The people around him Family, manager, patron, mechanic, and the men who ran his teams

In the weeks after the crash at Goodwood in April 1962, while Stirling Moss lay in a coma at the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, the people closest to him kept watch by turns. His secretary, Valerie Pirie, took the shift that began at half past six in the morning; Rob Walker or Ken Gregory came in the afternoon; and his father arrived at about ten at night and stayed until the morning.

Between them they had made much of his career possible. Gregory said that Moss had been the first driver to live by racing alone, which made him, Gregory, the first professional manager of a racing driver; Walker ran him on a handshake; his mechanic, Alf Francis, once cut and rewelded the chassis of a new car overnight to give him the driving position he wanted. Around them stood the men who ran the teams he drove for, the journalist who sat beside him for a thousand miles, and a family that had raced before he did.

His family

Alfred Moss

His father, Alfred (1896–⁠1972), was a London dentist with a chain of surgeries who had driven in the Indianapolis 500 of 1924 and finished 16th; the story is told in The early years. He opposed his son’s racing, then backed it, and Gregory learned that once Alfred approved of a plan, it went ahead. He gave Moss and Gregory offices in his building in London, whose basement became a bar they called The Beefburger. In 1958 he and Gregory founded the British Racing Partnership, and Alfred put up the money for its first Formula Two Cooper. He died on 23 April 1972, the tenth anniversary of Goodwood.

Aileen Moss

His mother, Aileen, born Craufurd, had been an ambulance driver in the First World War and then a competitor in trials and rallies, and was the winner of the Ladies’ Experts Trial of 1936. She and Alfred met at Brooklands. Moss said that he owed them both a very great deal.

Pat Moss and Erik Carlsson

His sister, Pat (1934–⁠2008), five years younger, became the leading woman rally driver of her time, as The early years tells. In 1963, in London, she married Erik Carlsson (1929–⁠2015), the Saab driver called “Mr Saab”, winner of the RAC Rally in 1960, 1961 and 1962 and of the Monte Carlo Rally in 1962 and 1963, who rolled his cars so often that he was also known as “Carlsson on the roof”. Pat drove beside him at Saab for a time, and they had a daughter, Suzy.

Three marriages

Moss married three times. The first wedding, at St Peter’s, Eaton Square, on 7 October 1957, was to Katie Molson, a Canadian of the brewing family; they parted in 1960. In 1964 came a second marriage, to Elaine Barbarino, an American in public relations; their daughter, Allison, was born, and they were divorced in 1968. In April 1980 he married Susie Paine, the daughter of old friends of the family, and their son, Elliot, was born that year. Susie became a director of Stirling Moss Ltd and ran the business with him. When he died, in 2020, she, Elliot and Allison survived him; Lady Moss died on 18 March 2023. The marriages and the years after racing are told in After racing.

Ken Gregory, the manager

Ken Gregory (1926–⁠2013) had left the army to work for the Royal Automobile Club and become secretary of the 500 Club, where he met Moss; at the end of 1951 Moss asked him to be his manager, and Moss lodged in Gregory’s flat in Hampstead. The early story is in The 500s.

I wish he’d learn to relax a bit. … This is about the first time I haven’t seen him doing anything. He’s always designing a house or a car or a boat or something.

Gregory made the large decisions while Moss was racing abroad. He bought the Maserati 250F that Moss raced in 1954, negotiated with Ferrari, Vandervell, Maserati’s Count Orsi and Alfred Neubauer of Mercedes-⁠Benz, and late in 1954 took Moss to Mercedes-⁠Benz. At the end of that year he, Moss and Alfred Moss formed Stirling Moss Ltd. When Moss was away Gregory spoke to the press for him, and he kept up the rule that every photograph a fan sent in came back signed; Moss signed them by the hundred. He managed Peter Collins too.

He admired Moss without illusions. He called him “a genius with a slide-rule mind”, and wrote, while Moss was still racing, that “a close friend of Stirling needs to fight him in spirit every inch of the way” (attributed). They had their strong differences of opinion. With Alfred Moss he founded the British Racing Partnership, which in 1960, as Yeoman Credit Racing, became the first Formula One team named for a sponsor, and later raced as UDT-⁠Laystall; the Lotus that Moss crashed at Goodwood was run by it.

After Goodwood Gregory dealt with the press and the letters, and then the two went their own ways. BRP built cars of its own; Gregory became a director of Brands Hatch, ran the Nassau Speed Week, founded the magazine Cars & Car Conversions, and ran an air-taxi firm whose passengers included Frank Sinatra and the Beatles. He lost his fortune in the banking crisis of the 1970s, retired to Spain, and died in 2013, aged 87.

Rob Walker, the patron

Rob Walker (1917–⁠2002), an heir to the Johnnie Walker whisky fortune, had driven at Le Mans himself in 1939: through the evening in a dark pinstripe suit, then for 12 hours on end after his co-driver’s feet were burned, to finish eighth in a Delahaye with Ian Connell. His passport, Andrew Frankel wrote, gave his occupation as gentleman. In the war he flew with the Fleet Air Arm.

