Stirling Moss: A Nodding Acquaintance with Death

sensitive, intelligent, almost unbelievably skillful, he is wholly dedicated to a sport that has twice nearly killed him

A Pretty, Pink-Cheeked English nurse pushed him into the room; he was riding a high-backed, old-fashioned--looking wheelchair, a small man, heavily muscled, laughing, slit-eyed. It was his 46th day in the hospital, and for 38 of those days he had been unconscious, or semiconscious, or in amnesia, but he was tan and he looked strong. The left side of his face was raddled with rough, red scars all around the eye, as if someone had been at him with a broken beer bottle.

"That was a funny story, boy, in your last letter," he said, "that story about the clam-digger ... what's this, what's this?" An enchanting gamine thing in faded levis, red-brown hair and dark glasses was handing him an envelope, her photograph. "I like that!" he said. "Put it over there, stand it up, you've met, you two, this is Judy Carne?"

We had met. He stared at her, smiling, as if he could pull himself out of the wheelchair with his eyes. He grabbed her wrist. "Did you see The Daily Sketch yesterday?" He turned to me. "Did you see that, boy? We were sitting in the garden, this bloke poked a telephoto lens over the wall, the bastard was 20 yards away, Judy was brushing a bread crumb off my chin when he shot it, 'an admirer' the caption said ..."

"I like that," Miss Carne said. "'Admirer!'"

"Are you suing?" he said.

"I can't," she said. "I'm going to Hollywood tomorrow."

He smiled again. He looked much as he had when I saw him four days before he went off the course at 120 miles an hour and slammed into a wall at Good-wood: the 40-odd stitches had been taken out of his face; the left cheekbone, stuffed full of support from inside, didn't betray that it had been shattered, and his nose didn't really look as if it had ever been broken, much less broken eight times. His bare left foot lay immobile on the wheelchair rest. His leg was bandaged, but the plaster cast was on the window-sill, sliced in two. There were marks on the pink top of his head. He looked beat up but whole. What he could move, he did move: his head, his right arm, his left arm less, and he talked. He picked up a cellophane bag of red roses someone had left on the bed.

"They're from Germany," he said. He read the name. "I don't know who that is," he said. The door opened behind him. "Viper?" he said. He looked around the back of the wheelchair. "Viper, you went off with my fountain pen." Valerie Pirie, his secretary, a pretty, calm girl. She gave him his pen. He made a note on the card and dropped it on a neat pile of cards and letters. "So-and-so and so-and-so are outside," she said. "I told them not to come, but ... and the man from Grundig is coming at 4:30, about the tape recorder." Tape recorders are important to Moss. He has done five books on tape recorders.

An orderly brought in another bunch of red roses. As he left, a tall blonde came in, and behind her, another, taller. Kiss-kiss. Judy Carne was lying on her belly on the bed, her chin in her hand, staring at him. "I'll tell you, boy," he was saying, "nothing that has happened to me since I came here, except when they broke my nose again, hurt like that clot's shaving me. I had seven days' growth of beard. He swore he'd knew how. I can't think where he'd learned, it was like pulling it out ..."

Another nurse, with tea, bread and butter, jam, clotted cream. He talked. Valerie said, "Drink your tea, Stirling." He drank it and she gave him another cup. He made each of the blondes eat a piece of bread and butter and jam. Neither wanted to, they were dieting, but they couldn't think of answers for the persuasions that poured out of him.

He talked very well, but he didn't stop. He said to me, "You know, I'm not supposed to put any weight on this left leg, under penalty of death or flogging or something, but I'll tell you, the other night I went from there, to there, the washbasin, and back; actually, coming back I passed out. I didn't go unconscious. I get dizzy now and then, I just fell down, but it was so funny, the reason I had to do it ..."

