1953 A car of his own, two accidents, and 2nd at Le Mans

The Reims 12 Hours began at midnight, on the night of 4 July 1953, with the drivers running to their cars in the dark. Through the small hours Maglioli’s Ferrari led by nearly 3 laps, until the officials, after more than an hour’s argument about the rules, tried to disqualify it, and showed the black flag first to the wrong cars. Stirling Moss, in the Jaguar C-⁠type he shared with Peter Whitehead, went on racing the Ferrari, still thinking it was in front, and Jaguar’s team manager, Lofty England, asked for it to be stopped so that he need not.

The Ferrari team packed up. Moss and Whitehead won, and Moss brought the dark green Jaguar to the finish to the applause of the lunchtime crowd; the photographs of the day show him standing to attention for the anthem with his parents beside him. He had driven the last 3 hours of the race. That afternoon, at the same circuit, Reims-Gueux, he lined up for the French Grand Prix.

He drove it in a car his own small team had built, the Cooper-⁠Alta. Its clutch was slipping by half-distance and gave out after 38 laps, and the burst clutch kept the car out of the British Grand Prix a fortnight later. Mike Hawthorn, in his first season with Ferrari, won the race at Reims from Juan Manuel Fangio by a second. Moss had won a 12-hour race before lunch and gone out of a Grand Prix after it in a car that could not last, and the day was the year in small.

A car of his own

After 1952 he had a Formula Two car built under his mechanic, Alf Francis: a Cooper-⁠Alta, the four-cylinder Alta engine in a Cooper-based special with chassis work by Ray Martin. Motor Sport later called it the Moss-Martin creation, and it would not steer properly.

It first raced at Goodwood on Easter Monday, 6 April, and was 7th in the Lavant Cup from 18th on the grid. At Silverstone in May it never ran higher than 4th and lost 12 seconds to a stop for fuel. At Rouen in June he made a tremendous start, round the outside of the cars in front and nearly collecting a photographer, and led the 2-⁠litre cars and the Talbots until it lost bottom gear. Then he could only wait, in a high second gear, for it to pull out of each hairpin, and he finished 10th. Motor Sport’s reporter thought the rest of the field had been driving at 85 to 90 per cent.

... there were only two drivers who were ‘motor-racing’ and they were Trintignant and Moss.

He had seen enough of the car by then to try another. In practice at Rouen he took a turn in Peter Lyons’s Connaught and put it on the third row. In May, at Dundrod, he had already driven Rob Walker’s Connaught in the Ulster Trophy, finishing 2nd in his heat with the fastest lap, before its gearbox kept him out of the final.

For the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort on 7 June, after the Cooper-⁠Alta had disappointed at the Eifelrennen the week before, he hired the works fuel-injected Connaught, not officially entered by the factory, beside Roy Salvadori and Kenneth McAlpine. He started 9th and clung to the red cars at first, and he was running 9th when a bung blew out of the injection’s pressure relief. Repaired and refuelled, the car finished at the back, 9th, 7 laps down. Alberto Ascari led every lap, on a new surface that broke up under the cars. In the sports-car race that weekend, meant for less experienced drivers, the organisers had simply refused entries from drivers of the calibre of Moss, Wharton and Salvadori.

2nd at Le Mans

Nobody gave Jaguar much chance at Le Mans with what was in essence its car of 1951, until Moss began to lap in 4 min 32 s in practice, as fast as any of the opposition. The C-⁠types now had three twin-choke Weber carburettors and disc brakes. He shared car No. 17 with Peter Walker, as he had in 1952.

He led after the first half-hour and after the first hour. Then he stopped for plugs, and stopped again, and only then was the cause found: a dirty fuel filter, which was taken out, after which the car went properly. From the tail of the leading group they were 9th at midnight and 7th an hour later, and at the finish they were 2nd, 4 laps behind the winning Jaguar of Rolt and Hamilton. Jaguar were 1st, 2nd and 4th. At Mulsanne the reporter noted the braking of the Jaguars, Moss’s above all. On the Sunday morning Tom Cole was killed when his Ferrari crashed at White House.

It was his best Le Mans result, equalled only by 2nd place in 1956. RacingSportsCars lists him as a reserve driver for the Rolt and Hamilton car as well; he never drove it. His 10 Le Mans races and his Tourist Trophies have a chapter of their own, the sports cars.

Reims followed three weeks later. The rest of the Jaguar year was patchier. In the Mille Miglia in April, with Mortimer Morris-Goodall, he retired. He was 4th in the British Empire Trophy in the Isle of Man, and 2nd in the sports-car Grand Prix at Monsanto, in Lisbon, where Bonetto’s Lancia passed him at half-distance. In the Goodwood Nine Hours in August the brakes grabbed, the car needed 13 changes of wheel, and it retired with no oil pressure: the disc brakes that had won at Le Mans did not suit Goodwood’s many corners. In the Tourist Trophy at Dundrod in September, again with Walker, he was 3rd on distance by one record and 4th by a newspaper headline of the day; accounts differ.

His rallying for the Rootes Group went on too. He was 6th in the Monte Carlo Rally in January, whose road sections gave him little trouble; Motor Sport reported that “Stirling Moss, indeed, well up on time in the Sunbeam-⁠Talbot, pronounced them too easy.” In July a second penalty-free Alpine Rally, in a Sunbeam Alpine, brought him a second Coupe des Alpes. The chapter on rallies and records follows them.

