In his words 50 years of interviews, and the sayings that travel under his name without a source

Talking about it

In the autumn of 1994, when he had just turned 65, Stirling Moss gave an interview to David Tremayne of Motor Sport, and in it he talked about being afraid.

You see, danger was always on my shoulder. … I was always really quite frightened of hurting myself. Of dying.

He talked about racing for the rest of his life, and most of what he said that survives word for word comes from a handful of long conversations. Tremayne’s is one. Julia Llewelyn Smith interviewed him for The Independent in 2001. Simon Taylor of Motor Sport had lunch with him in 2006, when he was 76, and talked to him again for his 80th birthday in 2009. In London in 2011 he talked to Gian Luca Pellegrini of the Italian magazine Quattroruote, which printed him in Italian; those quotations are shown here in the magazine’s Italian, with an English translation beneath, and never as his own English.

Behind them stands a book, All But My Life, which Ken Purdy wrote with him and published in 1963, the year he gave up racing. It is known here only through the long passages Motor Sport quoted from it in 2020, so its words are marked attributed, as is anything else that rests on someone’s later memory or a report at second hand. One line is older: six words from his diary, on the day of his crash at Spa in 1960.

The quotations below are grouped by what he was talking about, each with the date and the occasion. At the end are 18 lines that travel under his name without a source, and the reasons for doubting each one.

Fear and speed

He said it more than once, and he said it plainly. When Tremayne remarked that he had not spun a car in his first four years of racing, the answer came at once: “That’s because I’m not courageous”. In 2001 he told The Independent that he had lost three or four friends a year, and had made it bearable only by telling himself that he had not been going as fast as they had. But the danger was also the point: “It was like cooking with salt, it gives it a lot more flavour.”

Ten years later Quattroruote asked him whether a professional of the fifties faced death in every race.

Assolutamente sì. Per noi il pericolo era una motivazione fortissima, forse la più importante. Era quello che mi eccitava di più. Vincere era bello, certo. Ma la vera impresa era quella di superare la paura a ogni curva.

Absolutely, yes. For us danger was a very strong motive, perhaps the most important. It was what excited me most. Winning was nice, of course. But the real feat was overcoming the fear at every corner.

He talked as readily about the work of going fast. In 1994 he described the moment a rival dropped back in his mirrors: “That’s when I felt six feet tall.” Then came a lonelier race, against the rev counter and himself. To Nigel Roebuck he described the craft as a matter of language: “I believe the art of driving a car is learning the language the car is speaking.” No circuit, he said, made him feel it as the Nürburgring did, with his adrenalin up and the car doing what he asked of it. Purdy’s book has him put it another way, as an art, with the car no more than the tool: “Racing is rather like painting to me: the car is only the instrument, as paints are to a painter.” (attributed)

When it went wrong he wrote it down with the same economy. In practice for the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa on 18 June 1960 a rear stub axle broke on Rob Walker’s Lotus, the wheel came off, the car hit the bank and he was thrown out. His diary entry for the day ran to six words: “Shunt. Back. Legs. Nose. Bruises. Bugger.” (attributed) He was racing again in August. The 1960 season tells the rest.

A racer, not a driver

The rule he raced by he gave to Tremayne in a single sentence, and then explained it.

But you see, my philosophy was that I would rather lose a race driving fast enough to win, than win a race driving slow enough to lose, if you follow. Because I am a racer, I’m not a driver. And I think that is not an intelligent thing to be; one should be a driver and a racer as well, but I enjoy racing. I enjoy dicing with other guys. To me that’s what it’s about.