For some time after the accident his speech, when he spoke in delirium, was thick and slurred because of the brain injury, and there was some reason to doubt he would ever speak clearly again. Worse, a close friend had said, "I have the impression that he cannot form an idea of his own, but can only respond to ideas that are fed to him." Now he spoke the crisp quick English he had always used, and ideas came as fast as he could handle them. And he went on and on. It wasn't that he talked incessantly, or compulsively, although he did come close to it. He would stop to listen. He had always been in my opinion a good listener, polite, attentive, absorbed and retentive. But he would listen now only exactly as long as someone spoke and had something to speak about. Then he would begin instantly to talk again. There were no pauses. I think he was happy to find himself able to talk again, and in any case excitation is common in recovery from severe trauma. But it was also plain that he wanted no silences in that room.

I remembered something he had said that last time I'd seen him, in a long dark afternoon of talk in the little apartment in Earl's Court Road: "When I go to bed tonight, I hope to be tired, very tired, because I don't want to think. I don't want to think."

Valerie Pirie had said to me, when he was still in coma, "Do you know, last night he was speaking in French and Italian, as well as English, of course -- but his accent in French and Italian was very pure, much better than it's ever been when he was conscious. Why's that, do you think?"

"Disinhibition. What did he say?"

"He was talking about girls, a lot of the time. Once he said, 'E molto difficile per un corridore -- molto difficile.'"

("[Life] is very hard for a race-driver -- very hard.")

A hard life? Stirling Moss is one of the best-known men in the world, and beyond any doubt the best-known sports figure. Only Queen Elizabeth, by actual line count, gets more mention in the British press than Stirling Moss. Six weeks after his last accident the Sunday Times of London considered his appearance in the garden of the hospital worth a four-column picture and a long story -- on page one. His appearance on a street corner in Rome or Nairobi or Brisbane would block traffic within minutes. Stirling Moss (continued) He makes $150,000 or so a year. He knows the world as few men can imagine knowing it. He travels constantly, once flew to London from South Africa just for a date, flew back next day. His present injuries aside, he is as healthy as a bull, iron-hard, capable of fantastic endurance. He's expert at every sport he has ever tried, rugby, swimming, water-skiing, whatever. He was a better show-rider and jumper at 16, his sister Pat says, than she is today, and she's on the British International team. (The two of them once cleaned out an entire horse show: between them they won every prize offered.) Moss is highly intelligent, easily roused to intense interest in almost anything, from astronomy to Zen. He is one of the most pursued television and radio guests in Europe. He is a witty and amusing speaker. He has written five notably successful books on racing, and about 800 magazine and newspaper articles have appeared under his by-line. He subscribes to no clipping service, but he has 42 full scrapbooks, nevertheless. His mail averages 10,000 pieces a year (400-500 a day when he's in the hospital) and he answers every letter, and promptly. Most men like him. Women find him irresistible, nine times in ten. He has picked a girl out of the crowd standing in a corner at a race circuit, waved to her every time around, made a date for that evening in pantomime, and won the race, too. He sometimes dates three girls in a day. The ultimate mark is on him: his women know that he has other women and they don't care.

Most importantly, he has work to do that he likes doing, and he is better in his work than any other man alive, better in the common judgment of his peers. He is, if the last accident has not destroyed him, the greatest race-driver living. In matched cars he would beat any other driver in the world. More, he is probably the greatest race-driver of all time, the greatest who has ever lived. He has entered more races than anyone else ever did, and won more. He has been champion driver of Great Britain 10 times. He has won so many silver cups that he estimates they could be melted down into an ingot that would weigh 300 pounds. (The ingot, he thinks, would make, in turn, a striking coffee table.) Of his store of other medals, awards, oddities, there is no counting. I remember his coming through New York after a race in Venezuela carrying the Perez Jimenez Cup, a lump of solid gold so heavy it was unpleasant to hold in one hand.

