The 500s and the first wins From a Cooper on the grass to a Jaguar in the rain, 1948–⁠1950

Goodwood, 18 September 1948

There were no grandstands. The new circuit at Goodwood ran round the perimeter of an old airfield at Westhampnett, and its paddock was grass, laid with an anti-skid carpet. On the line for the fifth race of the first meeting, 3 laps for racing cars of up to 500cc, the official starter inspected the rear Dunlops of a Cooper driven by a young man who had turned 19 the day before. A little smoke came from the exhaust. The flag fell, Eric Brandon, the favourite, stalled, and Stirling Moss was away.

Motor Sport’s reporter saw the rest: “Moss built up a vast lead, was given a slow signal by Father Moss, and was never challenged.” Father Moss was Alfred, at the trackside, signalling his son to slow down. His son won by 9.4 seconds, at 71.92 mph (115.74 km/⁠h), with a best lap of 73.2 mph (117.80 km/⁠h), from Brandon and R. M. Dryden. Peter Collins had been entered and did not start.

Goodwood’s own publicity later called it his very first race. It was not. It was his first win there, and the first to be widely noticed.¹ It was far from his last. By the Duke of Richmond’s count in 2019 he raced at Goodwood 62 more times and won 22 of those races; Goodwood’s own figures of 2021 make it 56 more races and 21 wins.

1948: Prescott to Silverstone

The car was the one his parents had helped to buy, a Cooper-JAP 500 Mk II: a single-cylinder 500cc JAP engine, chain drive, and suspension at both ends derived from the Fiat Topolino. He first ran it at the Prescott hill climb in May 1948 and was 4th in his class, ahead of another newcomer, Ron “Curly” Dryden.

Through the summer he kept it busy. He won his class at the Stanmer Park speed hill climb at Brighton on 5 June, beating Eric Brandon and George Hartwell. On 4 July, on the aerodrome at Brough in East Yorkshire, he won his heat, the final and the handicap: his first wins on a circuit. Class wins followed at Bouley Bay in Jersey, at Prescott again, at Great Auclum and at the Boscombe speed trials; then a 4th place at Brighton and a 3rd at Prescott.

A fortnight after Goodwood came the first meeting at Silverstone, on 2 October, with a 500cc race before the RAC International Grand Prix. On the grid his father was photographed shaking his hand for luck. In front of a huge crowd he led, until the sprocket on his engine worked loose and he had to pull off; Spike Rhiando won.² A week later he won again, at Dunholme Lodge, and in November the British Racing Drivers’ Club elected him a full member, at 19. When he died, 71 years later, he was its longest-serving member.

One cylinder or two, 1949

For 1949 he had a long-wheelbase Cooper, the Mk III, with a 1,000cc JAP twin, for hill climbs, Formula Two and Formula Libre, and he raced in the 500cc class too. At Goodwood at Easter, on 18 April, he retired from the 500cc race and won the handicap with the bigger engine. Iota, the 500cc racers’ own journal, was impressed: “Apart from Reg Parnell, there was nobody to come anywhere near young Moss for sheer handling skill.” (attributed)

On 14 May he won the 500cc race at the British Grand Prix meeting at Silverstone, 17 laps in 44 min 26.2 s, at 68.81 mph (110.74 km/⁠h), from Dryden and Aston. On 25 May, 11 days later, he took a 1,100cc Cooper-JAP to the Manx Cup at Douglas, in the Isle of Man, and led until the magneto drive failed.

Six weeks after the Isle of Man he went abroad. At the Circuito del Garda, at Salò in Italy, on 10 July, in the 1,000cc Cooper his father had entered, he was 3rd overall and won his class: his first true race overseas. He retired from the Coupe des Petites Cylindrées at Reims-Gueux a week later. At Zandvoort on 31 July the Dutch organisers would not accept the twin-cylinder Cooper for their Grand Prix, so he took one cylinder off, ran it as a 500 and won the 500cc race, from Bill Aston and Lex Beels. He retired again in the Prix de Léman at Lausanne in August, won the Madgwick Cup at Goodwood in the 1,000cc car on 17 September, and was 3rd in the scratch race at Brough in October.

Ken Gregory

At the British Grand Prix that May, one of the RAC officials was a young man just out of the army called Ken Gregory. He took to racing, joined the 500 Club, later the Half-Litre Club, and became its secretary, and at one of the club’s dinners he met Moss, then about 20. He won Alfred Moss’s trust early. Alfred liked his son home on time, so Gregory told him that Stirling was coming to his flat for coffee, which gave Stirling time to see his girlfriend home.

In 1950 Moss needed somewhere in London that his father approved of, and moved into Gregory’s flat in Hampstead. They travelled to races together. It was Gregory, too, who issued Moss with RAC licence number 7: his lucky number. Gregory drove too, as a works driver for Kieft, which built 500cc racing cars, and with Moss he became a director of the firm.

He was not yet his manager. That came at the end of 1951, when Moss asked him.³ But the partnership of father, son and friend, in which every large decision passed through all three, began over that cup of coffee.

HWM, 1950

In 1950 he was paid to drive for the first time. HWM, Hersham and Walton Motors of Walton-on-Thames, was run by John Heath and George Abecassis, and its cars were prepared by a Polish refugee mechanic, Alf Francis. It signed Moss as a works driver in its Formula Two team: his first professional contract, and his first season on the Continent. He made his debut for the team in late April at Montlhéry, in a French national Formula One race, alongside Abecassis. At Mons in Belgium on 14 May he first drove the HWM-Alta that would be his regular car.

