Moss and Fangio The master, the team-⁠mate and the friend

Stirling Moss’s first memory of Juan Manuel Fangio was of him laughing. Moss, in an HWM, was being lapped by Giuseppe Farina’s Alfa Romeo. Farina pushed him wide, slid, was passed again by the little car and went off the road, and Fangio, Farina’s team-⁠mate, came by helpless with laughter that an Alfa had been beaten by an HWM.

Moss placed the scene only as a race in which he drove an HWM and Fangio an Alfa Romeo. Fangio’s memoir of 1961 puts their first race together at Bari, on 9 July 1950, where Moss was 3rd behind the two Alfas. Fangio wrote that he passed the young Englishman twice that day and still saw in him, behind a faintly disdainful set of the mouth, the makings of a great driver. Moss’s memory may belong to that race, or to Bremgarten the next year.¹ They did not meet properly, Moss said, until he joined Mercedes-⁠Benz.

For five years the older man had much the better of him. At Bremgarten on 27 May 1951, Moss’s first World Championship race, Fangio won and Moss was 8th. In 1953, in British cars, Moss finished ahead of him once in four races, and in 1954, in his own Maserati 250F and then a works one, not once in six.² At Monza that September he led Fangio’s Mercedes-⁠Benz until, on lap 68 of 80, a cracked oil pipe stopped him, then pushed his car to the line to be classified 10th; Fangio, who won, is said to have called him the moral victor.

Mercedes-Benz, 1955

When Ken Gregory, his manager, agreed terms with Mercedes-⁠Benz late in 1954, he asked Alfred Neubauer for one thing more: that Moss should share Fangio’s car at Le Mans. Moss, Gregory said, idolised him. Fangio was the main reason he joined, Moss said later, and he took the place of number two without a word of it in his contract, a place he would have taken behind nobody else: “I mean, my God, I’d never have signed up as number two to Hawthorn for example, or anybody else for that matter. The only man in the world with whom I would have agreed such a thing was Fangio.”

In the Grands Prix of 1955 the two silver W196s ran so close, nose to tail, that they became known as the train. In the six championship races they both started, Fangio finished ahead four times and Moss twice. One of Moss’s two was Monaco, where Fangio’s transmission broke at half-distance and Moss, a minute clear, lost his own engine with 19 laps left and pushed the car home 9th; the other was Aintree. In all their races together, by Moss’s count, the team asked him only once to let Fangio win. At Monza in September, where he led for half a lap and then dropped in behind, Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport thought orders were the reason.

Following so close was its own education, as Moss told Ken Purdy in 1963: “…two car lengths behind Juan Manuel Fangio. I learned more there than I did anywhere else.” (attributed)

In those cars Fangio was the faster, by the fifth or two of a second that Jenkinson timed between them through Monaco’s hairpin. In setting the cars up, the order was reversed: at the drivers’ briefings, Moss remembered, Fangio would simply say that he would go with Moss’s settings. Their team-⁠mate Karl Kling saw the same thing: “Moss was very fast, and much better at setting up the car than Fangio, who tended just to drive it as it was. I had a very good relationship with Moss — in fact, after the war, all the relationships between the Mercedes drivers were good.”

In the sports cars the order turned round altogether. Driving his 300 SLR alone in the Mille Miglia, with an injection pipe split for much of the way to Florence and the engine on seven cylinders, Fangio finished 2nd, 31 minutes 45 seconds behind Moss and Jenkinson, and in the Targa Florio in October Moss and Peter Collins beat Fangio and Kling. Fangio was ahead by half a car’s length in the Eifelrennen at the Nürburgring, and ahead again in the Swedish Grand Prix at Kristianstad. Moss said in 2011 that he often beat him there, and that Fangio told him he preferred single-seaters because he liked to see the front wheels; in Formula One, and that was no false modesty, he put Fangio first.

At Le Mans in June they shared the 300 SLR numbered 19, and were leading when, in the night, Daimler-Benz withdrew its cars, hours after the accident in which Pierre Levegh and more than 80 spectators were killed.

Aintree, 16 July 1955

At Aintree, for the first time in a Grand Prix they both finished, Moss crossed the line in front of Fangio: by two tenths of a second, for the first World Championship win of his career, and the first time a Briton had won the British Grand Prix. Did Fangio let him? It is the oldest question between them. There are several answers, and they do not quite agree.

The report of the day, by Jenkinson, took it for granted that Moss had been allowed to win, and recorded him thanking Fangio, after the prize-giving, for letting him do it. Moss, for the rest of his life, said that he did not know: nothing had been arranged between them, and Neubauer had given no orders. In 2003 he told Nigel Roebuck how the last lap had gone: “I backed off on the last lap … because I wasn’t sure of what we were supposed to do — but when the Old Man was still behind me at the final corner, I can tell you I gave it everything on the run up to the line!” By 2007 he remembered waving Fangio by at the last corner, knowing the cars too evenly matched for him to get by, and he remembered what Fangio had said to him: “But he did say to me, ‘this was your day; you were really on form today’.”

