The seasons The World Championship years, 1951–⁠1961

Each season has a page of its own, with every championship race in a table and the rest of his racing beside it. Here they are in brief. After the seasons the book goes back for the Mille Miglia, the sports cars and the rallies, then to Goodwood.

Bremgarten was his only championship race of the year. The rest of 1951 was everything else: the HWM in Formula Two, sometimes against the Formula One Alfa Romeos, beginning with a win at Goodwood at Easter in the new car’s first race; his own Kieft in Formula Three; and sports cars for Jaguar, whose works team he now led. In the new C-⁠type he led at Le Mans with Jack Fairman until the engine failed in the night, and in September he won the Tourist Trophy at Dundrod for the second year running. At Bari that month he arrived to drive the Ferrari he had been offered and found it given to Piero Taruffi; he said later that he swore then never to race for Ferrari. Juan Manuel Fangio was champion.

The change to Formula Two rules should have suited the British makers. For Moss it meant five championship starts in three makes of car, and not one finish. HWM withdrew his car at Bremgarten after two others had crashed with broken stub axles. Leslie Johnson’s new ERA G-⁠type failed him at Spa, at Silverstone and at Zandvoort, and the works Connaught retired at Monza. He did better elsewhere. In January he was 2nd in the Monte Carlo Rally, his first rally, in a Sunbeam-⁠Talbot 90, and in a Jaguar C-⁠type with disc brakes he won at Reims in June. He raced BRM’s V16 once, in the Ulster Trophy at Dundrod, for 3 laps, and in August he was one of four drivers who kept a Jaguar XK120 coupé going for seven days and nights at Montlhéry, averaging more than 100 mph (161 km/⁠h). Alberto Ascari was champion for Ferrari.

There was still no competitive British car, so his own small team built one: a Cooper chassis with an Alta engine, prepared by Alf Francis. Ken Gregory, by then his manager, later called it a disaster, and thought that Moss came close to giving up. His four championship races brought 9th at Zandvoort in a hired works Connaught, a broken clutch at Reims, 6th at the Nürburgring in the Cooper-⁠Alta, his best championship finish yet, and 13th at Monza. At Reims on 5 July he won the 12 Hours with Peter Whitehead in the morning and started the French Grand Prix in the afternoon. At Le Mans he was 2nd, with Peter Walker. In July he won a second Coupe des Alpes in the Alpine Rally; in October, at Castle Combe, another car struck his Cooper-JAP and he was taken to hospital with, the report of the day said, a broken kneecap and collarbone. Late in the year Gregory asked Mercedes-⁠Benz to take him; the answer, as he remembered it, was that they were not sure he was ready. Ascari was champion again.

With no British car and no seat at Mercedes-⁠Benz, he bought a Maserati 250F of his own. Gregory did the deal in Modena, with money from Moss’s parents, his sister Pat and Shell-Mex BP, and the car was painted pale green. At Spa, in its first championship race, it was 3rd, driven over the last laps with no oil pressure: his first championship points, and his first podium. At Silverstone he was running a secure 2nd when the rear axle failed 10 laps from the end. From the Nürburgring Maserati supported him, and from Bremgarten he drove as a works entry. At Monza he passed Fangio and Ascari and led from lap 45 until an oil pipe cracked on lap 68 of 80; he pushed the car to the line and was classified 10th. Away from the championship he won the Sebring 12 Hours in March in a 1,452cc OSCA, and in August, at Oulton Park, his first Formula One race. In July he won the Coupe d’Or of the Alpine Rally, for three runs in a row without penalty. In December, after a test at Hockenheim, he signed for Mercedes-⁠Benz.

At Mercedes-⁠Benz he was Fangio’s team-⁠mate, the number two by inference rather than by contract, and in the W196 the pair ran so close together that the press called them “the train”. On 1 May, with Denis Jenkinson beside him, he won the Mille Miglia in a 300 SLR. At Aintree on 16 July he took pole, set the fastest lap and beat Fangio by 0.2 seconds, the first British driver to win the British Grand Prix; whether Fangio let him win has never been settled. With 2nd places at Spa and Zandvoort he was runner-⁠up to Fangio, 23 points to 40. At Le Mans in June Mercedes-⁠Benz withdrew its cars while he and Fangio led, after the accident that killed Pierre Levegh and more than 80 spectators. He won the Tourist Trophy with John Fitch on his 26th birthday, and the Targa Florio with Peter Collins in October. Then Mercedes-⁠Benz withdrew from racing.

