1951 The year he drove everything

On Sunday 13 May 1951 Stirling Moss finished 3rd at Monza in a Formula Two HWM, behind the works Ferraris of Alberto Ascari and Luigi Villoresi. On the Monday he flew to Northolt, and from there to Shoreham, and his father drove him to Goodwood in time to see the newest Kieft, a 500cc car he had barely seen and never raced. In his heat its engine faltered and he fell to last. In the final he passed Brown on the inside at Woodcote on the second lap, won by 21.5 seconds and set a lap record for the 500s.

Motor Sport’s reporter put it plainly: “Never has a driver better deserved victory than Moss on this occasion.” On the commentary John Bolster asked, to laughter, “if Moss can go round on one-little-cylinder at 84½, what will the B.R.M. do with 16 blown ones?” Moss would try the V16 BRM for himself that winter.

It was that kind of year. He was 21, and 22 from September, and he drove almost anything he was offered, often three or four races in a day: the HWM in Formula Two, and against the Alfa Romeos when it ran in Formula One races; in Formula Three a Kieft built to his specification; the works Jaguars, as the leader of their team; a Frazer Nash; production Jaguar XK120s. He started one World Championship race and scored nothing in it. He led Le Mans, won the Tourist Trophy for the second year running, and went to Bari for a Ferrari that had been given to someone else.

A private team abroad

HW Motors of Walton-on-Thames was the business of John Heath and George Abecassis, and 1951 was Moss’s second season as one of its paid drivers. For the new year they built new cars with coil-spring front suspension, a 2-⁠litre Alta four-cylinder engine and a preselector gearbox, and after Easter they took three of them abroad in a specially built AEC lorry, the gift of a well-wisher. There was one skilled mechanic. Start money paid much of the way, and when an organiser wanted a local name, a local driver joined the team for the day. Moss and Lance Macklin were the regular drivers, each kept in his own car all season; his was prepared by Alf Francis, who would prepare his cars again on his Maserati and at Rob Walker’s.

The engine gave about 130 bhp. The supercharged Alfa Romeos of the Grands Prix had more than 400. In Formula Two, though, the new car won its very first race, the Lavant Cup at Goodwood on Easter Monday, 26 March, by 0.8 seconds. On the Continent Moss was 3rd at Marseille and at Monza, 2nd at Aix-les-Bains, 4th at Rome and at Mettet, and 3rd in the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort in July, which that year counted for no championship, after running 2nd until a magneto spigot sheared.

At Genoa on 20 May he held the HWM between the works 2-⁠litre Ferraris of Ascari and Villoresi and led them, until a starwheel broke in the differential. At Erlen in August he took pole and led two private Ferraris until the car broke: a front wishbone pivot, by the team’s account. The preselector gearbox failed often enough to cost a number of retirements, until Armstrong Siddeley cured it. In the autumn the wins came: the Wakefield Trophy at the Curragh, and the Formula Two race at Winfield in Scotland, with the fastest lap and the team’s cars in the first three places.

Not every day abroad was fruitful. At the AVUS the crankshaft broke, at Rouen the gearbox; at Modena he was running 2nd when he retired. In December Motor Sport looked back on 26 events and judged that a great factory would have been proud of such a season, and that a small private concern, two men with no great backing, had made it.

Bremgarten, 27 May

The Swiss Grand Prix at Bremgarten, outside Bern, was the first round of the 1951 World Championship, and an invitation to it was, in Motor Sport’s account of HWM’s year, a great compliment to the team. Moss and Abecassis drove. It rained. In a 2-⁠litre car without a supercharger, among the 1.5-⁠litre supercharged Alfa Romeos and the 4.5-⁠litre Ferraris, Moss qualified 14th in 2:58.4, more than 22 seconds slower than Juan Manuel Fangio’s pole.

He finished 8th, 2 laps down, having kept ahead of the Talbots and Maseratis for much of the race. Abecassis retired with magneto trouble. Moss was 21 years and 252 days old. In later tellings the HWM ran dry on the final lap, costing him 7th place to Louis Chiron’s Maserati; the report printed at the time gives him 8th, 2 laps behind, and says nothing of fuel.¹

He started no other championship race that year. Fangio won the title for Alfa Romeo with 31 points; Moss, with none, was not classified. He would not start another championship race until Bremgarten came round again in 1952.