For years he has been universally considered the fastest driver alive and that he has never won the championship of the world is one of the major curiosities of sports. He has been three times thrid in the world rankings, four times second. The championship is decided on the basis of placement in, usually, about 10 major races throughout the world. The 1958 champion, Mike Hawthorn of England, won only one of these races, while Moss won four; but Hawthorn, driving an Italian Ferrari, finished in more races than Moss, whose insistence on driving, when possible, privately owned cars (factory-owned models are always faster) of British manufacture has severely handicapped him. (Now British cars are fastest; in the 1950s they were not.) But Moss has beaten every man who has held the world championship for the past 10 years. Those very few of whom it can be said that they do one thing, whatever it is, better than anyone else has ever done it are marked forever, and in his profession Moss is an immortal. And he is 32, well off if not rich, healthy, popular, talented to the point of genius, a citizen of the world.

E molto difficile per un corridore -- molto difficile?

Yes. Very difficult. The essence of the difficulty is that race-driving on the highest level, in the fastest, most competitive company, Grand Prix driving, is the most dangerous sport in the world. In some recent years the mortality rate has been 25 percent per year: one of every four drivers starting the season could expect to be dead at the end of it. The list of drivers killed in the decade 1951-1961, counting major figures only, total 56 names.

If the game is so dangerous, why does anyone play it?

Because it's also the most compelling, delightful, sensually rewarding game in the world. In a race-driver's view, endeavors like tennis and golf and baseball are exercises, pastimes; demanding, yes, if you like, but still, games that children can play. (In the United States, motor-racing is second only to horse racing as a spectator sport, considerably outdraws baseball and football.) Some games, like court tennis, are both physically and intellectually demanding, but a splitsecond miscalculation in court tennis will cost only a point, not a life or crippling or 60 days in the hospital. Bullfighters, mountain climbers, skindivers know something of the racing-driver's ecstasy, but only a part, because theirs are team sports. Toreros are never alone and mountaineers rarely; the skindiver not usually, and in any case his opponent, the sea, though implacable and deadly, still is passive. When a race-car is passive it is sitting in the garage, and its driver's seat is as safe as a baby's cradle.

What is a race-driver? Is any man who has learned how to drive 150 miles an hour through traffic reasonably skillfully, a race-driver? No, he isn't. Hear Moss: "If you habitually go through the corners one fifth of a second slower than your maximum, you can make a reputation, you can earn a living, you can even win a race now and then -- but you are no race-driver."

There are some such. Also there are many drivers who will deny that there is anything esthetically or sensually rewarding about motor-racing. But they betray themselves when they say, and they all do, "I drive because I like it," or, "I like the life." They feel, but they are inarticulate.

The full terror and the full reward of this incredible game are given only to those who bring to the car talent honed by obsessive practice into great skill, a fiercely competitive will and high intelligence, with the flagellating sensitivity that so often accompanies it. In these men, a terrible and profound change sometimes takes place: the game becomes life. They understant what Karl Wallenda meant when he said, going back up on the high wire after the terrible fall in Detroit that killed two of his troupe and left another a paraplegic, "To be on the wire is life; the rest is waiting," This change is irreversible. A man who has gone through it will never come back across the fence to the herd. Once the game has become life, and life has become a vestibule, unimaginable courage is required to renounce the game -- because renunciation is suicide. Tazio Nuvolari, for decades called the greatest master of race-driving who ever lived, could not find the courage to leave the game that had broken every major bone in his body and had seven times caused doctors formally to announce his impending death; he drove with blood running down his chin because the exhaust fumes made him hemorrhage; he drove when he was so weak he had to be lifted, inert, from the car at the end of a race; he drove until he could not drive; he died in bed, hating it.

No, Grand Prix race-driving has nothing to do with other games, just as driving a Grand Prix car has nothing to do with driving a Chrysler on a parkway, even at, say, 100 miles an hour. ("It has not to do with it," Moss says. "That kind of driving is not even remotely the same thing. It's night and day, fire and water.")

