After racing Being Stirling Moss, for 57 years more

He never went ex-directory. Anyone who looked up Stirling Moss in the telephone book could ring him at home, and a fan who did could expect five minutes of conversation; if he was out, his answerphone said goodbye in Italian. For the 57 years after he retired, being Stirling Moss was his profession.

I had to retire, because even though my speed was acceptable, how I got to it was not … I couldn’t just get in the car and drive fast, I had to concentrate like hell. I would have had to have driven more slowly than I would have liked and be beaten by people whom I didn’t respect. So the decision to give it up was fairly easy.

He had little choice, as he saw it. At the Atkinson Morley a therapist, Berenice Krikler, had advised him never to race again, and he gave up racing in May 1963, after the test at Goodwood that showed him his instincts had gone, and found himself, he said in 2001, with no income and no education or experience in anything else. What he had was his name, and he sold it: he opened garages, endorsed products, made appearances, spoke on cruise ships with Murray Walker, and at Goodwood he would sit signing books twice a day for three days running. He had a phrase for it, and used it with relish: “Basically I’m an international prostitute. I sell my time for money.” Behind it stood Stirling Moss Ltd, the company he had set up at the end of 1954 with his father and Ken Gregory.

He had begun broadcasting in 1962, while he was still recovering, and he worked for years as a commentator, a writer and a guest; one obituary called him a sports correspondent. In the early 1980s a motoring column appeared under his name in Harpers, written by someone else. He guarded the name, too. In 1968 the BBC commissioned a play from Athol Fugard about him and Denis Jenkinson; Moss disliked the way it portrayed him and obtained an injunction against it.

Shepherd Street

He went into property as well. He bought flats in London to let, and ran them himself, later with his wife Susie as a director of the company; in 2001 he had 10. He did the repairs too, driving round London from one to the next, and one Christmas Day he went out to mend a tenant’s washing machine. “If I manage to repair a microwave, I feel wonderful. It’s almost like getting pole position. It’s a challenge and I love it.”

His own house stood on a bombed-out site in Shepherd Street, in Shepherd Market, Mayfair, which by his own account he bought in 1961 for £30,000; another account has him buying it, nearly derelict, in the mid-1950s. He designed the house himself: five storeys, wood panelling, racing cars etched into the window glass, and a lift. In a corner he called the nook, one button slid back a panel to show the television and another lowered the dinner table from the ceiling; a third ran his bath, two floors up, to exactly 104 degrees. Silver trophies held nuts and pot-pourri, and one propped open a door. Offered a trophy on one occasion, he chose an Eames chair instead, because it needed less polishing. On one wall hung a bent steering wheel from Goodwood.

In the hall stood 96 scrapbooks, green for his racing and black for his private life. He had kept diaries through his racing years in the same spirit, noting what he ate for breakfast and the pressures of his tyres in every session. The lift car, of carbon fibre, had been made, according to The Daily Telegraph, by the Williams Formula One team. His publisher remembered it as temperamental, and Susie would kick it into obedience.

Three marriages

He married three times. His first wife was Katie Molson, of the Canadian brewing family, whom he married in 1957; they separated in 1960. On 25 June 1964, at Berkhamsted Register Office, he married his second wife, Elaine Barbarino, an American public-relations executive; they had a daughter, Allison, and were divorced in 1968.

His third wife was Susie Paine, whom he married in April 1980. She was born in Hong Kong in 1953, the daughter of family friends: her father worked for the Rootes Group, and Moss had first met her, when she was five, while staying with her parents. She came to London at 17, helped him run the flats from the late 1970s, and became a director of Stirling Moss Ltd. Their son, Elliot, was born in 1980. In 2009 Moss described the partnership: “Susie and I are a team. We work seven days a week, we fit into each other’s pocket. She remembers everything and everybody: I call her my filing cabinet.”

Mallory Park, 23 March 1980

He had not stopped racing altogether: in 1976 he shared a car with Jack Brabham at Bathurst. But on the morning of the first round of the 1980 British Saloon Car Championship, Moss flew in on Concorde from a historic race at Sebring. He was 50, and he was back racing for points, in an Audi 80 GLE of 1.6 litres, entered by Richard Lloyd’s GTi Engineering and sponsored by Akai. Audi’s importer, VAG UK, had hired him for the publicity, and its Tony Hill thought the fee a bargain. Some 30,000 people came to Mallory Park to see him. In practice the engine swallowed something, a helicopter brought a new cylinder head, and in the race he managed 4 laps before the throttle failed.

Front-wheel drive and slick tyres were both new to him. “Front-wheel drive wasn’t the real problem – I found slicks very difficult. I’d never driven on them before and it took me a while to realise how critical to temperature they were.” Lloyd put it another way: “It was a bit like asking a Spitfire pilot to fly a Harrier.” Moss fussed so much over his tyre pressures that the mechanics took to pretending to let air out. His first points came at Silverstone in June.

In 1981 the cars were run by TWR, in BP’s colours, and his team-⁠mate was the 21-year-old Martin Brundle. Moss’s best drive of the two seasons came at Brands Hatch that year, in the wet: from 11th on the grid he was 2nd by lap 6, and catching the leader, until the throttle failed. “He was absolutely in a class of his own that day.” In two seasons he took six podium places in the 1600cc class, and won no race. In 2002 he looked back on it without mercy: “It was the biggest regret of my life.” Susie saw it differently. She loved the Audi, she told a historic racer years later, because they had married in 1980 and it was the first time she had seen him race.

The white helmet

Historic racing lasted longest. From the 1970s until 2011 he raced historic cars all over the world, often his own, an OSCA FS372 and a 1961 Porsche RS 61 among them, in his white Patey helmet. He went to some trouble to be allowed to race in his old helmet and overalls. “If you look at a picture of me racing the Osca, you can’t tell if it’s 2009 or 1959.”

