What they said Rivals, reporters, team owners and champions on the man they watched

On television

John Freeman had expected a playboy. On 12 June 1960 he questioned Stirling Moss for half an hour on the BBC’s Face to Face, and nearly 30 years later, talking to the broadcaster Anthony Clare, he remembered what he had found instead.

cold, precise, clinical judgement... a man who could live so close to the edge of death and danger, and trust entirely to his own judgement.

The year before, the BBC had made Moss the subject of This Is Your Life. His wife, Katie, married to him for a year and a half, told the presenter, Eamonn Andrews, that he never relaxed, and then described him at a race meeting.

Yes, I have, but he changes when he gets onto the track. He becomes a different sort of person. He often doesn’t recognise me. I know the times when I’ve stood in the pits and he’s looked right by me.

People had been trying to say what he was since the first reports of his racing, in 1948, and they went on doing it until a service in Westminster Abbey in 2024. This page gathers what they said, by who was speaking: the reporters who watched him race, the drivers who raced him, the men he drove for, the drivers who came after him, the writers who knew him, and his family. The race reports of each year are quoted with the seasons, his rivals’ words chiefly with Rivals and friends, and the words of his manager, his mechanics and his team managers with The people around him; here are the rest.

Some voices are missing. No verified words about Moss have been found from Enzo Ferrari, Alfred Neubauer, Mike Hawthorn, Jim Clark or Ayrton Senna. A sentence about Moss and the championship, credited to Enzo Ferrari, circulates on quotation sites with nothing behind it, and Neubauer’s memoirs, in their English edition of 1960, gave the British Grand Prix of 1955 just 13 words.

The men who watched him race

The reporters wrote about him race by race, and not always kindly. In 1953, when he was switching between big cars and 500cc ones from one race to the next, the commentator at the Goodwood autumn meeting, on 26 September, told the crowd that the changing about was harming his driving in the small cars, and Motor Sport printed the remark in its report.

No reporter saw him closer than Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport, who sat beside him for 10 hours in the Mille Miglia of 1955 and wrote it down within weeks.

On May 1st motor-racing history was made, for Stirling Moss won the 1,000-mile Mille Miglia, the first time in twenty-two years that this has been achieved by a British driver, and I had the very great privilege of sitting beside him throughout this epic drive.

Jenkinson went on reporting his races to the end, and the seasons from 1955 to 1961 quote him often. In 1994 David Tremayne, interviewing Moss for the same magazine, called him “one of those peculiarly British icons”, and set him against Nigel Mansell, whom, he wrote, the national media built up only to destroy when trouble came.

The men he raced

Juan Manuel Fangio, who beat him to three titles, named him in 1979, with Alberto Ascari, as one of the two rivals he had feared most.

Tony Brooks, his team-⁠mate at Vanwall and at Aston Martin, wrote for Motor Sport after Moss’s death about how differently the two of them drove.

We went about our driving in very different ways. I preferred to be smooth at all times, whereas Stirling perhaps fought the car a little more. He was also a very late braker and doubtless pulled out some time over me in this area, which perhaps helps explain why he preferred and was absolutely at his best on slow- and medium-speed circuits like Monaco and the Nürburgring.

To Goodwood’s obituary Brooks gave a shorter verdict: “The greatest team-⁠mate I ever had.” He thought the greatest tribute he could pay was that hardly any of Moss’s accidents had been his own fault.

Others described what it was like to race him. If a rival got close enough to push him, Tremayne wrote, Moss would let him by and put the same pressure on him from behind, and Dan Gurney explained why: “That way … he’d see what it took to make you come unglued, but you’d never see him getting unravelled so you never knew what it took. . .” (attributed) John Surtees compared him with Clark in 2000: “I would say that over a single lap in the same car there would have been virtually nothing in it. But Moss was more of a racer… I think Stirling was quicker in the wet.” Jack Brabham, who beat him to the titles of 1959 and 1960, wrote in a book quoted by Sports Illustrated in October 1960 that Moss was the greatest driver of all time, better even than Fangio.

The men he drove for

The private entrant who ran him for four seasons, Rob Walker, saw him win at Monaco in 1961 in an old Lotus against the new Ferraris, and said of it: “I thought it was Stirling’s greatest drive; in fact I thought it was the greatest drive by any driver, that I had ever seen in my life.” (attributed) At Maserati, for whose works team he drove in 1956, the chief mechanic, Guerino Bertocchi, put it more simply to Doug Nye in Modena in 1981: “Moss was a great driver, we liked him”.

Ferrari’s works team never had him. Enzo Ferrari’s view of him comes second-hand, from his son Piero, in a statement after Moss’s death.

My father said that Stirling reminded him of Tazio Nuvolari, because of his love of racing in any type of car, something which stayed with him right to the very end of his career.

In the same statement Piero Ferrari said that Maranello had been preparing a 250 SWB for Moss in British racing green when he crashed at Goodwood in 1962, with a contract to drive for Ferrari. Moss’s own account of the plan was different: a Formula One car in Walker’s dark blue, run by his team, and a GTO and a sports car painted pale green for the British Racing Partnership. The two accounts do not agree.