Juan Manuel Fangio, five times champion of the world, retired and left the game in 1958 because he was slowing and because he was lonely and depressed, so many of his friends had been killed. Today, it he were standing in front of the pits on a practice day and someone were to point to a car and say, "Juan Manuel, that is your car, made for you, to your measurements, ready for you," I Stirling Moss (continued) think the struggle within the man would be a hard one. Successful, wealthy, loved, respected, still he knows that he has gone to live in the vestibule.

Men like Nuvolari and Fangio, or the matador de toros Juan Belmonte, retiring with the marks of 72 bull gorings on a thin, frail body, share a common mold: skill, obsession, courage, sensitivity. Courage doesn't count most. Skill is basic, and sensitivity, and always the obsession. When the obsession is great enough, the man will find courage to sustain it, somehow. The American race-driver Frank Lockhart, killed at Daytona in 1928, nearly always vomited before he got into the automobile, but he got into it.

Once a man has gone over, the terror of his nights will be, not mortal death, which he will have seen many times, and which, like a soldier, he believes is most likely to come to the man next to him, and the risk of which is in any case the price of the ticket to the game, but real death -- final deprivation of the right to go up on the wire again. Then, like Moss, he'll do anything to get back. In the hospital, Moss would accept any pain, any kind of treatment, anything at all that he could believe would shorten, if only by a very little, his path back to the racecar, never mind the fact that it took a crew of mechanics 30 minutes with hacksaws and metal shears to cut the last one apart enough to make it let go of him. When he was finally lifted free his face was slashed in a dozen places, his left arm was broken, his left leg was broken at knee and ankle, he had cracked ribs, torn muscles, a broken cheekbone and a broken nose -- and his brain had been so massively bruised that the left side of his body was paralyzed. "Recovery from the brain damage is likely to be a slow process," specialists said, "and there is a possibility that full recovery of function in the arm and leg will not take place." His vision was disturbed. Moss laughed at the doctors and in the night, and whenever he could, pushed the broken leg against the footboard of his bed to exercise it.

• • •

How does a man come to this terrible place?

By an ordinary road, usually.

Moss' father, Alfred Moss, is a prosperous London dentist. He was a race-driver, although never approaching the first rank. Still, he ran at Indianapolis in 1924 and 1925, finishing 16th the first time and 13th the second time. He did some barnstorming in the United States. Stirling's mother, Aileen, was a wellknown British rally-driver, and in 1936 she was woman champion of Britain. She drove a Marendaz, one of the "specialist" cars for which England is famous, made from 1926 to 1936. She was a noted horsewoman. Stirling was their first child, born September 17, 1929.

Stirling was not a flaming success as a student. He was bright, but indifferent to the academic appeal. He was the kind of problem student who requires teachers with skill and special sympathy. He was often ill. His medical record shows appendicitis as a child, scarlet fever and a serious, prolonged case of nephritis. He and the academic life abandoned each other; he tried apprenticing himself to hotel administration and to farming and was bored.

He could drive an automobile, in the sense of steering it, when he was six. He had a car of his own when he was 14. It was a device called a Morgan Three-Wheeler, beloved of two generations of Englishmen. The Morgan had two wheels in front and a third, chain-driven, in the rear. The engine was usually a big motorcycle racing engine, and it rode out of doors, in front of the radiator. The Morgan attracted Englishmen because a whimsy of British law, involving chain drive and weight, classified it as a motorcycle, to its tax advantage; being light and overpowered, it had remarkable acceleration; also -- and this was what brought one to Stirling Moss -- you could legally drive a Morgan before you could drive a four-wheeler.

Moss' father was well off, but the Morgan wasn't really a gift. "My parents taught me," he said to me, "that I could have what I wanted if I paid for it. I always managed to get what I was after, but in order to do that, I had to get rid of everything else. I could have a motorbike if I sold my radio and my chemical set and this and that and the other; and when I wanted to move on from the bike I had to flog off my tent and my camping kit and the bike itself and this and that ... I was taught that everything is attainable if you're prepared to give up, to sacrifice, to get it. I think my parents gave me, gave me as a gift, one might say, this belief that whatever you want to do, you can do it if you want to do it enough, and I do believe that. I believe it.

