1957 The British car

On lap 26 of the British Grand Prix at Aintree, on 20 July 1957, Tony Brooks was called into the pits to hand his Vanwall to Stirling Moss, whose own car had begun to misfire. Moss rejoined in 9th place. When he took the chequered flag, first, a British car had won a round of the World Championship for the first time.

It was what he had gone to Vanwall for. He had tested Tony Vandervell’s car at Silverstone and Oulton Park in the autumn of 1956, and he knew it already: in May that year he had won the International Trophy at Silverstone in it, a one-off drive. In December Denis Jenkinson told the readers of Motor Sport that nothing in the winter’s team news was more encouraging for British followers of the sport. Twice runner-⁠up to Juan Manuel Fangio, in a Mercedes-⁠Benz in 1955 and a Maserati in 1956, Moss now had a car built at Acton by Vandervell Products: a 2.5-⁠litre four-cylinder engine with Bosch fuel injection, in a space frame by Colin Chapman under a body by Frank Costin.

It was not, he said many years later, an easy car to drive, and it gave little pleasure beyond its colour: “The sole pleasures of the Vanwall were that it looked good and it was green.” His team-⁠mate was Brooks, and from Rouen a third car went to Stuart Lewis-Evans. The tyres were Pirelli, and by Aintree Pirelli’s racing stocks were running so low that the team tried Dunlops.

Buenos Aires: a last Maserati

The Vanwall did not go to Argentina, so his season began on 13 January with one more championship race for Maserati, in a works 250F numbered 4. At the Buenos Aires Autodrome he beat Fangio to pole position on Fangio’s home ground, and lost the race at the start: a juddering getaway broke the throttle linkage, and he spent 9 laps in the pits. He went back out to set the fastest lap, 1:44.7, made up a lap on Fangio, and finished 8th, 7 laps down, while Maseratis took the first four places. The single point for the fastest lap was the first of his 25.

A week later, in the Buenos Aires 1000 km, he shared a Maserati 450S with Fangio and, driving well below its rev limit, built a lead of more than 2 minutes; the transmission broke after Fangio took over. Moss then drove the 300S of Jean Behra and Carlos Menditeguy, chased the leading Ferrari, set the race’s fastest lap and brought the car home 2nd. In the city’s Grand Prix on 3 February, a Formula Libre race in two heats, he and Peter Collins were both overcome by the temperature in the first heat; he shared Menditeguy’s car in the second and was classified 6th.

Havana, Sebring, Syracuse and Brescia

On 25 February he raced in the Cuban Grand Prix, on the Malecón in Havana, in two Maseratis entered by Scuderia Madunina: a 200S that stopped after 17 laps with no oil pressure, and a 300S shared with Harry Schell that went out after 78 laps with a failed engine. Fangio won. At Sebring on 23 March Moss and Schell were 2nd in the 12 Hours in a works 300S. On 7 April, at Syracuse, he drove a Vanwall in a race for the first time that year and finished 3rd, behind Collins and Luigi Musso.

On 12 May he started the Mille Miglia again with Jenkinson beside him, this time in a 4.5-⁠litre 450S. Two years earlier the two of them had set the race’s record in a Mercedes-⁠Benz. In 1957 the Maserati’s brake pedal broke, and they were out after about 12 km.

Monaco: 4 laps

The Vanwall’s first championship race of the year was at Monaco, on 19 May. In Thursday’s practice Moss won the £100 prize for the fastest lap, 1:44.4, and the front row held three makes: Fangio’s Maserati, Collins’s Lancia-Ferrari and Moss’s Vanwall, 3rd on 1:43.6. At the start he cut across from the left as he took the first hairpin, shutting out Collins and Fangio, and led with Collins on his tail. Out of the tunnel near the end of lap 4 he was only a few feet ahead.

At the chicane he went straight on into the barriers, scattering their poles. Collins swerved to miss the debris and hit the barricade at the harbour’s edge; Mike Hawthorn struck a wheel of Brooks’s Vanwall and rode up on to Collins’s car. Fangio went through between the wrecks and won; Brooks finished 2nd. Why Moss went straight on, the report of the day does not say.