Leader of the Jaguar team

His win in Tommy Wisdom’s XK120 at Dundrod in 1950, on the eve of his 21st birthday, had made him the leader of the Jaguar works team (the chapter on the 500s and the first wins tells that day). In 1951 he drove production XK120s in British races. He drove one in his first Mille Miglia in April, too, with Frank Rainbow, and retired early.

At the International Trophy meeting at Silverstone on 5 May he won the production sports-car race in an XK120, his tyres smoking at Stowe; in the final of the Trophy itself, run in a cloudburst and stopped after 6 laps, a marker tin thrown up by Richardson’s car wedged in the HWM’s front suspension, a St John Ambulance man kicked it clear and Moss was push-started on his way, to be classified 14th.

For Le Mans Jaguar built a new car, the C-⁠type, which the factory called the XK120C: the XK120’s engine in a new tubular frame under an aerodynamic body. Lofty England, the team manager, told Moss to go out and overstress the Ferraris and the Talbots. He shared car No. 22 with Jack Fairman. After the first lap he came past the stands 2nd, behind José Froilán González’s Talbot, and at about 4.20 pm, some 20 minutes into the race, he took the lead. In the early evening, as the roads dried, he lapped in 4 min 50 s, at over 104 mph (167 km/⁠h).

By 10 pm the Jaguars were 1st and 2nd, Moss and Fairman ahead of Peter Walker and Peter Whitehead. In the night the leading car lost all its oil pressure and broke before it could reach its pit. Walker and Whitehead won at 93.49 mph (150.46 km/⁠h), Jaguar’s first Le Mans, and Motor Sport gave Moss his share of the credit, for the lap record he took early in the race and for breaking up the Talbots. Whose lap stood as the race’s record is less certain: the same report has Fangio, in a Talbot, taking 2 seconds off Moss’s time at dusk.

In the Isle of Man on 14 June he won the British Empire Trophy in Sid Greene’s Frazer Nash Le Mans Replica, lapping Bob Gerard in 2nd place. The race was run on handicap too, and with 5 laps left he was still 8 min 42 s behind its leader, Griffiths’s Lester-MG, when its engine seized and spun it. He went by and won both categories.

At Dundrod on 15 September, two days before his 22nd birthday, he went back to the RAC Tourist Trophy as its holder. It too was run on handicap, and he said beforehand that he expected to have to drive very hard to beat it: the 747cc D.B.-Panhard had 11 laps’ start. He led on handicap within half an hour, raised the lap record more than once, touched 127.2 mph (204.7 km/⁠h) through the timed kilometre and never stopped. He won outright and on handicap at 83.55 mph (134.46 km/⁠h); Walker was 2nd, and Jaguars took 1st, 2nd and 4th. Two cars crashed on the first lap, and Eric Winterbottom, whose Frazer Nash had overturned, died of his injuries on the way to hospital.

With two Tourist Trophies he now shared, Motor Sport noted, a distinction with Nuvolari and Dixon. A fortnight later, at Goodwood on 29 September, he won the Madgwick Cup in the HWM, with HWMs 1st, 2nd and 3rd, and two sports-car races in the C-⁠type, then came 2nd in a Formula Libre handicap: the HWMs had 47 seconds’ start on Giuseppe Farina’s Alfa Romeo 159, Moss just led into Woodcote on the last lap, and Farina passed him on the run to the flag to win by 2 seconds. He finished 5th in the Goodwood Trophy as well. His Tourist Trophies and his Le Mans races are told whole in the chapter on the sports cars.

The Kieft

Moss had not rated Cyril Kieft’s 1950 car. Ken Gregory, secretary of the 500 Club, persuaded Kieft to take on a design by Dean Delamont, John A. Cooper and Ray Martin instead, and Martin built the prototype in his garage in Victoria to Moss’s specification. Moss and Gregory became directors of Kieft Cars. Until it was ready Moss won at Castle Combe in April in an old Kieft Mk I, though only against other Mk Is.

