Goodwood Easter Monday, and the end of a career

On the morning of Easter Monday, 23 April 1962, Stirling Moss reversed his Lotus Elite out of the car park of The Fleece, a pub in Chichester, and knocked off its exhaust. That is the last thing he remembered of the day. The race at Goodwood that afternoon, the bank at St Mary’s and the weeks that followed he knew afterwards only from what other people told him.

He was 32, and the year had begun as well as any. In the southern summer he won the New Zealand Grand Prix at Ardmore on 6 January in Rob Walker’s Lotus 21, in a race stopped by a tropical storm after 50 laps, then the Lady Wigram Trophy, and on 4 February, in Walker’s Cooper T53, the Warwick Farm 100 in Australia. Warwick Farm turned out to be the last race he won as a professional. In America he was 4th in the Daytona three-hour race in a Ferrari 250 GT and 3rd in the three-hour race at Sebring in an Austin-⁠Healey Sprite; in the 12 Hours there, sharing a Ferrari with Innes Ireland, he was disqualified for refuelling too early.

For 1962 he had come to a private understanding with Enzo Ferrari. Walker would run a Formula One Ferrari, with the latest parts from the factory, in his own colours, which was Moss’s condition, and there would be a Dino 246 for sports-car races and a GTO for GT racing, both in the light green of the British Racing Partnership, which his father and Ken Gregory ran. Nothing was to be said in public until the Formula One car was delivered, and it was meant to arrive in time for Goodwood. Maranello fell behind. Looking back in 2009, Moss said: “So the late delivery of that car changed my life.”

So he raced Walker’s Lotus: an old Lotus 18, chassis 906, under the bodywork of the newer 21, with Coventry Climax’s new V8 engine and a Colotti gearbox. At Brussels on 1 April, in Walker’s dark blue, he was 2nd in the first heat and set a lap record in the second before the valve gear failed. Walker then lent the car to the British Racing Partnership, which raced that year as the UDT-⁠Laystall team, in its pale green. At Snetterton on 14 April, in a UDT-⁠Laystall Lotus V8, Moss had the throttle linkage mended in the pits with a hacksaw, finished 7th and set another lap record. For Easter he had been offered a choice between Pau and Goodwood. He chose Goodwood, and the home crowd.

The Glover Trophy

The Glover Trophy was a Formula One race of 42 laps, outside the World Championship, and 70,000 people came to watch it. Moss had pole, with Graham Hill’s BRM V8 and Bruce McLaren’s Cooper beside him on the front row. At the start he fell to 3rd behind McLaren and Hill, and on lap 3 Hill took a lead he never lost. Then the selector of the Colotti gearbox began to jam, and Moss came into the pits to have it put right. The stop was a long one. He rejoined 3 laps behind, by Bill Boddy’s report in Motor Sport; Simon Taylor, writing in 2009, remembered it as 2.

So he set out after the lap record. John Surtees, also far behind after a spin and two stops, had set a new one in his Lola V8, 1:22.0, a speed of 105.37 mph (169.58 km/⁠h), and Moss equalled it. Taylor was a teenager that afternoon, watching from the grandstand at St Mary’s. He saw Moss work his way back up to 7th, driving hard and smoothly as he always did, head back, arms outstretched.

With 7 laps to go, on about the 36th, Moss came up behind Hill’s BRM on the approach to St Mary’s, a right-hand bend, to unlap himself. As Hill moved left to take his line for the corner, the Lotus ran onto the left-hand verge, at about 115 mph (185 km/⁠h) by Taylor’s estimate, and went straight on into the earth bank on the outside of the bend.

Why the Lotus went straight on

The first reports were garbled. One commentator said the brakes had failed, another that Moss had come round; Hill thought the Lotus had gone off backwards. Boddy, writing his report a week later, judged them all apparently wrong, and added: “So this crash remains a mystery, especially as RAC officials could find no mechanical derangements.” As far as could be told from the wreckage, Taylor wrote later, the brakes had been working and the car was in fourth gear, the ratio Moss would usually have used there. Moss himself remembered nothing at all. Every explanation offered since is a theory, and none has been proved.

Something broke

In the past his great skill has been equal to almost any emergency except breakage of his car. If the brakes fail he spins it, if the throttle sticks open he gets out of gear and flicks the switch off.

Brake failure was the first theory, voiced on the day, and the examination of the car found no sign of it. Taylor, in 2009, listed others that had been put about, a jammed throttle or a fault in the steering, but no fault of any kind was found. Moss came to think the car more to blame than the driver, at least by implication: “If the car I was in at Goodwood had been the Ferrari in place of the Lotus, I don’t think I would have crashed… When I crashed I was at the height of my skills.”