From 1958 to 1961 Moss drove for him, in Coopers and Lotuses bought from the factories and painted in Walker’s dark blue, and there was never a contract between them, only a handshake. Moss chose him over the works teams for the man himself. Moss remembered that the factories would sell the little team only a year-old chassis, though Jenkinson reported the Lotus that won at Monaco in 1960 as brand new; either way, it beat them all the same: together they won seven Grands Prix, Argentina in 1958, the first time a rear-engined car had won a round of the championship; Portugal and Italy in 1959; Monaco, the first Grand Prix win for a Lotus, and the United States in 1960; and Monaco and Germany in 1961. Counting Maurice Trintignant’s win at Monaco in 1958, Nigel Roebuck reckoned, Walker’s cars won eight Grands Prix in those four years. Of all his teams, Moss said in 1994, Walker’s was the one he had most enjoyed, for the cooperation and the teamwork: if he and Alf Francis reckoned a race was worth going to, Walker gave it his blessing, and Moss felt that his own say counted.

For 1962 Ferrari had agreed, at Moss’s insistence, to supply a car for Walker to run in his own colours, and Goodwood ended it. Walker died on 29 April 2002, aged 84.

Alf Francis, the mechanic

Alf Francis was a Pole, born Alphons Frantisek Kowalski in Denis Jenkinson’s spelling; other accounts give the name differently.¹ He escaped the occupation, made his way across Europe to Portugal and reached Liverpool by sea, believing he was on his way to America. He took British nationality, and became so British in his ways, Jenkinson wrote, that nobody would have guessed where he came from until he spoke.

He prepared Moss’s HWM from 1950, his own Maserati in 1954 and, as chief mechanic at Walker’s garage in Dorking, the Coopers and Lotuses that followed: a fixer, by Jenkinson’s account, who could make a car go with fencing wire and a welding plant. Walker always deferred to him on what to run and where to race. At Monaco in 1961 it was Francis who decided to change the misfiring engine in Moss’s Lotus before the race, and Francis who gave him his pit signals as he held off the Ferraris.

On the BBC’s This Is Your Life in 1959 he said that the two of them argued, and worked together like brothers, and he gave his verdict on his driver: “Now I think he is the greatest living.” (attributed). He wrote a book, Racing Mechanic, with Peter Lewis, in 1957; later he worked with Valerio Colotti on gearboxes in Italy, and with restorers in America. He died in Oklahoma in June 1983, at 65 by the usual account, though Jenkinson thought him nearer 70.

Alfred Neubauer

Alfred Neubauer (1891–⁠1980) had run the racing team of Daimler-Benz since 1926, a large, strict figure on the pit wall. His memoir told the story of signing Moss to its own advantage: Gregory, it said, had come to Stuttgart in 1953 offering Moss in place of Fangio, a driver whose name “meant no more to me than Herbert Smith or Alfred Jones” (attributed). Chris Nixon, writing in Motor Sport, found that hard to believe, and Gregory, who had first approached the firm by cabling Rudolf Uhlenhaut, remembered it differently: turned down in 1953 as not yet ready, and sent for a year later. The approach is told in 1953 and the signing in 1954.

He was the most sympathetic, but hard-faced man. By that I mean that he was very strict, but he had a wonderful sense of humour. I think he really loved his drivers and took great care of them.

Moss remembered him with great warmth, almost as a father. On the way to Argentina in 1955, he said, Neubauer pretended to be stuck in the door of the aircraft’s lavatory, and called his drivers to come and free him.

When Moss went to Hockenheim in December 1954 to try the car and sign, Picture Post sent reporters after him, and Neubauer’s driver took them the wrong way; it was most of the afternoon, Gregory remembered, before they reached the track. Before the Mille Miglia Neubauer warned him to give the 300 SLR plenty of throttle as it left the starting ramp, and when Moss and Jenkinson wrote off two cars in practice, Jenkinson reported, his only worry was that they had not been hurt. At Le Mans that year, Moss said, Neubauer set him no limits.

Rudolf Uhlenhaut

Rudolf Uhlenhaut (1906–⁠1989) was born in England, where his father ran the London branch of the Deutsche Bank, and his mother was English; the family moved to Germany in 1914. He ran the Mercedes-⁠Benz racing department, and he drove the cars himself, near the pace of his drivers: at 49, testing the 300 SLR, he was still almost as fast as the best of them. The story that he lapped the Nürburgring faster than the racing drivers, Nixon judged, was wide of the mark, but he was only seconds away. With Kosteletzky and Werner he prepared the cars for the Mille Miglia.

Nothing was impossible for Rudi. I always felt that if I had asked for square wheels, either they would have been fitted the next day or he would have looked it up in a big, black book and said, ‘We tried that in 1936 and there was too much vibration!’ … a lovely man, a very happy, very human individual. I look back on him with fond memories.