"I believe that if I wanted to run a mile in four minutes I could do it. I would have to give up everything else in life, but I could run a mile in four minutes. I believe that if a man wanted to walk on water, and was prepared to give up everything else in life, he could do it. He could walk on water. I am serious. I really do practically believe that."

When Moss decided that he wanted to be a racing-driver, his parents objected. His father argued on practical grounds: "I couldn't make a living at it, and I tried years ago, when it was easier." But they only objected, they didn't refuse. Neither is the kind of parent who wants to live life over again through a child, but as former competition drivers they didn't consider the métier as dangerous as some parents might, nor as unrewarding. They were outdoor people. They considered physical risk a part of life. After all, Stirling and his sister Pat, five years younger, had been riding show horses and jumpers since they'd been old enough to say "horse" and no harm had come to them. So, after the Austin 7 and the Morgan and the MG and such traditional school-cars of the British competition driver, Stirling graduated, at 16, to a solid, reliable, medium-fast German sports car, a BMW (Bayerische Motoren Werke) 328. In 1948, when he was 18, and legally could drive in competition as well as on the roads, he got his first race-car, a Cooper.

The Cooper then (the firm is famous now) was made in a garage that has been described as approximately the size of a big kitchen. It was a Formula III car: 500 cubic centimeters of engine, which usually meant a rear-mounted one-cylinder J.A.P. or Norton racing motorcycle engine, propelling it at speeds up to 120 miles an hour. The car was tiny and light. Steering was so quick as to be instantaneous and the engine delivered usable power only when it was turning very fast: if the speed dropped it would promptly stall. It was best as a sprint and hill-climb car. Moss put in an entry for the famous Shelsley Walsh hill climb and was not accepted: nobody had ever heard of him. He tried again, for a hill climb at Prescott, the famous venue of the Bugatti Owners Club, was listed, and on the scheduled day he loaded his Cooper into a horse box and set off.

Prescott was then 880 yards of twisty, narrow road. Cars start on the flat, run over a rubber contact timing device, scream up the hill and break an electric-eye beam at the finish. Every great driver in Great Britain has run at Prescott. Moss' first assault on the hill was ragged. But each car is given two tries, and his second run was a record for the 500 cc. class. It didn't last long, it was broken three times in the course of the day, but still it was a fact: Stirling Moss broke a course record the first time he ran in competition. Knowledgeable people at Prescott that day, nothing the speed with which he learned the circuit and seeing that he made no mistake twice, marked him as one to watch, and one perceptive journalist so cited him in print. The next time he ran in a hill climb he won it. He entered in an airport race and won that, in pouring rain. He went to Goodwood, one of the best-known racing circuits in Britain, and won there, in fast company. All in all, in his first year, Stirling Moss (continued) a boy, he entered 15 events and won 11 of them.

For the next year he bought a bigger Cooper, with a two-cylinder engine. He kept on winning. His father, reluctantly supporting his campaigning, serving as his manager, conceded that there would be no return to the hotel business or any other. With mixed feelings, he began to suspect greatness in his son. Moss was invited to run on the Continent, a small race at Lake Garda in Italy, and offered £50 in starting money. The Italians thought he was amusing, a boy, a pink-cheeked Inglese with curly hair, and too much of it. Some laughed at him and his funny-looking Cooper. He won his class, going away, and was an astonishing third overall to a pair of Ferrari drivers, one of them the formidable Luigi Villoresi. He began to form his own style of driving, patterning the attitude, which today identifies him as far as he can be seen -- relaxed, limp as cooked pasta, arms straight out to the wheel -- on Dr. Giuseppe Farina, onetime champion of the world. Other drivers watched him and saw, gladly or bitterly, as their natures ran, that he had the stamp of major talent; he could do things that he had never been taught to do. Finally Tazio Nuvolari saw him and said, "Watch. He will be one of the great drivers of the world."