The Cooper chassis

By the German Grand Prix on 2 August the Cooper-⁠Alta had been rebuilt: the Alta engine from the first car went into a normal Cooper Formula Two chassis, with a preselector gearbox under the driver’s knees, four S.U. carburettors and an exhaust of Ferrari type. At the Nürburgring he qualified 12th in 10:48.3, the fastest of the British cars, some 48 seconds slower than Ascari’s 9:59.8. He ran 10th, the first British car, stopped to refuel, and a late spurt past Swaters’s Ferrari and Ascari’s retirement brought him up to 6th, just outside the points: the best he would do before 1954.

A week later, at Les Sables d’Olonne, he was 3rd on aggregate behind Rosier and Chiron, although Gordinis won both heats: in those French races, Denis Jenkinson wrote, it paid to keep going, however slowly. Jenkinson thought the car had the makings of an ideal one for such races, given a better gearbox. At Charterhall the fuel injection failed in the Formula Two race; in the Formula Libre race he ran 2nd to Farina’s Thinwall Ferrari until the Cooper-⁠Alta went sick, and Motor Sport watched him go slowly round lifting his helmet with one hand to listen to the engine’s changed note.

At Monza on 13 September it had S.U. fuel injection, timed and metered from the exhaust camshaft, and a claimed 186 bhp. His practice lap of 2:06.6 was easily the fastest by a British car, though Jenkinson found the roadholding inadequate and the brakes non-existent. He was 5th after the first lap, holding the Italian cars on speed, then stopped on the third lap because oil from the breather made him fear a leak.

In the Alta engine with S.U. injection we have the Formula II engine for power, as Moss showed along the straights, all we need now is a Formula II chassis.

He rejoined last. For more than 20 laps he ran with Bonetto’s Maserati, never more than a length away for 10 of them, and for a lap he towed it along in his slipstream. He was classified 13th, 10 laps down.

A week later, at Crystal Palace, he took pole for the London Trophy, won both its heats and with them the race. At Goodwood the week after that the car, which should have been very fast after Monza, was not; he was 2nd in the Madgwick Cup to Salvadori’s Connaught and 4th in the Goodwood Trophy. The Goodwood commentator told the crowd that changing between big cars and small ones was hurting his driving of the 500s. In Formula Three, in what was his last full season of it, he won the 500cc supporting race on British Grand Prix day once more, now in a works Cooper, and won at the Nürburgring, Crystal Palace and Charterhall.

Two accidents

The first came in May, in practice for the International Trophy meeting at Silverstone. Motor Sport’s reporter wrote that “Everyone admired Moss for pluckily driving after a nasty accident on the Thursday, when he left the course in the Type C Jaguar at Abbey Curve and was pinned beneath the overturned car.” That was on 7 May. On the Saturday he won the production touring-car race in a Jaguar Mk VII with a lap record for the touring cars, was 7th in the sports-car race in a C-⁠type and 9th in the International Trophy in the Cooper-⁠Alta.

The second came at Castle Combe on 3 October. The Cooper-⁠Alta was not ready, so in the 20-lap Formula Two race he drove a 1,100cc Cooper-JAP, an improbable car, Motor Sport thought, in which to take on the Connaughts. He had won his 500cc heat with a lap record for the class. Running 3rd into Quarry Corner on the third lap, he moved over when Bob Gerard’s Cooper-Bristol slid; Rolt’s Connaught, close behind, struck the Cooper-JAP, which rolled over and threw him out. He scrambled clear, Rolt stopped to help, and he was taken to the Bristol Royal Infirmary with a broken kneecap and a broken collarbone, abrasions and shock.¹ He missed the 500cc final.

Towards Maserati

Ken Gregory, who had managed him since the end of 1951, said long afterwards that “After the disaster of the Cooper-⁠Alta [with no decent British car on offer Moss’s small team had tried to build its own under Alf Francis] I think he was close to quitting.”

Late in 1953, without telling Moss, Gregory cabled Rudolf Uhlenhaut at Mercedes-⁠Benz and went to see Alfred Neubauer, the racing manager. He told Neubauer he had the best driver in the world, a cheek, he admitted, when Mercedes-⁠Benz had Fangio. Neubauer’s answer, as Gregory remembered it 56 years later, was that “we’ve made our choice; we’re not certain Stirling is ready.” (attributed)

Maserati had signed a full team and would only sell him a car. Moss was leaving for a rally and a holiday, and by Gregory’s account he said only “Ken, I leave it entirely to you.” (attributed) The car Gregory found for him was a Maserati 250F, and in 1954 he raced a Grand Prix car from abroad for the first time. As he put it in 1994, “They dried up in ’53, so I was forced to go with Maserati in 1954.”

Stirling Moss has had an unlucky 1953 season, with two nasty accidents and slow or unreliable cars. But he is young, keen, exceedingly popular and not fit enough for National Service. He has, if anything, better style than Hawthorn and looks far more relaxed in a 140-⁠m.p.h. cockpit.

He was 24. He had started 10 World Championship races in three seasons, in HWM, ERA, Connaught and Cooper-⁠Alta cars, and had not scored a point. The first came at Spa in June 1954, in the Maserati: 3rd place, and 4 of them.