Tony Vandervell

Tony Vandervell had made his fortune in engine bearings, and the Vanwall, built at his works in Acton, gave Moss what he had long wanted: a British car that could beat the Italians. He first hired Moss for the new car’s debut, in the International Trophy at Silverstone in May 1956, while Moss was under contract to Maserati, and Moss won; he then tried to borrow him for that year’s British Grand Prix. From 1957 Moss led his team, with Tony Brooks and later Stuart Lewis-Evans. In 1958 Vanwall won the first championship for constructors, and after Lewis-Evans died of the burns he suffered at Casablanca, Vandervell withdrew his team.

Moss found him gruff but likeable, he said in 1994, and in 2006 tough, with his heart in the right place. When Vandervell died, in March 1967, it was hinted that drink had killed him. Frank Costin, who shaped the Vanwall’s body, would have none of it: a heart attack had killed him, Costin said, because he worked and played so hard.

Colin Chapman

Colin Chapman (1928–⁠1982), the founder of Lotus, redesigned the Vanwall’s chassis before he built the Lotus cars Moss raced in Walker’s colours. In championship races Moss’s Lotuses were Walker’s, bought from the factory, except at Monza in 1961, when Innes Ireland lent him his works car. In a Walker Lotus 18 he gave Lotus its first Grand Prix win, at Monaco in 1960; in practice at Spa three weeks after, the left rear stub axle broke as he took a curve at over 130 mph (209 km/⁠h), and he was badly hurt. He could accept that crash, he said, because it was the car’s fault and not his own, and he blamed Chapman. Of the Lotuses in general he said: “I always worried more in the Lotus and I never felt comfortable.”

In 1963, by Pirie’s account, the rear hubs of the Lotus Elan that Moss’s own small team was running for John Whitmore kept failing, and Moss called Chapman to his house in Shepherd Street and threatened to sue. Chapman agreed to redesign the hubs and to pay a large sum to a charity of Moss’s choosing, and they shook hands on it. Chapman died at his home in Norfolk in December 1982, aged 54.

John Wyer and David Brown

David Brown (1904–⁠1993), the Huddersfield industrialist, bought Aston Martin in 1947 and Lagonda the year after; what he wanted was to win at Le Mans. In 1950 he asked John Wyer (1909–⁠1989) to form and run the racing team. Wyer was known for a lugubrious wit and a crushing one-liner, and Moss, who drove Brown’s Aston Martins in 1956, 1958 and 1959, for £50 a year by his own account, remembered how rarely he praised anyone, and what it meant when he did: “Maybe under the circumstances, Moss, you didn’t do too bad a job” (attributed). In 1959 Brown had what he wanted: Aston Martin won Le Mans and the World Sportscar Championship, which Moss clinched at Goodwood in the Tourist Trophy. The races are in The sports cars. Brown was knighted in 1968.

Denis Jenkinson

Denis Jenkinson, “Jenks” to his readers, was Motor Sport’s Continental Correspondent and a former world champion as a sidecar passenger. In 1955 he sat beside Moss for the whole of the Mille Miglia. They had prepared it as two minds in one car, Jenkinson keeping the navigation from 17 pages of notes made on their practice runs and passing it on by hand signals, since they could not talk in the 300 SLR; they won, and the story is told in The Mille Miglia. He went with him again in 1956 and 1957, in Maseratis, without success. Moss had a name for him: “guide dog” (attributed).

He was a judge, not a fan. He timed Fangio faster than Moss in the same cars, judged at Aintree in 1955 that Fangio had let Moss win, and put Tony Brooks not quite Moss’s equal. Years later he told Doug Nye what he thought held Moss back: “Stirling had the talent to win in anything, but he’d always try to find that little extra car advantage by trying something new, and it often let him down… If he’d played safe, he’d still have won.” (attributed) Jenkinson died on 29 November 1996, aged 75.

Valerie Pirie

Valerie Pirie was a young Scot, 17 or 18 by different accounts, when in 1958 she answered an advertisement for a secretary without knowing who the employer was. She booked his flights to places she had never heard of, Karlskoga, Catania, the Avus; she drove him home from airports late at night to the Lotus House, a Chinese restaurant on the Edgware Road, where he worked out gear ratios on scraps of paper and drew her maps of the circuits to teach her the lines; she oversaw the building of his house in Shepherd Street; and she resigned, she said, frequently. When a helicopter came late, he had her write to BP to complain; BP answered with a confidential package of ping-pong balls. Once, in August 1960, she was told to get on to an airline and make it deliver him to Karlskoga in time for his race; he got there, and won.

That year he tried to send her to the British Racing Drivers’ Club dinner with Jim Clark, a fellow Scot. Neither was interested, though they stayed friends, and of Clark she wrote: “He was even shyer than Stirling, in fact, painfully so.”

After Goodwood she ran the office through the flood of good wishes: “In the first couple of weeks or so, we received well over 1500 letters and cards wishing him well every day.” Gregory’s count was 400 a day. She also had her own account of his first word on coming round, which the papers credited to his mother as “Mum” and which she remembered as an oath. In 1963 she managed his small team’s Lotus Elan for John Whitmore, and later raced it herself. She left his employment in 1965, ran a public-relations agency and became women’s editor of the South Wales Echo, and in 2019 published her memoir, Ciao, Stirling. They were never a couple, as a reviewer of the book put it; she was a steadying presence in a life that rarely stood still.