Twelve years later he gave Simon Taylor the same rule almost word for word, with the three short sentences that stand at the head of this page. He meant every race, whatever its size. With Juan Manuel Fangio, whom he revered, he disagreed about one thing, as Doug Nye recalled: “The one thing I never agreed with was his saying ‘Always drive to win at the slowest possible speed’ – just to reach the finish. To me, that wasn’t racing.” (attributed) The Associated Press, writing his obituary, put the same thought in one undated question of his: “If you’re not trying to win at all costs … what on earth are you doing there?” (attributed)

Money was never reason enough, he told Purdy for the book of 1963, and he did not believe it was for anyone else: “A professional is a driver who races out of pride. He wants to win because he wants to beat you” (attributed). In the same book he explained why each lost championship hurt him less than the one before. Part of it was habit, part of it something he could not quite name, but he thought it might be the realisation that “while having the championship would mean perhaps a lot to Stirling Moss Limited, it might not mean much to Stirling Moss” (attributed). The book has him runner-⁠up five times. He was runner-⁠up four times, in 1955, 1956, 1957 and 1958, and third in each of the three years that followed.

By 2009 he had decided that the fault, if it was one, was in his own make-up: “My philosophy was different – I had absolutely the wrong mindset for winning titles, but I’m a racer.” (attributed) Why the title he never won became part of his fame, and not a footnote to it, is the subject of The sportsman.

The cars

The Associated Press counted 107 types of car in his career, and when he talked about them he talked about how they drove. Of the Maserati 250F, which he raced in 1954, in 1956 and at the start of 1957, he said in 2009: “It was just such an easy car to drive fast.” He set it beside the Mercedes-⁠Benz W196 he drove in 1955.

An incredibly engineered car, it only ever broke on me once, which I certainly can’t say about the 250F, but it wasn’t anything like as nice to drive as the Maser. … Maybe in certain places the W196 had an edge in pure speed, but because the Maserati gave such confidence you could drive it harder and get more out of it. I think at somewhere like Monaco, I might actually have been quicker in a 250F.

The records give him three retirements in six starts in the W196. The Mercedes-⁠Benz he put above every other car was the sports car, the 300 SLR. In 2012 he named it outright: “The greatest car built, in my mind, was the 300SLR Mercedes. There’s a car that was unbreakable, really.” Of the BRM P25, his book of 2009, All My Races, written with Alan Henry, says: “In many ways, despite its unreliability, this car represented the ultimate development of the front-engined 2.5-⁠litre Formula 1 concept.” The little Maserati sports car of 1959, the Tipo 60, got warmer words: “My first impression of this distinctive little machine was that it was absolutely fantastic – responsive and agile in equal measure. … What a great little car it was.”

The four-wheel-drive Ferguson P99, in which he won the Gold Cup at Oulton Park in 1961, he called “The most difficult car to drive, purely because it was different.” The same book explains what he meant.

I think a rear-engined car is inherently easier to drive than a front-engined one. … The Ferguson was difficult because you could not set it up and throw it around in the same way as you could a Cooper, for example. You could hold a Cooper beautifully balanced in a sideways drift, but you could not do that with the Ferguson. You had to be much more accurate and precise.

The cars he raced, from the Coopers of 1948 to the Lotus of 1962, are in The machines.

Fangio, and the others

Of all the drivers he raced, one stood apart for him, for 50 years. In 1998, three years after Fangio’s death, he wrote about him for Motor Sport.

All I was trying to do was emulate him, to be as good as him. I like to think he also taught me humility because, as the best in the world, he was a humble man. … And if you look at every part of his career, every detail, you won’t find anything he ever did, or said, that wasn’t good for motor racing. We won’t see his like again.

In the same essay he remembered that Fangio never lost his temper with a driver who tried to carve him up on the track: he wagged a finger at him, and from Fangio that was frightening enough. Their year together at Mercedes-⁠Benz, Aintree and the friendship are told in Moss and Fangio.

He went on judging drivers to the end. In 2006, after Michael Schumacher stopped his Ferrari on the track in qualifying at Monaco, he called it cheating, a tragedy for a man who had spent years building his reputation, and added a judgement of his own: “He’s not the best driver ever, of course – he’s won seven world titles, but he’s racing in the Safe Era, you see.” For passion, he said, there had been only Senna in the modern era. The next year he wrote of Lewis Hamilton: “I’ve been observing this sport, in one way or the other, for well over 60 years now and I can safely say in all truth that he is the most interesting and talented figure I can identify in all of that time.” His verdicts on the men he raced are with each of them in Rivals and friends.