Fangio, asked by Roebuck in 1979, said that he could not have won even if he had wanted to: Moss had been pushing hard, and his car had a higher final drive. But in his foreword to My Cars, My Career, Moss’s book of 1987, he described a bargain between them, struck at Spa that June:

Then there were the times when we raced each other from start to finish, until the ’55 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa, when you finally agreed with me that the battle between us should only last until we had gained a certain advantage over the competition. Then Neubauer had to show us the ‘Langsam’ pit signal [slow down] and whoever was in front stayed in front, and whoever was second stayed second.

At Spa itself, Motor Sport had noticed at the time, both cars slowed together after 28 laps. Neubauer, who might have settled the matter, did not. When his memoir appeared in English in 1960, Motor Sport’s editor, Bill Boddy, noticed the gap: “…why Moss was allowed to beat Fangio at Aintree is not disclosed and that race occupies – just 13 words.”

A standing rule to hold station once Neubauer’s board went out, a lead that happened to be Moss’s when it did, and a team-⁠mate who kept the bargain would square most of these accounts; but neither man ever told it that way, and the question stays open. The race itself is told in 1955.

Opponents again, 1956–⁠1958

Mercedes-⁠Benz left racing at the end of 1955. For 1956 Fangio went to Ferrari, and Moss to Maserati as its team leader. At Monaco and at Monza Moss won, and both times Fangio was 2nd in a car he had taken over from Collins; at Monza Moss ran out of fuel on lap 45, was pushed back to his pit by his team-⁠mate Luigi Piotti’s Maserati, and still won by 5.7 seconds. Fangio, who won in Argentina, Britain and Germany, the last by 46.4 seconds from Moss, took the title by 3 points, 30 to 27, and finished ahead of Moss four times to three.

In 1957 Fangio drove a Maserati, and Moss, after one more race for Maserati in Argentina, the British Vanwall. In Buenos Aires in January Moss took pole position from Fangio in front of Fangio’s home crowd, then lost the race when his throttle linkage broke at the start. Fangio won in Argentina, at Monaco and, on 4 August, at the Nürburgring, the drive that made him champion for the fifth time, with Moss 5th. Around it the green car beat him three times: at Aintree a fortnight before, where Moss shared the win with Tony Brooks; then at Pescara, by 3 minutes 13.9 seconds; and at Monza, by 41.2 seconds, the last two in Italy. At Monza Fangio revved his Maserati 800 rpm past its limit and still could not stay with the Vanwall. Fangio was champion with 40 points to Moss’s 25. In the sports cars that year they were team-⁠mates once more, for Maserati, sharing a 450S in the 1000-kilometre races at Buenos Aires and the Nürburgring; it retired both times.

Fangio drove only twice more in the World Championship. In Argentina in January 1958 Moss won in Rob Walker’s Cooper, with Fangio 4th, and at Reims-Gueux in July, in Fangio’s last race, Moss was 2nd and Fangio 4th. From Pescara onwards Moss had finished ahead of him four times out of four.

The friend

I would have done anything for Fangio … I had that much respect for the man. For me, it was the same sort of respect I had for my father, actually. I loved the man, in a different way from my father, but yes, I loved the man.

He spoke of Fangio as he spoke of nobody else, and the respect was for the man as much as the driver. “Fangio was a quiet man, not at all an extrovert, but when he came into a room conversation would fade away, as everyone turned to look at him…” When Ferrari offered Moss a drive, it was Fangio he asked: “When Ferrari offered me a drive, I asked Fangio’s advice. Should I take it? Drive for them, he said, but don’t sign. Never sign for Ferrari.”

Part of the respect was for the age Fangio had raced in, before the cars were safe: “I mean, we’re talking about cornering at 145mph in the damp, knowing that if you go off then you’re probably going to die. Or you walk back to the pits with the steering wheel and ask for another car.” Part was for his authority among the others, as Moss wrote in 1998: “If someone tried to carve him up, he wouldn’t get angry. He’d just wag his finger at the culprit. So great was the respect for him among the other drivers that a wagged finger from Fangio was a pretty frightening thing.”

It was not uncritical. Fangio’s maxim was to win at the slowest speed he could, and to Moss that was not racing. But he never wavered in ranking him first of all, and Fangio returned the compliment in his own way. Talking to Roebuck in 1979, he named the two rivals he had feared: “I had tremendous affection for [Alberto] Ascari… He and later Moss were without doubt the rivals I feared most.”

On the evening before the Cuban Grand Prix of February 1958, Fangio was kidnapped from his hotel in Havana by Fidel Castro’s rebels, and Moss spent the night under police guard. Fangio, Moss learned afterwards, had steered his captors away from him with a story that Moss was on his honeymoon. It was a fib, and a kind one.

In 1994, at the request of friends, Moss flew to Argentina to see him alive for the last time. Fangio died on 17 July 1995, and at his funeral in Balcarce Moss was one of the six men who carried the coffin.

Three years after the funeral, Moss wrote about what hung on his wall:

When he retired, he gave me a clock. It’s on my wall to this day. It has an inscription round the rim: To the future World Champion, signed JM Fangio. I’d been runner-⁠up to him three years running, and I think he expected me to take the title when he stopped – which of course was not to be.