The honours came with the years. In 1990 he was elected to the International Motorsports Hall of Fame. For his 70th birthday, in 1999, the Goodwood Revival had Damon Hill drive him round the circuit, dressed as his chauffeur. In 2008 Lewis Hamilton presented him, on behalf of the British Racing Drivers’ Club, with the title of Vice-President for Life; his 10 BRDC Gold Stars, won between 1950 and 1961, stood as the record until Hamilton passed it in 2017.

At 80 he was still racing, and honest about it. Corners he had once taken flat, he admitted, he probably no longer did, though he would try to persuade you otherwise. And he had set himself a rule. “If I ever felt I was getting in other people’s way, then I’d stop.”

Sir Stirling

He had been appointed OBE in the New Year Honours of 1959, gazetted as a racing motorist. Forty-one years later came the knighthood: Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours of 2000, gazetted on 31 December 1999, for services to motor racing. The Prince of Wales dubbed him at Buckingham Palace on 21 March 2000, with Susie, Allison and Elliot there to see it. Some accounts say the Queen knighted him, or that it happened in 1999; neither is right.

The next year he spoke publicly about an operation for prostate cancer, and Robert Edwards’s authorised biography of him was published. In 2007 he and Susie became founding patrons of Hope for Tomorrow, a charity that runs mobile units for cancer care. For his 80th birthday, in 2009, came Stirling Moss: All My Races, written with Alan Henry, and in 2015 Stirling Moss: My Racing Life, with Simon Taylor. In it he wrote that he could not operate without Susie: “She makes sure that my life works.”

Donington, about 2009

About four years before he wrote it up, in May 2013, the photographer Neill Watson went to a press day at Donington Park, in Leicestershire, for the launch of a new historic racing event, one that in the end never took place. Moss was there with Jochen Mass and Paul Stoddart, once the owner of the Minardi Formula One team, and the two drivers told stories on stage as a double act. Outside stood cars such as Ayrton Senna’s John Player Special Lotus and James Hunt’s McLaren, and at the head of the pit lane a Maserati 250F owned by Nick Mason, the drummer of Pink Floyd.

Moss changed into a period race suit and climbed in. Two mechanics bump-started him, he drove about half a dozen laps, and he came back down the pit lane with the engine off, freewheeling to a halt. It was hot, and an assistant hurried over with an umbrella. He waved her away: “Why on earth wouldn’t I want to be in the sun?” (attributed)

A photographer had been taking publicity pictures for the event with a model, and when he had finished she stayed by the car, still posing. Moss told her to mind the hot exhausts. Laughing, she put an arm round him and kissed the top of his helmet, and when he took it off she kissed the top of his head.

Watson was, he says, the only photographer with a camera to his eye at that moment; the others had taken their picture and turned away. His photograph became one of his best known and sold as a fine-art print, and people often asked him whether it had been doctored. It had not, he says. He met Moss three times, and found him a thorough professional, with time for everyone in the room. So Neill Watson, who took these pictures, told it on HistoricRacer.com.

The lift shaft

On Saturday 6 March 2010 the lift door at Shepherd Street opened in error, with the car on another floor, and Moss stepped into the empty shaft. He fell three floors. He broke both ankles and four bones in one foot, and chipped four vertebrae. He was taken to the Royal London Hospital, and on the Sunday, with the help of Sid Watkins, moved to the Princess Grace, nearer home, where his ankles were plated and pinned. About a week later he recorded a video message from his hospital bed, thanking everyone who had written to him.

His office posted a photograph of the lift with a joke about bungee jumping. When his publisher, Philip Porter, suggested a trampoline at the foot of the shaft, Moss had an answer ready: “Can’t do that, Old Boy – I’d hit my head on the roof!” (attributed) By July he was back at the wheel. In August, at the Monterey Historics at Laguna Seca, he spun his Porsche and was hit by a Lotus, and in September he raced at the Goodwood Revival, around his 81st birthday.

Le Mans, 9 June 2011

He drew the line himself, as he had said he would. On Thursday 9 June 2011, in qualifying for the Le Mans Legend race in his Porsche RS 61, he reached it. He was 81. “This afternoon I scared myself and I have always said that if I felt I was not up to it, or that I was getting in the way of fellow competitors, then I would retire.” He announced it on Radio Le Mans and on his website, adding: “I love racing, but now it is time to stop”. On Twitter, his account said that the white Patey helmet had been hung up for good. On the Saturday Ian Nuthall raced the Porsche without him and finished 23rd, and Moss presented the trophies.

The last years

On 22 December 2016, in Singapore, he was taken to hospital with a serious chest infection, and complications followed. He spent 134 days in hospital before he came home to London. In January 2018, at 88, he retired from public life. His son Elliot’s statement put it fondly: “the indefatigable man will finally retire”. On his 90th birthday, in September 2019, the family could report only slow progress.

Lady Moss nursed him at home, and she was with him when he died, in the early hours of Easter Sunday, 12 April 2020, in Mayfair, after a long illness. He was 90. She called herself, in her statement that day, the “luckiest wife in the world to have had the very best husband.” Lewis Hamilton wrote of their friendship: “Two people from massively different times and backgrounds but we clicked”.

Because of the Covid-19 lockdown his funeral was a small private cremation at Mortlake Crematorium, for a handful of his closest family; the press were told afterwards.

Goodwood renamed a race for him, the Stirling Moss Memorial Trophy, and in 2021, when crowds could gather again, the Revival paraded his cars, led by the Mercedes-⁠Benz 300 SLR “722”, with Lady Moss there to watch. She died on 18 March 2023, aged 69. The public farewell, at Westminster Abbey on 8 May 2024, is told in Legacy.