from Zandvoort, others from Kristianstad and Karlskoga in Sweden, and many later ones of cars of the kinds he raced, and of him at Goodwood. A few are used by permission, and say so where they appear. Most are shown in black and white, as the newspapers of his day printed them; a few are in colour, where the colour is the point. Some are cropped. Nothing is retouched.

A car shown here in his colours and his race number is not called his car unless it is. Every photograph’s caption names its photographer and licence, and the Picture credits list each one with its source and the terms on which it may be used.

The photographers at Karlskoga in 1960 could not have known which of their pictures would last. Four taken that day open these reference pages.