1955 A few feet behind Fangio in the Grands Prix, and at Aintree first to the line

Buenos Aires, 16 January

His first race for Mercedes-⁠Benz put him, briefly, in an ambulance. In the heat of the Argentine Grand Prix at the Buenos Aires Autodrome on 16 January he started fast and ran with Juan Manuel Fangio and Alberto Ascari, until after 29 laps the fuel in his W196 began to vaporise and the car stopped. He climbed out spent, someone bundled him into an ambulance, and he would not have it: “Some medic said something like ‘Observation’ to which I just said, ‘Oh, don’t be so bloody silly’”. He was driven to the pits instead, and took a turn in the car Hans Herrmann had started, which Karl Kling also drove; it finished 4th, and the 3 points were divided between the three of them.¹ A fortnight later, in the Buenos Aires Grand Prix for Formula Libre cars, he was 2nd to Fangio on aggregate.

Motor Sport had announced in its January issue that he had signed for the Mercedes-⁠Benz Grand Prix and sports-car teams. The car was the W196, a 2.5-⁠litre straight-eight with fuel injection, built with long, medium and short wheelbases, on Continental tyres; the team had 56 people in its racing department, a great many for the time. Fangio, he said half a century later, had been the main reason he joined. He was the number two: “I was never actually officially contracted as the number two, it was more by inference; he was already twice world champion. There’s no other driver in my entire career that I would have considered doing this for.”

How much faster was Fangio? Denis Jenkinson of Motor Sport timed them both in practice, sometimes in the same car, and found Fangio a fifth or two of a second quicker through the Gasworks hairpin at Monaco and a consistent half a second faster through a curve at Spa. In sports cars the order turned round. In practice for the Swedish race in August, Motor Sport noted, Moss was faster than Fangio, as had happened before in the sports cars.

The Mille Miglia and Monaco

Early in the year he and Jenkinson began learning the roads of the Mille Miglia in a 300 SLR. On 13 March he was 6th in the 12 Hours at Sebring in an Austin-⁠Healey 100 with Lance Macklin, and on 24 April 4th at Bordeaux in his own Maserati 250F, a lap behind the three works cars, with the lap record.

On 1 May, with Jenkinson beside him passing on his notes of the road by hand signals, he won the Mille Miglia in the 300 SLR No. 722, in 10h 07m 48s. Nobody ever went faster in the race; it has a chapter of its own.

Three weeks later, at Monaco, the Mercedes-⁠Benz engineers set up his short-wheelbase car and Fangio’s differently, on purpose, to learn about the weight distribution. In Fangio’s car Moss came within a tenth of a second of Fangio’s time; in his own he was more than 2 seconds slower, and he started 3rd. Jenkinson found the difference between them in the tunnel: in the same car Fangio went through it without lifting, while “Moss admitted freely that try as he might he always eased the throttle a fraction as he entered the tunnel.”

On race day, 22 May, Fangio’s transmission broke at half-distance, and Moss led by a minute and more. Lapping Cesare Perdisa, who kept getting in the way, he gave him a piece of his mind on the way past. He was close to lapping Ascari when, at the end of lap 81, his engine burst in a cloud of smoke. He pushed the car to the finish to be classified 9th and last. At almost the same moment Ascari went into the harbour, and Maurice Trintignant won. Four days later Ascari was killed at Monza, testing a Ferrari.

On 29 May, in the Eifelrennen for sports cars at the Nürburgring, he was 2nd in a 300 SLR, half a car’s length behind Fangio. At Spa-⁠Francorchamps on 5 June he started 3rd, passed Eugenio Castellotti in the first kilometre and was 2nd again, 8.1 seconds behind; there were places, Motor Sport noticed, where Fangio stayed flat and Moss had to ease off a little, and after 28 laps the two of them eased off together.