Stopping

He remembered nothing of the crash at Goodwood on 23 April 1962, and he went back over the decision that followed it for the rest of his life. On 1 May 1963 he drove a Lotus at Goodwood to see whether he could still race. The lap times were good enough. What he told Tremayne in 1994 was that the driving no longer came by itself: “The automation had gone, and it was now a conscious effort.” That evening, in London, he announced that he was retiring.

In the same interview he said he had tried too soon: “Now, in hindsight, I probably came back two years too early”, because the press asked every week whether he would race again, and he wanted to. In 2009 he told Taylor that he might have recovered his concentration in two or three years, and that before the accident he had meant to race on for years: “Before the accident I had every intention of going on until I was 50.” But having said he was finished, he would not go back on it, and he did not like it when others did. At the Goodwood Revival in September 2019, the month he turned 90, the Duke of Richmond repeated in a speech what Moss had told him: “I tried too soon. I should have waited another two or three years to recover – I would still have been young enough.” (attributed)

He raced historic cars into his eighties, and in June 2011, aged 81, at Le Mans, he decided that he had raced for the last time.¹ Later that year he told Quattroruote why.

Alla fine di maggio, ero a Le Mans su una Porsche e mi sono accorto di non essere più competitivo: non riuscivo ad andare veloce, che è l’unica cosa che mi è sempre interessata. Inoltre, mi sono reso conto che, se anche fossi riuscito ad accelerare, avrei avuto paura. Non ho mai provato nulla del genere alla guida di una macchina. E ho capito che avrei dovuto abbandonare una volta per tutte.

At the end of May I was at Le Mans in a Porsche and I realised I was no longer competitive: I couldn’t go fast, which is the only thing that has ever interested me. And I realised that even if I had managed to go faster, I would have been afraid. I had never felt anything like it at the wheel of a car. And I understood that I had to stop once and for all.

What happened at Le Mans, and after, is in After racing.

The man behind the wheel

Asked about the rest of his life, he was as direct as he was about racing. In 2001 he looked back on the fifties with pleasure: “It was all travelling and pretty girls and dancing.” Of the women in his life then, he said: “I never lied. I never said, you are the only person in my life, although I wouldn’t rub their nose in it, either. But it’s inevitable, if you lead as public life as I did, you get caught out.” Of his first marriage, to Katie Molson in 1957: “I wasn’t ready for it. Right person, wrong time.” Of his third, to Susie Paine in 1980, he told Taylor in 2006: “She’s involved in every trip, organising and taking part. We haven’t spent a night apart this century. I couldn’t have done that with my other wives.”

He could be as hard on himself.

The downside of being so competitive is that one tends to be selfish. People had been asking me my opinions since I was 17, which made me think I was more important than I really was. It made me a bit of a control freak and I’m impetuous too, I make a decision in an instant which can make me very difficult to live with.

He had no qualifications, as he saw it, and when racing ended he had to find a living. In 2009 he described the choice as he had seen it: “I had no qualifications to do anything. … if you know nothing about anything, there are only two jobs available to you: estate agent or Member of Parliament. I didn’t want to be either of those.” He sold his name instead, and his time, and he wanted the whole of his life told, not only the racing. When Robert Edwards wrote his authorised biography in 2001 and wanted to leave out his private life, Moss insisted: “It’s got to be warts and all.”

His figures did not always agree from one telling to the next. What he earned in his last full season, 1961, he put at £32,700 in 2009 and, to Quattroruote in 2011, at £25,000. His opinions did not soften with age. In 2001 he had said it plainly: “Motor racing is no longer a sport.” In April 2013, aged 83, he told BBC Radio 5 Live that women lacked what it took to win in Formula One: “The mental stress I think would be pretty difficult for a lady to deal with in a practical fashion. I just don’t think they have aptitude to win a Formula One race.” The Williams development driver Susie Wolff answered him on the same station, and her words are in What they said.

