Rallies and records From the snow of the Monte Carlo Rally to the salt of Bonneville

Over ice and snow

On the long descents of the Monte Carlo Rally, over ice and snow, the speedometer of the Sunbeam-⁠Talbot was touching 50 mph. Stirling Moss wrote it down himself, a few weeks later, for Motor Sport: in January 1952 they had put no water and very little oil into the car on the way to Monaco, and it had done more than 26 miles to the gallon. It was his first rally. He was 22, and he finished 2nd.

The car was a works Sunbeam-⁠Talbot 90 Mk II saloon, with a 2,267cc overhead-valve engine, a four-speed gearbox and independent front suspension on coil springs. His crew were Desmond Scannell of the British Racing Drivers’ Club and John Cooper, who wrote for The Autocar and was not the John Cooper who built Moss’s racing cars. They were one of only 15 crews out of 328 to reach Monte Carlo without losing a mark on the road, and one of two from Britain; the other was Sydney Allard’s, whose own half of the same Motor Sport article told of finding an enormous greyhound painted on the side of “their” car at the Amsterdam control, and realising only when the key would not fit that it was another Allard of the same colour, from Norway.

Everything turned on the last test, a regularity run on the Col de Braus, in which Moss slid for a moment into a snowbank. Motor Sport’s report put the result in a sentence: “Stirling Moss, in his first rally, came second, four marks behind, in a Sunbeam-⁠Talbot 90 saloon”.

For the Rootes Group

The rallies were a programme of the Rootes Group, which made Sunbeam-Talbots and Humbers, run by its competition manager, Norman Garrad, for three years from 1952, alongside everything else Moss raced. Rootes used his name off the rally route too. In 1952 he was one of four drivers who took a Humber Super Snipe 3,280 miles, from Oslo to Lisbon by way of 15 countries, in 3 days 18 hours, for publicity.

He went back to the Monte Carlo Rally in January 1953, again in a Sunbeam-⁠Talbot 90. It was a bigger rally: of 404 starters, 349 reached Monte Carlo. Moss was well up on time and found the conditions too easy, Motor Sport reported, and Louis Chiron diced with him happily along the way. He qualified for the final test on the Col de Braus and finished 6th, by a photographer’s caption of the day. Gatsonides won in a Ford Zephyr, with Ian Appleyard’s Jaguar 2nd.

Later summaries give him a third start, in January 1954, in a Sunbeam-⁠Talbot. Chiron won, in a Lancia, on an easy rally, and Motor Sport, naming the first five, did not mention Moss.¹

The Coupe d’Or

The Alpine Rally ran each July through the French, Italian and Swiss Alps, and its own award, the Coupe des Alpes, went to every crew that finished without a single penalty. A crew that did it three years running won the Coupe d’Or, the gold cup.

In July 1952 Moss came through without a penalty in the Sunbeam-⁠Talbot 90 and won his first Coupe; with Murray-Frame and Mike Hawthorn he also took the team prize for Sunbeam-⁠Talbot.² In the stop-press it wrote while the cars were still being scrutineered, Motor Sport congratulated Ian Appleyard on winning what it called the only Gold Cup ever awarded, for his third clean run in a row.

For 1953 Rootes built the Sunbeam Alpine, an open two-seater on a strengthened Mk IIA chassis, with an 80 bhp engine. Moss drove one through that July’s Alpine Rally without a penalty and won his second Coupe. That year, too, on the motorway at Jabbeke in Belgium, a specially prepared Alpine of 105 hp was run at about 120 mph (193 km/⁠h). Moss and Sheila van Damm took turns at the wheel, and she was the one who set the slightly higher average.

On 9 July 1954 he set off on the Alpine Rally again, in the Alpine registered MKV 21, with John Cutts beside him. A week later they came back with a third clean run in three years, and the Coupe d’Or. On Motor Sport’s count of 1952, that made Moss only the second driver to win the gold cup.³

Years later, at a dinner in London, he told a story from those cars. With two of the direct gears gone, he convinced the scrutineers that all four ratios worked, by playing the Laycock de Normanville overdrive against the two he had left. Classic & Sports Car puts it on MKV 21 in the Alpine of 1954; one listener heard Moss place it on the Monte. Where it happened is not settled.

In November 1954 he took a Sunbeam to the United States for the Great American Mountain Rally, where, by his own account of 1957, the Sunbeams won the team prize.

The Moss who won the Tulip Rally, in 1962, was not Stirling, who never started it so far as these sources show, but his sister Pat, who became one of the most successful women in rallying; the early years tells her story.

Seven days and seven nights

The records began with endurance. Leslie Johnson had the idea: a Jaguar XK120 fixed-head coupé, registered LWK 707, to be driven at Montlhéry, near Paris, for seven days and seven nights. From 5 to 12 August 1952 Johnson, Moss, Jack Fairman and Bert Hadley took turns, day and night, and the car covered 16,851.73 miles; with every stop counted, it averaged 100.31 mph (161.43 km/⁠h).⁴

Well into the run a spring broke. A replacement fitted from outside would have ended the car’s eligibility for further records, so Johnson drove on with the spring broken for nine hours before it was repaired. The car took world and class records.

The Roaring Raindrop

The MG EX181 was the idea of George Eyston, a director of Castrol. It was designed at Abingdon under Syd Enever, and drawn by Terry Mitchell. Its body was a teardrop, and in cross-section it was shaped like an aerofoil, run at a slight negative angle to cancel out the lift. Motor Sport likened it to a half-pint version of Reid Railton’s car for John Cobb. People called it the Roaring Raindrop.

For 1957 it had a supercharged MG twin-cam engine of 1,489cc, a Shorrock blower at 32 psi, and a reported 290 bhp at 7,300 rpm. The driver sat in front of the engine. MG took it to the salt at Bonneville, in Utah, in August, and Moss went out to drive it in a gap between races. He set 245.64 mph (395.32 km/⁠h) for the flying kilometre and 245.11 mph for the flying mile: international records for Class F, cars of 1,101 to 1,500cc. The date usually given is 23 August 1957, and Goldie Gardner’s old record, by the same secondary sources, had stood at about 203 mph.⁵

It was not his favourite kind of driving. Motor Sport wrote long afterwards that he did not enjoy lying flat on his back in the car while the mechanics fastened its bubble canopy down over him. The 1957 season sets the record runs among the rest of that year.

MG asked him back in September 1959, for another session with EX181. Rain flooded the salt, and for days nothing could run. By the end of the month Moss had to be back in England to race at Oulton Park, and he left the car to its reserve driver, Phil Hill. The same session ran a second record car, EX219, badged as an Austin-⁠Healey Sprite, for Tommy Wisdom, Gus Ehrman and Ed Leavens; Moss drove neither. On 3 October Hill took EX181 to 254.91 mph. MG had bored its engine out to 1,506cc, into Class E, so that Hill’s records would be new ones, and the Class F records Moss had set two years before would stand.