Le Mans, 11 and 12 June

Mercedes-⁠Benz entered three 300 SLRs for the 24 Hours, each with a new air brake, a hinged panel behind the driver raised by hydraulic rams: Moss shared No. 19 with Fangio, Pierre Levegh drove with John Fitch, and Kling with André Simon. In practice on the Wednesday night Alfred Neubauer, the team manager, waved Moss out of the pit in Levegh’s car just as a DB was coming in. Moss sensed the impact and accelerated hard; the DB was thrown against the pit counter, and the injuries it gave Jean Behra’s leg kept him out of the race.

Fangio started the race at four o’clock and fought Mike Hawthorn’s Jaguar for the lead, which reminded Motor Sport of their duel at Reims-Gueux in 1953. Shortly before half past six, opposite the pits, with Fangio at the wheel of No. 19 just behind, Levegh’s Mercedes-⁠Benz hit Lance Macklin’s Austin-⁠Healey and was flung into the enclosure where the spectators stood. More than 80 of them were killed, and Levegh with them. Moss was not driving.

The race went on. Through the evening the Fangio and Moss car drew further into the lead, and just after two in the morning the two remaining Mercedes-⁠Benz were called in: the directors of Daimler-Benz, meeting in Stuttgart, had decided to withdraw them as a mark of sympathy for all those involved. They were leading by 2 laps.²

The French, German, Swiss and Spanish Grands Prix were cancelled. The championship was left with seven rounds, the Indianapolis 500 among them, where the European teams did not go, and after June Moss had only two championship Grands Prix left to race.

Zandvoort, 19 June

A week after Le Mans, in the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, he started 2nd. On the first lap Luigi Musso got between them; on the swerves behind the pits Moss drew alongside him and frightened Musso into lifting a fraction of a second too soon, and he was back on Fangio’s tail. They ran a few feet apart for the rest of the race and finished a length apart, 0.3 seconds. Moss toured the last laps mostly in fifth gear, and on the last of them a plug oiled up.

Only Neubauer worried about how close he followed. At Zandvoort he feared that Moss’s engine would swallow the sand thrown up by Fangio’s car, and asked what would happen if Fangio went off. Moss remembered his answer: “I told him, ‘Fangio never goes off and I’m sticking with him’.”

Aintree, 16 July

The Royal Automobile Club had moved the British Grand Prix from Silverstone to Aintree, the new circuit inside the Grand National racecourse outside Liverpool. Before the race Motor Sport wondered whether Daimler-Benz might turn its usual order round and let the young Englishman set the pace, on his first appearance at home in one of its cars. On the Thursday he equalled the lap record, 2:00.6, his own, set in his Maserati the October before, and only at full stretch; on the Friday he did 2:00.4 to Fangio’s 2:00.6, and took his first pole position in the World Championship, with Fangio and Behra beside him. Race day was very hot, and the crowd enormous: as many as 150,000, by one later count.

The opening laps are told two ways. In Jenkinson’s report Fangio went into the lead as usual and let Moss by on lap 3, and Jenkinson drew the obvious conclusion: “Clearly, Moss was going to be allowed to set the pace and probably win”. Fangio took the lead back on lap 17 and would not give way when Moss tried to pass him at Tatts Corner, and Moss got by again at the end of the long straight on lap 26. Moss’s diary, written on the day, has it differently: “Took lead at start, due to Behra’s proximity. Let Fangio lead later, and at 18 laps took lead to the end.”

By lap 40 he led by 9 seconds, gained by slipping through gaps in the traffic where Fangio had to wait, and he had twice lapped his own grey-and-green Maserati, which Macklin was driving; when Macklin spun it into the straw at Tatts, Moss wondered next time round how much the repairs would cost him. At half-distance the Mercedes-⁠Benz pit showed both drivers its “RG” sign, keep stations, and later the sign to slow down. His lead grew to 12 seconds, and Fangio closed it in the last laps. On lap 88 of 90 Moss equalled his pole time, 2:00.4, the fastest lap of the race. At the line Fangio drew up alongside him and finished half a car’s length behind, as Moss had finished behind Fangio at the Nürburgring in May.