He was the first ever professional racing driver, in that his only income was from racing, which made me the first professional racing driver manager.

He said later that HWM’s small 2-⁠litre car was where he learnt his trade. From his team-⁠mate, Lance Macklin, he learnt about life. At the Gran Premio di Roma, on the Caracalla circuit, on 11 June, he was fighting the Italian cars for 3rd place when a wheel came off and he crashed. At Reims on 2 July he was 3rd.

A week later, on 9 July, he took the 2-⁠litre HWM to the Gran Premio di Bari, a Formula One race outside the championship, and finished 3rd, 2 laps down, behind the Alfa Romeos of Giuseppe Farina and Juan Manuel Fangio. It was the first time he and Fangio raced each other, and Fangio remembered it in his memoir of 1961, written with Marcello Giambertone, a book he later partly disowned.

In that race, a young Englishman driving a HWM came in third. I passed him twice. Nevertheless, I was strongly impressed by his driving style. Having raced so much in my life, I can judge a rival. I immediately sensed the makings of a great driver in that young man with an almost disdainful expression about his mouth.

At Naples on 23 July, on the Posillipo circuit, he crashed after 30 laps and hurt his knee; the Motor Sport database says he broke it, and that he was racing again two weeks later. On 7 August, at Brands Hatch, he won a 500cc heat and finished 2nd in the first final, to George Wicken, despite gearbox trouble.

The autumn brought two more places for the team. He was 2nd on aggregate at Mettet on 10 September, with Macklin 3rd, and 3rd at Périgueux on 24 September. At Garda, in October, a stub axle broke.

From the back of the grid

He still raced the 500s, in a new Cooper, the Mk IV. At the “Royal” Silverstone meeting of 13 May, the Grand Prix meeting held before the King and Queen, he won his heat, holed a piston in the final and was 2nd to Frank Aikens’s Iota, with Peter Collins 0.4 seconds behind. On the Monaco Grand Prix weekend that month he was fastest in practice for the 500cc race and won his heat and the final.⁴ At Brands Hatch on 25 June he won three races in a day.

The race that showed what he could do was at Silverstone on 26 August, at the Daily Express meeting for the BRDC International Trophy. His Cooper now had a Manx Norton engine. Ten minutes before the start its clutch jammed, and he had to start at the back of the grid.

Cars on the grid, Silverstone, 26 August 1950: he started last

32

His place after one lap

3

He led on the second lap and won, and on the way he lapped in 2 minutes dead, 86.66 mph (139.47 km/⁠h). Paula Cooper, John Cooper’s wife, was photographed congratulating him. In 2006 he said that he had always enjoyed it this way: “I always rather liked starting from the back of the grid and coming through, I liked being the underdog.”

Dundrod, 16 September 1950

By the late summer of 1950 the British establishment thought him fast, and too fast for his experience. That, at least, is the story the BRDC and The Daily Telegraph tell: no British works team would give him a car for the RAC Tourist Trophy, the sports-car race at Dundrod.⁵ Tommy Wisdom, the motoring correspondent of the Daily Herald, entered him instead in his own Jaguar XK120, No. 7. Wisdom himself drove a Jowett Jupiter.

The race ran for 3 hours on 16 September, in torrential rain and a gale that blew across the course. The press tent blew over. At the hairpin a driver could see 80 to 100 yards. By the end, it was said, the only spectators left at Ireland’s Corner were a man, a woman and a small boy under a large umbrella.

Stirling Moss’ drive under the terrible conditions [that] prevailed proves him our leading British driver and the Jaguar a very outstanding sports-car.

Moss passed Leslie Johnson’s works XK120 on the second lap and was never headed. His pit signalled him to slow down. Then it signalled, urgently, for more speed: no one was sure that Bob Gerard’s Frazer Nash had not caught him on the handicap. So on the very last lap he set a record for the Dundrod Tourist Trophy, 77.81 mph (125.22 km/⁠h).

He covered the distance at an average of 75.15 mph (120.94 km/⁠h) and won both on distance and on the handicap formula, with Whitehead’s XK120 2nd and Gerard 3rd on handicap. Wisdom’s Jowett had retired with a blown gasket, but as the entrant of the winning car he collected the Tourist Trophy, the class trophy, the distance award and the team prize: about £800, Motor Sport reckoned.

Last lap, mph: the Dundrod TT record

77.81

Miles in 3 hours of rain

225.45

Jaguar made him the leader of its works team for 1951, as he would be until 1954, and with that his career in sports cars began in earnest; he would win the Tourist Trophy six more times.

The morning after: Brands Hatch, 17 September 1950

From his successes in 500cc Coopers and that breakthrough Dundrod TT win in a privateer Jaguar XK120 on the eve of his 21st birthday in September 1950, Moss was the man to give a battered country and its tired people new hope.

That night Alfred Moss flew back to London through the gale, so that he could drive his son to Brands Hatch in the morning. Stirling followed on an early flight, with a seat he had only because a journalist, also called John Cooper, gave up his. The Tourist Trophy had been run on Saturday 16 September. On the Sunday, at Brands Hatch, he was 21.

In October Iota said what the 500cc racers thought of him: “Most promising of all present day drivers is twenty-one year old Stirling Moss.” (attributed)

In November he went to Montlhéry with Gregory and Jack Neill, and the three of them took 13 international class records for 350cc and 500cc cars in a Kieft. In 1951 he would win first time out in the new Kieft. He was the “Boy Wonder” of these years, as Motor Sport’s obituary would call him seven decades later.