1952 Five Grands Prix, three makes, and not one finish

The year began in snow. In January 1952 Stirling Moss drove his first rally, the Monte Carlo, in a works Sunbeam-⁠Talbot 90, with Desmond Scannell of the BRDC and John Cooper, a journalist on The Autocar and no relation of the car builder.

The rally was settled in fresh snow on the Col de Braus, by 4 marks, and Moss was 2nd to Sydney Allard. Motor Sport called it his first rally, and printed a few paragraphs from him beside Allard’s own account.

The car⁠—a Sunbeam-⁠Talbot 90⁠—was magnificent. Its performance is a great tribute both to the designers and to those who were engaged in its construction. … In the Rally we finished with the same shock-absorbers and the same brakes with which we set out, which is more than you can say for some of the other competitors.

He went back to the Alps in July for the Alpine Rally and came through without a penalty, winning a Coupe des Alpes, and with Murray-Frame and Mike Hawthorn he took the team prize for Sunbeam-⁠Talbot. The rallies were a programme run by the Rootes Group’s competition department, alongside his racing, and the chapter on rallies and records tells them whole.

The rallying went well. The racing that mattered most, the World Championship, went as badly as any year of his career.

A championship for Formula Two

For 1952 the organisers turned the World Championship over to Formula Two: 2-⁠litre engines, and no superchargers. It was a formula that should have suited the British teams.

The first was the Swiss Grand Prix at Bremgarten on 18 May, in a fourth HWM, no longer as one of the team’s regular drivers. He started 9th, stopped after 4 laps to have the right sparking plugs fitted, and was working back through the field when George Abecassis and Peter Collins crashed, both with broken rear stub axles. John Heath called in Moss and Lance Macklin, and the two cars were withdrawn on lap 24. Piero Taruffi won for Ferrari.

The BRM had promised more. After his test at Monza the winter before, BRM entered him with Juan Manuel Fangio for its supercharged V16, but with the championship now for Formula Two cars the V16 was left with Formula Libre and races outside the championship. It was not ready for Syracuse in March and did not arrive at Turin in April. At Dundrod on 7 June, in the Ulster Trophy, only one BRM practised, shared by Fangio and Moss, and it was never quick; both started from the back row. Moss stalled, did 2 laps and stopped with overheating, then after a long delay completed a third lap and retired. After another BRM fiasco at Boreham in August, Motor Sport thought the team should now be quietly disbanded. Of the V16 Moss wrote later, “I always say it was the worst car I ever raced”.

The ERA G-⁠type

From Spa he drove a car built around him. Leslie Johnson had revived English Racing Automobiles, and its new G-⁠type, designed by Robert Eberan von Eberhorst and completed by David Hodkin, had a magnesium-alloy tube frame, a de Dion rear axle and a 2-⁠litre Bristol six-cylinder engine. The twin-cam engine first planned for it, made from four Manx Norton cylinders, was never built.

At Spa-⁠Francorchamps, after tests at Silverstone and Lindley, it seized its pistons after a few laps of practice. Another engine was flown over in a Bristol Freighter, and Johnson’s five mechanics, men from the aircraft industry, rebuilt the car overnight in the Citroën garage at Spa, moving the steering column and the brake pedal as Moss asked. On race day it rained, and he started 10th.

Moss too, went off like a squib in the ERA working up to about fifth place in half a lap, only to have a very nasty time when the engine ‘blew-up,’ locking the back wheels. The new ERA never reappeared!

F1DB records an engine failure and grandprix.com an accident; the report of the time reconciles them: the engine blew up and locked the rear wheels. It was a hard start for the new car.

In the British Grand Prix on 19 July, at Silverstone, the Bristol engine lacked power and ran hot. He started 16th, spun early, stopped for plugs and retired after 36 laps. Mike Hawthorn, born the same year as Moss, finished 3rd in a Cooper-Bristol. At Zandvoort on 17 August he started 18th and the engine failed after 73 laps, while Ferraris finished 1st, 2nd and 3rd. That was the ERA’s last Grand Prix: three starts, and in each the engine failed.

At home it did little better. At Boreham in August it was 5th, and 3rd of the Formula Two cars, 0.01 mph behind Brown’s Cooper-Bristol on average speed; at Goodwood in September it went off on the grass at the first corner of the Madgwick Cup and later had to be towed in behind a publicity van; at Castle Combe in October it took pole and led until the steering failed, and Moss waved Roy Salvadori through and retired; at Charterhall it was 4th, passed on the last lap by Oliver’s Connaught. Motor Sport’s history of the car, written in 1999, summed up Moss’s view of it: “Moss found the car handled, steered and stopped excellently, but it was heavier and bulkier than the Cooper-Bristols, and it was seriously unreliable.” (attributed) In October Johnson sold the project to the Bristol Aeroplane Company, which built its Le Mans sports-racers from it.

Monza, 7 September

The last round he drove in a works Connaught, the car Rodney Clarke and Mike Oliver built at Send in Surrey with Kenneth McAlpine’s money, its 2-⁠litre four-cylinder engine developed from the Lea-⁠Francis. At Monza only 24 of the 35 entries were allowed to start. He took his place on the third row, 9th fastest, with a lap in Alberto Ascari’s slipstream, and ran 7th in the race behind Landi.