Seconds ahead of Fangio at the line

0.2

Mercedes-⁠Benz in the first four places

4

He won in 3h 07m 21.2s, at 86.47 mph (139.16 km/⁠h), with Kling 3rd and Piero Taruffi 4th. It was the first time he had won a World Championship race, and no driver from Britain had won the British Grand Prix before him. It also settled the title: Fangio had 33 points to Moss’s 22, and only Monza, with 9 points at most, was left.

Did Fangio let him win?

Jenkinson’s report of August 1955 took a managed result for granted, and so, as he reported them, did Moss’s thanks at the prize-giving. For the rest of his life Moss was asked the question. In 2003 he told Nigel Roebuck: “Don’t ask me if he let me win that day, because in all honesty I don’t know, and it was something we never discussed subsequently.” There had been no arrangement between them, he said, and no orders from Neubauer. The question has never been settled, and Moss and Fangio weighs the evidence.

That evening, on the road home, Nigel Roebuck, then a boy of nine or ten, was in his father’s car when a motorcycle policeman drew alongside and signalled for the window to come down: “Drop it to 30, Stirling.” (attributed)

Monza, 11 September

The Italian Grand Prix was run on Monza’s new combined road and banked circuit, 10 km round. Moss waited on the Friday for a long-chassis car from Stuttgart and was fastest in the Saturday session, but his usual fraction slower than Fangio overall, and he started 2nd, in a long-chassis streamlined car with the previous year’s body. He made one of the best starts of his career and led for half a lap; by the end of the lap Fangio was in his usual place in front, which Jenkinson put down to team orders.

On lap 19 he came in with his windscreen shattered by a stone: at around 170 mph (274 km/⁠h) the wind was too much to bear in his face. The spare screen was already in the pit and was fitted in 1 minute 40 seconds. He rejoined 8th, set the fastest lap of the race, 2:46.9, on lap 21, and was closing on Behra when, shortly after starting his 28th lap, he felt something break in the engine. Monza, Jenkinson wrote, had claimed him once more, as it had in 1954. Fangio won the last race of the W196, and the season ended with Fangio on 40 points and Moss 2nd on 23.

Sports cars, and a borrowed Maserati

In the 300 SLR he won more often than Fangio. At Kristianstad on 7 August, in the Swedish Grand Prix, a race for sports cars, he led the first lap and then waved Fangio by, and followed him close enough to take a faceful of stones; he was 2nd.

On 17 September, his 26th birthday, he and John Fitch won the Tourist Trophy at Dundrod, a race in which three drivers were killed; on 16 October he and Peter Collins won the Targa Florio in Sicily, and with it Mercedes-⁠Benz became world sports-car champions. The sports cars tells both races.

Between the two, on 24 September, Maserati lent him the works 250F that Roberto Mieres had driven at Monza for the International Gold Cup at Oulton Park. He led from Lodge Corner on the first lap, set a lap record of 87.81 mph (141.32 km/⁠h), and beat Hawthorn, in one of the first Lancia-Ferraris seen in Britain, by 1 minute 0.2 seconds, before catching an aeroplane to London.

The end of the team

Daimler-Benz had announced in the summer that it would leave Grand Prix racing at the end of the year, and on 22 October, at a celebration in Stuttgart, it announced that it was leaving all racing. Moss, writing in 1998, kept the count of the six championship races they had run together: “Mercedes-⁠Benz were victorious in five: four wins, one second and one retirement for Fangio; one win, two seconds and three retirements for me.”

He finished the year at the Nassau Speed Week in the Bahamas in December, in an Austin-⁠Healey 100. For 1956 Fangio signed for Ferrari, and Moss went back to Maserati, as its team leader. The train was broken up, and from then on he would have to beat Fangio rather than follow him.