Legacy The honours, the memorials and the measure he left

The last blast

Early on a Sunday at the end of September 2021, a silver Mercedes-⁠Benz 300 SLR numbered 722 drove through London behind an escort of eight police motorcyclists. It set off from the Temple at 7.22, the minute at which Stirling Moss and Denis Jenkinson had started the Mille Miglia of 1955 in it, and went past the Houses of Parliament, Trafalgar Square, the Royal Automobile Club and the Ritz to the house in Mayfair where Moss had lived and died. In the film Mercedes-⁠Benz made of the morning, The Last Blast, his son Elliot waits there, wearing his father’s watch, which reads 7.22. Then the engine is switched off, for good, and the car goes back to the company’s museum in Stuttgart.

The car has never belonged to anyone but Mercedes-⁠Benz, and in 2021, the year after Moss’s death, the company brought it to Britain as a tribute to him. The head of Mercedes-⁠Benz Classic, Christian Boucke, announced it: “As a tribute to a great man and racing driver, Sir Stirling Moss, Mercedes-⁠Benz Classic will take the original 300 SLR ‘722’ to the UK again this year.” (attributed) It was shown at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July, appeared at the British Grand Prix, and in September led the parade of his cars at the Goodwood Revival. The Last Blast was released that December. The billing was not quite right: the 722 was out again in May 2024, standing outside Westminster Abbey on the morning of his Service of Thanksgiving, which is told below.

On the day he died, 12 April 2020, the Mercedes-AMG Formula One team wrote: “Today, the sporting world lost not only a true icon and a legend, but a gentleman. The Team and the Mercedes Motorsport family have lost a dear friend. Sir Stirling, we’ll miss you.” Its team principal, Toto Wolff, singled out one thing above the rest, and it was not his speed.

Stirling’s career was characterised by an impeccable sportsmanship and in this he truly set himself apart.

Mercedes-⁠Benz had honoured him in its own way before. In 2009 it and McLaren ended their SLR road car with a speedster named after him, the SLR “Stirling Moss”, built to mark the Mille Miglia win: 75 cars without a roof or a windscreen, with twin fairings behind the seats and exhausts down the sides in the manner of the 300 SLR, offered only to people who already owned an SLR. It was the last SLR made. The Petersen Automotive Museum gives its top speed as 217 mph (349 km/⁠h).

Honours, early and late

The honours of his racing years came quickly. His OBE came in the New Year Honours of 1959, when he was 29. At the end of 1961, his last full season, the BBC made him its Sports Personality of the Year and the motoring writers’ guild named him its Driver of the Year. Between 1950 and 1961 the British Racing Drivers’ Club gave him 10 of its Gold Stars, a record nobody passed until 2017. In 1990 he was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, at Talladega.

The knighthood came almost 38 years after the crash that ended his front-line career. The New Year Honours of 2000 made him a Knight Bachelor, for services to motor racing, and the Prince of Wales knighted him that March, as After racing tells; Motor Sport called him the first Briton honoured for what he had done in motor racing, as distinct from the Land Speed Record.

For his 70th birthday, in October 1999, Motor Sport had put him on its cover, with a story by Robert Edwards. It had not been easy. When the magazine’s Andrew Frankel asked for a photographic session at short notice, Moss said no; then Susie Moss rang back to offer 10 minutes, and the photographer, Charles Best, got two hours, after which Moss took him to the pub. Ten years later, at Moss’s 80th birthday dinner at Goodwood House, one of his closest friends told Frankel that Moss had always considered the cover part of the reason he was knighted six months after it appeared. Frankel was not sure: “I’d love to believe it were true, but I can’t quite make the leap in my head.”

The sport’s governing body caught up in 2006. On 8 December the FIA gave him its Gold Medal, and he was pleased, and said so: “This is the first FIA award I’ve ever won - it means a lot to me and I am very proud to receive it”. The BRDC made him its Vice-President for Life in 2008, and when he died he was the club’s longest-serving member.

Bronze, a trophy and a plaque

Mallory Park, 12 June 2006

On 12 June 2006¹ a life-size bronze of him by the sculptor David Annand was unveiled at Mallory Park, in Leicestershire, the circuit where, at 50, he had come back to race saloon cars, as After racing tells. He and Lady Moss were there. Raymond Baxter, Tim Parnell, John Surtees, Charles Morgan and Chris Meek paid tribute, and Baxter’s speech, by one report, was rousing and irreverent enough that Moss could not help joining in. The statue joined the circuit’s tributes to Surtees and to Colin Chapman.

Its plinth gives his name, his OBE and the date of his birth, calls him the people’s champion, and ends “WINNER OF 66 GRAND PRIX”. That line is wrong. Sixty-six is the number of World Championship Grands Prix he started; he won 16 of them.