A signal misread

In 1994 Moss offered one reconstruction, and called it no more than that. A marshal might have shown Hill a flag; Hill might have raised a hand to acknowledge it; and Moss might have taken the gesture as a sign to come past. “So it’s all just surmise.” Taylor told the same story in 2009, without the hedges: Hill acknowledged the marshal’s blue flag with his left hand, and Moss read it as a signal to pass him on the left. It fits what Taylor saw from the stand, the Lotus going for a gap on the left just as the BRM moved over for the corner. But it is a reading of a moment Moss himself could not remember.

Hill moved across

By 2009 Moss had come to a harder view, which rested on a remark Hill made to Moss’s mother, Aileen: “My mother told me Graham went up to her later and said, ‘I didn’t mean that to happen.’ I think he probably did move across on me, quite frankly, not realising I was already there.” Hill’s words reach us third-hand, from Hill to Aileen Moss to her son to Taylor. Hill died in 1975 and could not answer, and in 1994 Moss had said the opposite, that Hill was not a driver who would push anyone off.

Trying too hard

Boddy supposed in 1962 that Moss, having equalled the record, was presumably trying to go faster still, and he warned that the weight placed on who set the fastest lap could make for a dangerous situation. Moss, speaking of his career in general in 2006, could not remember ever having an accident through his own error.

Motor Sport still called the crash unexplained in 2006 and again in 2020, and Goodwood wrote in 2018 that nobody knows why to this day. The report of the day and those who watched it settle where it happened, roughly when and how fast, and that no fault was found in the car. They do not settle why.

The season without him

Back at Goodwood, later that afternoon, Ireland won the sports-car race in the team’s Lotus 19, for which Moss had been listed as reserve. Six days later Moss’s entry for the Aintree 200 was still on the list; it did not start. The Ferrari arrangement had never been made public. In March even Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport, who was not in the secret, had expected him to race Walker’s Lotuses, and had heard only a rumour of a Maserati.

Three weeks after Goodwood a 1961 Ferrari appeared at Silverstone for the International Trophy, driven by Ireland, painted red with a UDT tartan sticker. The pale-green GTO was delivered too, and Ireland won the Tourist Trophy in it. Whether a new GTO was already waiting for Moss in the paddock on Easter Monday, as Goodwood’s obituary of him says, or came later, as Taylor’s account implies, the sources do not agree.

Wimbledon

Yet I clearly remember, as one of millions horrified by the injuries suffered by the world’s greatest racing driver, that Stirling was treated like royalty. In the days immediately after the accident, when most expected him to die, the BBC ran hourly radio bulletins on his condition.

Letters came at 400 a day, by Ken Gregory’s count. The newspapers wanted the patient himself, and Gregory, his manager, sold the rights to a bedside interview for £10,000. In June Motor Sport rounded on a columnist in the Sunday Express who had used the crash to argue for speed limits.

He came round slowly, and the accounts of how long it took differ: 38 days to proper consciousness, by Taylor’s reckoning; a month, by Goodwood’s; six weeks, by his own memory. “I woke up six weeks later in a room filled with flowers, and I remember thinking vaguely, ‘Somebody must have thought I was going to die.’” When he grasped that his left side was paralysed he set himself to work on what would not move, and a finger of his left hand came back first, then the others, then the whole hand.

He left the Atkinson Morley on 20 July 1962, nearly 13 weeks after the crash, on crutches, to a crowd of the press, and took the 11 nurses who had looked after him out to dinner. Then he went to Nassau to recover. The press followed him there, to the roof of his hotel. One hand was cold and the other hot; to open a door he had to tell himself to do it. “My speech was slurred, so people thought I was drunk.” His insurance was to pay £30,000 if he could no longer earn his living as a racing driver; the company, he said, tried to get out of it, and paid up at the last minute. Within the year he had begun to work in broadcasting.

Goodwood, 1 May 1963

All that winter the question followed him: when would he race again? The papers ran it week after week, and he felt he owed the press and the public an answer. Professor Sid Watkins later judged that he should have left more time before coming back. Before the crash Moss had meant to race until he was 50; Fangio, after all, had won the World Championship at 46.

On Wednesday 1 May 1963, just over a year after the crash, he went back to Goodwood, bearded, on a damp, grey day, to an empty circuit. He drove a British Racing Partnership Lotus 19 sports car at racing speeds for about half an hour. He went through St Mary’s, and nothing came back to him. Once he spun coming out of the chicane, and his times, for the conditions, were competitive.

But instinct had gone. Approaching a corner, he had to tell himself where to place the car, when to brake and when to go back on the power. “It all had to be worked out, nothing was automatic any more.” It was, he said, a depressing decision and an easy one, because he would not come back second-best. That evening, in London, he announced his retirement. He was 33. Long afterwards he gave the Duke of Richmond the short version: “I don’t remember it old boy… If you’re not there to win, there’s no point being there.” (attributed)

He came to doubt it. In 1994 he thought he had probably come back two years too soon, and in 2009 he thought that with two or three years more his concentration and focus might have returned. To Taylor in 2006 he put it most simply: “With hindsight, I did that test too early.”