Back at Maserati as team leader, he won at Monaco on 13 May, leading from start to finish, and at Monza on 2 September, where he ran out of fuel with a few laps left and his team-⁠mate Luigi Piotti pushed his car to the pits with his own. At Spa a wheel came off; he ran back to the pits, took over Cesare Perdisa’s car and finished 3rd. He was runner-⁠up to Fangio again, 27 points to 30. In May, at Silverstone, he took the International Trophy in a Vanwall, a British car, and in July he was 2nd at Le Mans with Collins in an Aston Martin DB3S. For Maserati he won the Buenos Aires 1000 km and the Nürburgring 1000 km, and in December, in a works 250F, the Australian Grand Prix at Melbourne. By the end of the year he had joined Vanwall.

In the Vanwall he won three times: at Aintree on 20 July, sharing the car with Tony Brooks, the first World Championship win for a British car; at Pescara on 18 August, on the longest circuit the championship has used, by more than 3 minutes from Fangio; and at Monza on 8 September, by 41.2 seconds, from Fangio again. He had crashed while leading at Monaco, and a sinus infection kept him out of the French Grand Prix. Fangio, champion at the Nürburgring, beat him to the title for the third year running, 40 points to 25. In sports cars he won the Swedish Grand Prix with Jean Behra and, in a Ferrari, the Nassau Trophy. In August, at Bonneville, he took the MG EX181 record car through the flying kilometre: 245.64 mph (395.32 km/⁠h).

Vanwall did not go to Argentina, so he drove Rob Walker’s little 2-⁠litre Cooper T43 there and won, without a stop, on rear tyres worn to the canvas: never before had a rear-engined car won a World Championship race. Back in the Vanwall he won at Zandvoort, at Oporto and at Ain-Diab, four wins in all to Mike Hawthorn’s one, and lost the title to Hawthorn by a single point, 41 to 42. At Oporto his evidence to the stewards had helped Hawthorn keep his 2nd place there, worth 7 points in all: 6 for the place and 1 for the fastest lap. For Aston Martin he won the Nürburgring 1000 km with Jack Brabham and the Tourist Trophy at Goodwood with Brooks, in the DBR1. It was the year in which Luigi Musso, Peter Collins and Stuart Lewis-Evans died after accidents in races he drove.

With Vanwall gone, he joined no works team. He drove Rob Walker’s dark-blue Cooper T51, and twice the BRM P25 of the British Racing Partnership, the team his father and Ken Gregory had set up. He took four pole positions and set four fastest laps in eight Grands Prix, but he led at Monaco, Zandvoort and Sebring and lost all three races to broken transmissions, and at Reims he was disqualified for a push start. He won at Monsanto, leading every lap from pole with the fastest lap, and at Monza, where he ran without a stop while the Ferraris changed tyres. Brabham was champion with 31 points; Moss, with 25½, was 3rd. In sports cars he won the Nürburgring 1000 km for Aston Martin with Jack Fairman, doing most of the driving himself, and at Goodwood, after a fire in the pits, he won the Tourist Trophy in a team-⁠mate’s car to clinch Aston Martin’s World Sports Car Championship. The New Year Honours had made him an OBE.

Walker bought him a Lotus 18 for Monaco, and he won there on 29 May: the first World Championship win for a Lotus. In practice at Spa on Saturday 18 June a rear stub axle broke at Burnenville and he was thrown from the car; Motor Sport’s report that summer listed a broken nose, back injuries and cracked bones in both legs. Chris Bristow and Alan Stacey were killed in the race the next day. He was back, and winning, seven weeks later, but at Oporto in August he was disqualified for restarting against the direction of the race, on the circuit where he had spoken up for Hawthorn two years before. The late summer and autumn brought a run of wins, the Tourist Trophy in Walker’s Ferrari 250 GT in August and the Gold Cup at Oulton Park in September among them. He won the last round, at Riverside in November, and was 3rd again. Brabham was champion.

The new 1½-litre formula favoured Ferrari, whose V6 engines had some 30 to 40 bhp more than the four-cylinder Climax the British teams had to use. In Walker’s year-old Lotus he still won twice. At Monaco on 14 May he held off Richie Ginther and Phil Hill for 86 laps and won by 3.6 seconds. At the Nürburgring on 6 August he started on rain tyres against Dunlop’s advice and beat Wolfgang von Trips by 21.4 seconds, for his 16th and last championship win. At Aintree he drove the four-wheel-drive Ferguson P99, already disqualified with Jack Fairman at the wheel, until protests had it called in. At Monza von Trips and 14 spectators were killed in a crash on the second lap, and Phil Hill became champion. Moss was 3rd for the third year running, level with Dan Gurney on 21 points and ahead of him on wins. His seventh Tourist Trophy came in Walker’s Ferrari, and at Oulton Park in September he won the Gold Cup in the Ferguson, the only Formula One race ever won by a four-wheel-drive car. The BBC named him its Sports Personality of the Year. In April 1962 came Goodwood.