Just before half-distance he stopped with valve-gear trouble. He ran on at the back of the field, and stopped for good when the trouble came back, after 60 of the 80 laps.¹ Ascari was champion, with 36 points. Moss had none, and for the second year running was not classified.

The C-⁠type’s year

The Jaguar C-⁠type gave him his best days. By one account Dunlop’s disc brakes first raced on his C-⁠type at Goodwood on Easter Monday, where he set the fastest lap in a handicap and finished 4th (the car, XKC 003, is pictured on the 1951 page). In the Mille Miglia on 4 May, with Norman Dewis beside him in a disc-braked C-⁠type, he was close to 3rd place, about 145 miles from the finish, when leaking fuel tanks and steering trouble put them out.

Six days later at Silverstone he won three races in an afternoon in three different Jaguars: the production touring-car race in a Mk VII saloon, blowing its horn at slower cars; the production sports-car race in a C-⁠type, with Reg Parnell’s Aston Martin DB3 14 seconds behind; and a 5-⁠lap race of champions in XK120s. In the 500cc race his Kieft had built a huge lead when a dislodged handbrake cable stopped the foot brake from releasing, and it was a wonder, the reporter thought, that he finished at all; he was 3rd. Then he drove a parade lap in the Sunbeam-⁠Talbot that had been 2nd at Monte Carlo.

Le Mans, in June, went wrong for the whole team. What Moss saw of the Mercedes-⁠Benz 300 SL’s speed in the Mille Miglia led Jaguar to reshape its three cars for less drag; within about 3½ hours every one had overheated and retired, his and Peter Walker’s among them.

A fortnight later, on 29 June, he drove Tommy Wisdom’s disc-braked C-⁠type in the sports-car race before the Formula Two Grand Prix at Reims-Gueux. Motor Sport thought it an uninspiring race, with only two serious contenders: Moss, and Manzon in the 2.3-⁠litre Gordini from Le Mans. The Gordini, giving away more than a litre, built a minute’s lead, until a front hub bearing seized and it crashed into a pylon; Manzon jumped out before the impact. “This left Moss to go on and win with ease.” He averaged 158.017 km/⁠h (98.19 mph) for the 50 laps, and Mairesse’s Talbot was 2 laps behind.

Reims is often called the first major international win for disc brakes. Motor Sport’s report of the Silverstone meeting of 10 May said the C-⁠types there had them too, so it was at the least an early one. They had their ways: after the race, with the car standing in the sun, the fluid boiled and the pedal went to the floor on the slowing-down lap, and he learned to give the pedal a quick stab before he needed it, to push the pads back into place. When he drove the same car again at Silverstone in 2008 he said of it, “I hadn’t realised she’d be such a – what’s the word? – such a lady.” The same afternoon at Reims he drove an HWM in the three-hour Formula Two race and was 10th, 10 laps down, too far behind to be classified.

In August, at the Daily Mail meeting at Boreham, he won the big sports-car race at 88.09 mph (141.77 km/⁠h). In the Goodwood Nine Hours on 16 August, the first night race in Britain, run in rain, he handed his goloshes to Lofty England before the run across the track at the start. He and Walker were 1st or 2nd for 224 laps until, at 10 pm, an A-⁠bracket broke. The mechanics took one from the team’s crashed car and fitted it in 36 minutes, and they finished 5th, 1st of the cars over 3,000cc. He won again at Turnberry, was 2nd to Rolt by 0.6 seconds at Goodwood with a sports-car lap record, and 2nd at Charterhall to Ian Stewart’s Ecurie Ecosse C-⁠type.

From Kieft to Cooper

In Formula Three he began the year in his Kieft, winning at Castle Combe and the Earl of March Trophy at Goodwood at Easter. At the Eifelrennen in May it lost a wheel on the first lap. At the British Grand Prix meeting on 19 July Don Parker’s Kieft passed him and led by a second; out of Stowe for the last time, Parker’s primary chain broke, and Moss swung out and past to win.

After the Kieft was damaged in an accident at Swansea he raced at Boreham in a Cooper borrowed from John Cooper, and from then on increasingly in Coopers, winning at Zandvoort, Turnberry, Goodwood and Castle Combe. A director of Kieft winning in its rival’s car amused Motor Sport, whose reporter at Castle Combe wrote that “Moss, the Kieft director in a Cooper, pulled out his usual masterly lead from the placemen.” At Charterhall in October he was a foot or so behind John Coombs, chasing him for the lead, when Coombs’s Cooper shed a rear wheel. Moss spun to avoid it and finished 2nd; the wheel missed the crowd and dented a parked Morris Eight.

Seven days and nights

Between the races there were records. From 5 to 12 August, at Montlhéry near Paris, he was one of four drivers, with Leslie Johnson, whose idea it was, Jack Fairman and Bert Hadley, who drove a Jaguar XK120 fixed-head coupé for seven days and seven nights: 16,851.73 miles at an average of 100.31 mph (161.43 km/⁠h), stops included. Later in the year, for Rootes, he drove a Humber Super Snipe from Oslo to Lisbon with Johnson, John Cutts and David Humphrey, 3,280 miles through 15 countries in 3 days 18 hours.

Frustrated with the ERA, he turned his plans for Formula Two in 1953 to a car of his own, a Cooper-⁠Alta, and the story of 1953 is largely its story. The Sunbeam-⁠Talbot had finished the Monte Carlo Rally on the shock absorbers and brakes it started with. Not one of his Grand Prix cars that year reached the finish.