Goodwood

Goodwood saw an early win and the end of his front-line career: he won there on the circuit’s opening day in 1948, and crashed there in 1962. In his last decades he was a regular at its Revival and its Festival of Speed. In September 2020 Goodwood renamed the Kinrara Trophy, a race for two drivers in GT cars built before 1963, the Stirling Moss Memorial Trophy. It was first run at the SpeedWeek meeting on 17 October 2020, and it has been run at the Revival since. The Duke of Richmond explained why.

Stirling Moss was known as ‘Mr Goodwood’ … More than anything, though, he was our friend and played a huge part in our history. We miss him terribly and felt there could be no better way of recognising this than by naming a race in his honour.

Shelsley Walsh

On 11 June 2021 a blue plaque from the Worcester Civic Society was unveiled in the courtyard of the Shelsley Walsh hill climb by Joe Dunn, the editor of Motor Sport. It marks the hill on which Moss won his class on 25 September 1948, set the record for unsupercharged cars on 11 June 1949, and made the fastest time of the day on 24 September 1949. The county’s other blue plaques include ones for Edward Elgar and Tip Foster.

On the page and the screen

He told his own story many times, with a different writer each time: All But My Life with Ken Purdy in 1963, Stirling Moss: My Cars, My Career with Doug Nye in 1987, with a foreword by Fangio, Stirling Moss: All My Races with Alan Henry in 2009, and Stirling Moss: My Racing Life, written with Simon Taylor, in 2015. Robert Edwards wrote his authorised biography, published in 2001, and Richard Williams The Boy in 2021.

Television found him early, as The sportsman tells. In 1967, by Damien Smith’s account, he made a cameo appearance in Casino Royale, and when Peter Sellers told him to follow that car, he ran off after it on foot. In 2020 Motor Sport released an hour-long filmed interview with him by Mia Forbes Pirie, recorded before 2016, as his last. The books and the films are listed in Books & films.

The measure

When he died, the British Racing Drivers’ Club described the standing he had held among drivers.

In the history of motor racing, not just in his home country but also wherever he raced around the world, Sir Stirling held a unique status, which continued throughout his life, long after he retired from his front line racing career … He was universally recognised, following the retirement of the great Juan Manuel Fangio in 1958, as the racing driver who set the standards by which all other drivers were judged, whether in Formula 1 or international sports car racing.

The champions who came after him said much the same in their own words, and What they said gathers them: Jackie Stewart, who called him his ultimate hero; Damon Hill, who carried his helmet at the Abbey; Mario Andretti, and younger drivers with stories of their own.

The modern driver whose career touched his most closely was Lewis Hamilton. Moss had written of Hamilton’s gifts in 2007, and in 2008 it was Hamilton who presented him with the BRDC’s Vice-Presidency for Life; seven years later they drove together at Monza, as What they said tells. In 2017 Hamilton passed the record of 10 Gold Stars that Moss had held since 1961, and when Moss died, Goodwood’s obituary called him England’s greatest driver until Hamilton came to challenge him.

Some of the measure is arithmetic. His 16 World Championship wins are still the most by any driver who never became champion; the next on that list, David Coulthard, has 13.² Over his whole career, from 1948 to 1962, he won 212 of 529 races, the 529 being the count of All My Races: races only, without the rallies, hill climbs and record attempts. Other counts include more events and give other totals, and Records sets them out.

Some of it is not. That he never won the title became, in time, part of how he was remembered, and a question that, the story goes, British traffic policemen put to speeding drivers kept his name in use long after his front-line career had ended; The sportsman follows both.

Westminster Abbey, 8 May 2024

Because he died under the Covid-19 restrictions of 2020, when public gatherings were not allowed, his funeral was private, and the public farewell waited four years. At 11 o’clock on 8 May 2024 about 2,000 people came to a Service of Thanksgiving for him in Westminster Abbey; 722 of the tickets had been released to the public, for the number of the Mille Miglia car, and the car itself stood outside. The Duke of Kent represented the King, and Jackie Stewart the Princess Royal.

Damon Hill carried his white helmet, the trophy he won at Monaco in 1961 and his Gold Stars up the nave to the High Altar. Simon Taylor and Stewart gave tributes; David Coulthard and Derek Bell led the prayers, and the Duke of Richmond read a lesson. Nigel Mansell, Ross Brawn and Christian Horner were in the congregation, and Anthony Hamilton came for his son. They sang “He who would valiant be”, “I vow to thee, my country” and “Jerusalem”, and the collection went to Hope for Tomorrow, the cancer-care charity of which he and Lady Moss had been founding patrons. She had not lived to see the day; she died in March 2023.

There will never be another Stirling Moss. He drove well, he presented himself well, he dressed well and he was just an amazing character … I don’t think in the history of the sport there has been somebody so well loved and who has continued to be so well loved.

Elliot Moss read to the congregation what his father had once written for him, about the Gold Stars and the helmet.