Doubtful lines

Quotation websites carry a good many sayings under his name, and some reputable pages repeat them. None of the sites gives a source that can be checked, and none of the 18 lines below has been found, as worded, in an interview, an article or a book of his. Each was tested against the interviews and books quoted on this page; what was found, or not found, follows each one. They are printed here so that they can be recognised, and each is marked doubtful.

His own creed, garbled

Three of them twist the rule he really raced by. The first turns his sentence of 1994 and 2006 about driving fast enough to win into something he never said: “Better to lose a race with a slow car than win it with a fast one” (doubtful). The second paraphrases words he did use in 1994, and a line from 2001 about his schooldays, which he said had made him a racer rather than a driver: “I am not a driver, I am a racer.” (doubtful) The third, a racing proverb credited to many people, contradicts the rule he raced by: “In order to finish first, you first have to finish.” (doubtful)

Traced to an Italian book

The best known of them is tagged on one quotation site as from Newsweek in 1955, though no issue, page or article has been found: “It is necessary to relax your muscles when you can. Relaxing your brain is fatal.” (doubtful) The earliest printing found is in Italian, in a book of sporting aphorisms published in 1992, Palla lunga e pedalare, by Marco Pastonesi and Giorgio Terruzzi. Nothing like it is in Denis Jenkinson’s account of their Mille Miglia, which has Moss relaxed at the wheel. The same book is the earliest printing found of another: “To achieve anything in this game you must be prepared to dabble in the boundary of disaster.” (doubtful)

Perhaps from Purdy’s book

Three may come from All But My Life, but none has been found in it. One quotation site gives the book as the source of the first, without a page, and none of the passages that reputable writers have quoted from the book contains it: “There are two things no man will admit he cannot do well: drive and make love.” (doubtful) No source has been found for the second: “I love to feel a racing car around me … and then a little bit more.” (doubtful) Nor for the third, though he was 33 in 1962 and 1963, when the book was made, which is reason to look for it there: “It has taken me thirty three years and a bang on the head to get my values right.” (doubtful)

No source at all

For five there is nothing. One has no source anywhere: “If God had meant for us to walk, why did he give us feet that fit car pedals?” (doubtful) Nor has another: “It’s hard to drive at the limit, but it’s harder to know where the limits are.” (doubtful) A third is a driving instructor’s saying: “It is better to go into a corner slow and come out fast, than to go in fast and come out dead.” (doubtful) A fourth is more often credited to others, in versions given to Ferdinand Porsche and to Colin Chapman: “The ideal racecar will expire 100 yards past the finish line.” (doubtful) And the fifth reads like a joke line: “Calling upon my years of experience, I froze at the controls.” (doubtful)

On other drivers

One, said to be about Ayrton Senna, has been found only on a fan account on X: “He was the greatest driver ever seen. The only person to compete with him was Fangio.” (doubtful) What he said about Senna in 1994, six months after Senna’s death, was more measured: that Senna was of the same stature as Fangio. Another has no source at all: “Quite frankly, Kimi Raikkonen is the fastest driver in the world.” (doubtful) What he said in 2006 was that Kimi Räikkönen would be up there too, if only McLaren could give him the right equipment.

Three stories told about him

The International Motorsports Hall of Fame prints the first of the last three without a source, and Quattroruote printed it in Italian in the introduction to its interview, published in 2012, in quotation marks but not in the interview itself: “Better to lose honourably in a British car than win in a foreign one.” (doubtful) His own account of 1994 says the opposite of the vow it implies: he went to Maserati in 1954 because there was no British car to drive. How far he chose British cars is told in The sportsman.

The Hall of Fame also has him say simply, after his test at Goodwood on 1 May 1963: “I am retiring.” (doubtful) His own accounts have him make up his mind there and announce it in London that evening. And after his knighthood, the story goes, a guard at the palace asked who he thought he was, Stirling Moss, and got the reply: “Sir Stirling Moss, actually.” (doubtful) It has no source. The question the guard is supposed to have asked has a history of its own, told in The sportsman.