Le Mans, and a hospital bed

Sports cars filled the gaps between Grands Prix. At the Nürburgring 1000 km on 26 May the 450S he shared with Fangio retired, and he finished 5th after a stint in a private 300S. For Le Mans, at his instigation, Maserati had Frank Costin design a closed body for the 450S. Fangio took one look at its cramped cockpit and declined, so Harry Schell squeezed in as Moss’s co-driver; the coupé broke an oil pipe and then a rear universal joint, and retired.

Then he fell ill. A sinus infection caught on holiday on the Mediterranean put him in hospital, and he missed the French Grand Prix at Rouen on 7 July and the Reims Grand Prix a week later. Brooks, still not mended after a crash at Le Mans, missed Rouen too; Roy Salvadori and Lewis-Evans drove the Vanwalls there, and for Reims the team borrowed Lewis-Evans from Ferrari.

Aintree, 20 July

He was back for Aintree, the sinus trouble behind him. On the Thursday he tried all three Vanwalls; on the Friday he took pole in 2:00.2, 0.2 seconds faster than the record he had set there in 1955, with Brooks at 2:00.4. The front row was Moss, Jean Behra’s Maserati and Brooks, and Fangio, unusually, was on the second. Brooks, more or less fit again after Le Mans, had said before the start that he did not think he could last the 90 laps, but that he would keep his car running well in case one of his team-⁠mates needed it.

Moss led from Behra and drew away, 9 seconds ahead after 20 laps. At the end of lap 21 his exhaust note faltered; on lap 22 he stopped, and the mechanics tore the magneto earthing wire off in case the switch was at fault. He rejoined 7th, stopped again a lap later, and the misfire could not be traced. Brooks was flagged in, and on lap 26 Moss set off again in Brooks’s car, No. 20.

His place in Brooks’s car, lap 26

9

At the finish, lap 90

1

He drove as if there were nothing to lose. He passed Menditeguy, then Fangio by lap 35, then Musso and Collins, setting fastest laps as he went, and at half-distance he was 4th, 1 minute behind Behra. He brought the lap record down to 1:59.2. On lap 69, as he came up to take 3rd place from Lewis-Evans, the clutch of Behra’s leading Maserati broke up; Hawthorn, following, ran over the pieces and punctured a tyre, and the two Vanwalls came down the straight towards the Melling Crossing 1st and 2nd, Moss leading. Cheers broke out all round the circuit as they ran round together.

Lewis-Evans stopped on lap 73, a throttle-linkage ball joint adrift. Moss, 90 seconds clear of Musso, made a precautionary stop for 10 gallons of fuel on lap 79 and still won by 25.6 seconds, with Hawthorn 3rd. Near the line Roy Salvadori, whose Cooper’s gearbox had split, waited for him to finish so that he could push his car across and be classified. Brooks had taken over Moss’s own car and kept it going until its engine failed after 51 laps.

The two drivers shared the win and its 8 points, 4 each, and Moss had 1 more for the fastest lap.¹ It was Vanwall’s first win in a championship Grand Prix and the first World Championship race won by a British car anywhere, with British drivers; the race also carried the title of European Grand Prix. “Moss driving Brooks’ Vanwall had triumphed”, Jenkinson wrote at the end of his report, and everyone paid tribute to Vandervell for the team that had made a British win in the British Grand Prix possible.

The Nürburgring and Pescara

The Nürburgring, 4 August

Vanwall had never raced at the Nürburgring, and over its bumps the car’s suspension could not cope. Moss started 7th and finished 5th, more than 4½ minutes behind Fangio. It was Fangio’s great day: the win made him champion for the fifth time.² Writing about it in 1998, Moss put himself 4th; the results say 5th. A week later he won the Swedish Grand Prix for sports cars at Kristianstad, sharing Behra’s 450S.