The new car won on its first day, that Whit Monday at Goodwood, and in 1951 it won three of the year’s most important Formula Three races: Goodwood, the 500cc supporting race at Silverstone’s British Grand Prix on 14 July, and Zandvoort the week after. At Silverstone, after blowing up his race engine in practice, he became the first to lap the circuit in under 2 minutes in a 500, at 86.95 mph (139.93 km/⁠h); rumour had it, Motor Sport said, that he had wanted the front brakes taken off as unnecessary there. He won so easily that the magazine thought he made skilled 500cc drivers look like learners. Before the Grand Prix itself Walker and Whitehead drove their Le Mans-winning C-⁠type round the circuit with Moss riding on its tail.

Bari, 2 September

Ferrari offered him a car for the Bari Grand Prix on 2 September. When he got there, by his own later account, the car had gone to Piero Taruffi. The record of the time says less: Motor Sport ended its report of the race with a single line: “Alas. Moss didn’t get his hoped-for drive in a Ferrari at Bari.” Fangio won for Alfa Romeo, González was 2nd and Taruffi 3rd in the Ferrari, a four-cylinder car in Moss’s memory, which OldRacingCars identifies as the prototype of Ferrari’s 1952 Formula Two car, run with a 2.5-⁠litre engine.

Sixty years later Moss told the Italian magazine Quattroruote what he remembered.

Nel 1951, quelli di Maranello mi offrirono un’auto per disputare il Gran Premio di Bari. … Quando mi presentai ai box, vidi la mia Ferrari e mi ci sedetti subito dentro. I meccanici mi chiesero chi fossi. Risposi che ero Moss e che avrei dovuto guidare una quattro cilindri in gara. Loro mi risposero che quella macchina era di Piero Taruffi. Enzo Ferrari aveva cambiato idea e non mi aveva detto nulla. Mi offesi moltissimo e mi ripromisi di non correre mai per il Cavallino.

In 1951 the people at Maranello offered me a car for the Bari Grand Prix. … When I got to the pits I saw my Ferrari and sat straight in it. The mechanics asked who I was. I said I was Moss and that I was to drive a four-cylinder car in the race. They told me that car was Piero Taruffi’s. Enzo Ferrari had changed his mind and told me nothing. I was deeply offended and swore I would never race for the Prancing Horse.

The details of the day differ from one telling to the next. He drove from London, in the full interview; he flew, in Ken Gregory’s; his father went with him, in later summaries. The results databases list him as a non-starter at Bari in a different Ferrari, the Scuderia Ambrosiana’s 125, after a practice accident, but no account of the race explains the entry and nothing confirms that he crashed.² Nor has any contract been found behind the later claims that he was to drive for Ferrari at chosen races, or for a whole season in 1952.

SM was comfortable driving for British teams – not because he was patriotic but because he was comfortable with the British way of doing things.

What is not in doubt is what followed: he would not drive for Ferrari’s works team. The usual telling gives the reason as patriotism. Gregory, his manager from the end of that year, gave another, and thought the commitment to HWM, not the snub, had kept him from the Ferrari in the first place. Moss himself, in 1994, put it his own way: he had wanted to drive a British car when there was none, and Ferrari’s was the car to beat. The tellings sit side by side on the record, and the chapter on the sportsman follows them through his career.

The Ferraris he did race came years later, from private entrants and above all from Rob Walker: in Walker’s Ferrari 250 GT SWB, in his dark blue and white, he won the Tourist Trophies of 1960 and 1961. For 1962 Enzo Ferrari agreed, at Moss’s insistence, to a Formula One car run by Walker in those colours; the crash at Goodwood that April ended the plan before it began.

The winter

Late in the year he drove to the Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona with Ken Gregory in a Sunbeam-⁠Talbot, and then, by Gregory’s account, went to Monza to test the BRM V16, the 16-cylinder car Bolster had joked about in May; Motor Sport’s profile of him places the test in the winter. At the end of 1951 he asked Gregory, whose flat in Hampstead he shared, to be his manager.

He had raced four makes of car in a single season and won in every one of them. He had led Le Mans, and found at Bari, by his own account, that a promise from Maranello could be taken back without a word. The British Grand Prix car he wanted did not yet exist. The search for one began with the BRM test, and it would take him through BRM, ERA, Connaught and a Cooper of his own before he gave up and bought an Italian car.