Records The figures of a career, and what each of them counts

Second only to Fangio

On 20 November 1960, at Riverside in the Californian desert, Stirling Moss won the United States Grand Prix from pole position. It was the last race of the 2½-litre formula and his 14th World Championship win, one more than Alberto Ascari had scored, and it put him second on the list of winners of all time, behind Juan Manuel Fangio alone. He added two more in 1961. When he stopped, after Goodwood in 1962, nobody but Fangio, with 24, had won more championship Grands Prix, and no British driver had won as many.

That stood until 10 July 1965, when Jim Clark won the British Grand Prix for his 17th. Some of the other figures on this page have fallen since; some have not. The championship figures come from two independent databases, F1DB and Jolpica, which agree on his starts, wins, podiums and points. The grid places are F1DB’s, since Jolpica misplaces two, one of them the pole noted below; the laps he led are ChicaneF1’s, and so is the check on F1DB’s fastest laps, which Jolpica does not record for those years.

Of 67 World Championship Grands Prix he was entered for, he started 66; the one he missed was the Belgian Grand Prix of 1960, after his crash in practice. One of the 16 wins was shared, with Tony Brooks at Aintree in 1957. Three of the 19 fastest laps were shared with drivers who set the same time, and two of the 24 podiums came in cars he had taken over from a team-⁠mate.

Set against his 66 starts, the figures make a rate. He won 24.2% of them, the same share he started from pole, set the fastest lap in 28.8% and finished in the first three in 36.4%. He scored points in 35 races: 186 9/14 points in all, of which 185 9/14 counted under the rules of the time, which kept only a driver’s best results. The seasons explain the fractions.¹

He was usually at the front before the start. In 36 of his 66 starts he lined up in the first three places: 16 times on pole, nine times 2nd and 11 times 3rd. He led 32 of his championship races, for 1,181 laps between them, and once, at Monsanto in Portugal in 1959, he took pole, won, set the fastest lap and led every lap, the full house the statisticians call a grand slam.

He was 21 years and 252 days old at his first championship race, at Bremgarten on 27 May 1951, and 25 years and 302 days old when he first won one, at Aintree on 16 July 1955. His last win, at the Nürburgring on 6 August 1961, came when he was 31 years and 323 days old, and his last start, at Watkins Glen on 8 October 1961, at 32 years and 21 days.

Seven years in the first three

For his first three seasons he scored no championship points at all, in British cars that could not match the Italian ones. In 1954, in his own Maserati and then the works team’s, he scored 4 1/7 and was 13th. Then, for seven years in a row, he finished in the first three: runner-⁠up to Fangio in 1955, 1956 and 1957, runner-⁠up to Mike Hawthorn in 1958, then 3rd in 1959 and 1960, when Jack Brabham was champion, and in 1961, when Phil Hill was.

The closest of them was 1958, which Hawthorn won by a single point, 42 counted to 41, though his official website says half a point. Writing in 1994, David Tremayne set the two seasons side by side:

The record shows he won four races to Hawthorn’s one, but Mike had four poles to three, five fastest laps to three, and they both started from the front row eight times. By season’s end Hawthorn had 49 points from nine finishes, but that was corrected to 42… Stirling finished only six times, earning 41 points.

The databases bear out his poles and fastest laps, three of each for Moss that year and four poles for Hawthorn, though not his counts of finishes and front rows: Moss finished five races, not six, and started in the first three on the grid seven times, not eight. Hawthorn’s five fastest laps are F1DB’s alone, since Jolpica keeps no fastest laps from those years.

Records that fell

Three records for a driver without the title have since been passed. Bruce McLaren took his 25th podium on 19 July 1969, one more than Moss’s 24. René Arnoux passed his 16 poles in 1983, though older sources still credit Moss with that record, and Charles Leclerc now has 27. Gerhard Berger set his 20th fastest lap on 13 April 1997, one more than Moss’s 19.

His records against everyone went the same way, and sooner. Clark’s 17th win, in 1965, took both the most by a British driver and second place on the all-time list. By September 2026 Lewis Hamilton had won 106.

212 wins from 529 races

The championship was a small part of his racing. Between 1948 and 1962 he drove Formula One, Two and Three, sports cars, saloons and Formula Libre, sometimes three races in a day, and the count used here for all of it is the one All My Races gives, the book he wrote with Alan Henry for his 80th birthday in 2009, which tells each race in turn.

Races, 1948–⁠1962

529

Wins

212

Those are races only: rallies, hill climbs, sprints and record attempts are left out, and The Guardian, Sky Sports and Simon Taylor print the same pairing. Other counts draw the line elsewhere, and they are different definitions rather than corrections:²

• the British Racing Drivers’ Club: 585 events, 387 finishes and 216 wins, counting some hill climbs and sprints;
• his official website: 375 finishes and 212 wins in his competitive races as a professional, with no total of starts;
• Simon Taylor, in his tribute at Westminster Abbey in 2024, as evo reported it: 219 wins from 529 professional races;
• The Daily Telegraph: 530 races and 212 wins; the Haileybury Society, 569 and 212;
• Quattroruote: 585 races, 209 wins and 108 cars;
• the International Motorsports Hall of Fame: 194 wins from 466 starts “in all major events”.

His official website breaks the figures down another way. From his first season in the Maserati 250F, 1954, to 1962 it counts 318 races, 225 finishes and 134 wins. For Rob Walker’s team, 1958–⁠1962, it gives 93 races, 70 finishes and 46 wins; for Maserati 72 races, 50 finishes and 25 wins, with 31 lap records; for Ferrari 14 races and 12 wins. It reckons he raced 107 different types of car. Andrew Frankel, in Motor Sport, counted 54 races in 1952 alone.

At Westminster Abbey in 2024 his son Elliot put the scale another way. A driver of today, he said, would start as many Grands Prix as his father did in his whole career in less than three seasons.