Pescara, 18 August

The Pescara Grand Prix counted for the championship for the first and only time. The circuit at Pescara was 25.6 km of public roads in the Abruzzi, the longest ever used for a round of the World Championship, and the race was run in heat.³ Ferrari sent only Musso: Enzo Ferrari was in dispute with the Italian government and the Automobile Club of Italy after Alfonso de Portago’s fatal crash in the Mille Miglia.

In practice Moss was the first under 10 minutes, with 9:54.7, before Fangio answered with 9:47.7 and then 9:44.6 for pole; Moss started beside him. Musso led the first lap and was soon passed. Moss was sliding the Vanwall through the corners in a way practice had not suggested was possible, and from a high bank above the road the spectators could see how hard he was working at the wheel. On lap 9 he went round in 9:44.6, Fangio’s pole time, and the record of the circuit.

Fangio arrived in second place more than 3min behind, having for once been unable to overcome the handicap of being up against a superior machine, driven by a not so inferior driver.

On lap 10 Musso’s oil tank split. Fangio slid on the oil, bounced off the kerb-stones and buckled his left rear wheel. Moss stopped for oil before his 13th lap with a lead of more than 3½ minutes, and after 18 laps, in 2h 59m 22.7s, he won by 3m 13.9s.

It was a win on Italian roads over the Maserati of the new champion, and three weeks later he won again in Italy, at Monza.

Monza, 8 September

He flew in from England and arrived at Monza 5 minutes before first practice. On the first day he set the fastest time, 1:43.2; when Fangio equalled it he went out again and did 1:42.7. Lewis-Evans took pole with 1:42.4, and the four-car front row was three Vanwalls, Lewis-Evans, Moss and Brooks, and Fangio’s Maserati.

The race was run on the road circuit alone, over 87 laps. For the first part of it five cars ran together, two and three abreast and giving nothing away: Behra’s V12 Maserati, Fangio’s six-cylinder one and the three Vanwalls, three of the five British cars with British drivers. Lewis-Evans’s cylinder head cracked; Fangio and Behra called off the fight and let Moss go, hoping he too would break, and from lap 26 he drew away. Fangio revved his Maserati to 8,400 rpm, 800 over its limit, and still could not hold him; on lap 41 he stopped for tyres. On lap 68 Moss’s pit showed him “LOOK TYRES”. He beat Fangio by 41.2 seconds, and Motor Sport caught the moment: “Amid much rejoicing by the many British people present and an air of bewilderment from the Italians, Moss crossed the line to win.”

Fangio had already won the title. Moss’s three wins in the last four races made him runner-⁠up for the third year running, with 25 points to Fangio’s 40. In the six races they both started that year, Fangio finished ahead three times, in Argentina, at Monaco and at the Nürburgring, and Moss three times, at Aintree, Pescara and Monza.

Salt, a wedding and the Bahamas

In August, at Bonneville in Utah, he lay on his back in the cockpit of the MG EX181, a teardrop record car with a supercharged 1,489cc twin-cam engine, and drove it at 245.64 mph (395.32 km/⁠h) over the flying kilometre, an international record for Class F.⁴ He beat Goldie Gardner’s record, by the usual secondary figure, by some 42 mph (68 km/⁠h), and did not much enjoy it: being shut under the car’s bubble canopy was not to his taste. The record runs are told in Rallies and records.

At the last Goodwood meeting of the year a demonstration was staged for him to try for the lap record in the Vanwall that had won at Monza; it equalled the record on lap 4 and failed on lap 5. On 21 September he finished 4th in the Tour de France Automobile in a Mercedes-⁠Benz 300 SL with Garnier. At the non-⁠championship Moroccan Grand Prix, at Ain-Diab on 27 October, he was fastest on the first day of practice, then went to bed with a fever and did not start. At Caracas on 3 November the 450S he shared with Brooks retired, and in Nassau in December he was 4th in the Governor’s Trophy in an Aston Martin DBR2 and won the Nassau Trophy in Temple Buell’s Ferrari 290 MM.

Between Monza and Morocco, on 7 October, he married Katie Molson, 22, Canadian-born, of the brewing family, at St Peter’s, Eaton Square, in London. Among the ushers were Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins. A year later Moss would lose the championship to the first of them by a single point.