What his manager, Ken Gregory, and his team managers, Neubauer at Mercedes-⁠Benz and John Wyer at Aston Martin, said of him is told with their own stories in The people around him.

The generations after him

Jackie Stewart had his autograph as a boy in the Scottish Borders, and was still showing it in 2024. On the day Moss died, 12 April 2020, he told BBC Radio 5 Live what he had seen in him.

He walked like a racing driver should walk, he talked like a racing driver, he looked like a racing driver and he set a standard that I think has been unmatched since he retired.

Damon Hill, a champion of a later generation, said the same day: “I think he launched all the other careers of British racing drivers who went on to become world champions of which he sadly was denied.” Mario Andretti, who called him a dear friend, wrote “He was my hero and such a kind man beloved by everyone.” Eddie Jordan, who had run a Formula One team, would not let the phrase about the championship pass: “You say he’s one of the greatest drivers not to win the world championship but actually he was one of the greatest drivers ever, you don’t need to enlarge on that. He was all-powerful. He was the one person that transcended the sport.” And David Coulthard, speaking as president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club, of which Moss had been the longest-serving member, called him a loyal member of the club and an ambassador for it.

Of the drivers who came after him, Moss wrote warmly of Lewis Hamilton: in 2007 he called him the most interesting and talented figure he had seen in more than 60 years. In 2015 the two of them drove old Mercedes-⁠Benz Silver Arrows side by side on the banking at Monza, and five years later Hamilton remembered it.

I remember driving along the bank of the circuit at Monza and I didn’t want to wear a helmet because obviously the helmet we have today is much different to back then … I could see him to the right and I felt for a brief moment that I was in his time, and I was driving alongside just such a legend. God rest his soul.

He remembered, too, how differently Moss thought about danger: “He would say, ‘you hope that if you crash, you fall out. You’d hope you’ll get thrown out’ and it’s just a different way of thinking to what you would think today.” (attributed) Younger drivers had their own stories. Kevin Magnussen once asked a friend who knew Moss to get him an autograph, and was invited to spend a day with Moss and his wife at their house in Mayfair.

The writers

Several of the writers who knew him found the same contrast in him, between the competitor and the man. Julia Llewelyn Smith, interviewing him for The Independent in 2001, wrote “Stirling reminds me of one of the old Spitfire pilots. He has a core of steel, masked by self-deprecation.” Goodwood’s obituary, in 2020, put the contrast the other way round.

To strangers, Stirling could seem brusque and at times little less than rude, though those who got to know him would soon realise this was simply a coping mechanism for the shyness that stayed with him all his life.

The same obituary ranked him with care: “Unquestionably England’s greatest racing driver until Lewis Hamilton came to challenge that status”. Andrew Frankel, writing in Motor Sport after his death, listed what he had failed to win, and then what he had failed to acquire: “Famously he never won the Formula 1 World Championship, nor did he win Le Mans, but the most remarkable thing he failed to acquire in his years at the top of his game was an ego.” Craig Slater of Sky Sports remembered the interviews: “Like most of the great sportsmen and women you deal with in journalism, he was polite, he made the most of the time you had with him and he liked to be challenged. … Moss much preferred talking about the here and now, the battles of Hamilton against Vettel and Max Verstappen than he did reminiscing about his own triumphs.”

Not every verdict was a tribute. The Associated Press obituary called him a national treasure and gave the other side in the same breath: “He was fearless, fiercely competitive and often reckless.” And when he said in 2013, at 83, that women might lack the mental aptitude to win in Formula One, the answer came from a driver. Susie Wolff, then a development driver for Williams, replied on BBC Radio 5 Live, the station on which he had said it.

I completely disagree with him. It makes me cringe hearing that … I’ve got a lot of respect for Sir Stirling and what he achieved, but I think we’re in a different generation.

His own words on the subject, and on most others, are in In his words.

Family, and the Abbey

His widow, Lady Moss, spoke for him once more in September 2020, when Goodwood renamed its Kinrara Trophy the Stirling Moss Memorial Trophy: “Stirling and I always received such a warm welcome at Goodwood from the family and the fans … He would have been touched to be remembered with a race in his name. In fact, he’d probably be raring to have a go at it himself.” She died in March 2023, before the public farewell that the pandemic had put off; his funeral had been private, for the family only.

That farewell came on 8 May 2024, at a Service of Thanksgiving in Westminster Abbey attended by about 2,000 people. Before it, his son Elliot, who was to read a letter his father had written to him, said: “To be able to do this for my father – a man I admired in just about every way and one whom I still miss very much – is an unimaginable honour”. The Dean of Westminster, David Hoyle, opened the service with the bidding.

We remember the competitor who was ever the gentleman. We recall his rare talent and courage; that compelling ability that made him excel on the race track. ‘Movement is tranquillity’ he said, and lived out a long life with an eager urgency. We grieve for our loss as we celebrate all that he gave us.

The motto the Dean quoted was Moss’s own, and he had given it to interviewers for years. It closes In his words.