Since then Stirling Moss has run in 466 races, excluding rallies, sprints, land-speed record attempts, endurance runs and so on. He has won 194 races. He has won 41.6 percent of all the races he has entered, a fantastically high percentage and one that no other racing-driver has approached. For comparison in another field, the jockey William Hartack, one of the greatest who has ever ridden, had his best season in 1957, when he won 27.5 percent of his races. Moss has had more than his share of mechanical breakdowns that have prevented his finishing races, but he has finished 307 of them in first, second, third or fourth place, and that is 65.8 percent placements. Moss aside, the three greatest drivers of all time were Tazio Nuvolari, Rudolf Caracciola and Juan Manuel Fangio. No one of them approaches his record, except that Fangio, when he retired at the age of 47, had won 25 races of the first category, while Moss has so far won 15. In 1961 he started 50 events and won 23 of them. This year, when he had won the Grand Prix of New Zealand in a spilling, solid, tropical downpour, and had lapped every man in the field to do it, including former world champion Jack Brabham, another driver said, "I wouldn't mind, if he was a human being!"

What kind of driving is this that Moss does, and the other 15 or 20 men who are classified in any one year as drivers of Grand Prix stature? It is hard to understand, because it relates to ordinary driving in about the same way as mountain climbing relates to riding up a flight of stairs on an escalator. Basically, the idea is to drive so fast that the car barely maintains adhesion to the road, runs just a hair this side of a tremendous skid and loss of all control. Richard Seaman, a great British driver who was killed at Spa in Belgium in 1939, said that the sensation of driving a Grand Prix car on dry concrete produced exactly the same sensation as driving a fast sports car on a frozen lake. The fastest driver is the one who can come closest to the point at which the car's tires will break adhesion to the road and let the machine go into an uncontrolled slide. ("Uncontrolled" is the key word. Much of the time, the driver has deliberately broken the car loose and is letting it slide.) Since this speed varies with the individual car, with the kind of tires and their state of wear, with the weather, and may change every few yards all around a 5.6-mile course, a fantastic degree of skill is required. Moss will decide in practice, for example, that the car will slide off the road in a certain corner at 97 miles an hour. He will go through the corner in the actual race at 96.5 miles an hour, over and over again, perhaps 100 times. Other good drivers will go through at 95 one lap, 96.3 the next, and so on in a slightly varying pattern. Moss will beat them. Another will try the corner at 98. He will go off the road. This exercise is mildly complicated by the fact that no race-car carries a speedometer. The information it gives is not sufficiently precise. The driver judges car speed by feel and by engine speed, which is important: "4500 rpm in third gear."

That is the basic skill required, to estimate, almost instantaneously, and always correctly, that the four little oval patches of rubber that alone hold the car to the road will give up and let go of it, here at 49 miles an hour, there at 103, there at 158, and, having made the estimation, to keep the car within a fraction of those speeds, steadily and consistently.

Next, one must be able instantly to modify the entire equation in the event of rain, or sand or oil on the track. (American oval track racing stops in the rain; Grand Prix racing does not, unless visibility comes down to zero, or there is floodwater on the circuit, or something of that sort.)

Then, one must be able to maintain speed in traffic, among cars going faster in some places and slower in others; one must be able to handle odd little emergencies, such as coming around a corner to find another car spinning in front of one; or having a wheel break off: or having the car catch on fire or lose its clutch or its brakes. (Total loss of the clutch, making clutchless gear changes imperative, or total loss of the brakes, is not supposed to stop a first-class driver. When Moss and William Lloyd won the 12-Hour Race at Sebring, Florida, in 1954, Moss drove the last four hours or so, from eight P.M. to midnight, without the clutch and without a trace of braking power. After the race Moss asked a writer to get into the car and put the brakes on full; he then pushed the car down the track at a dogtrot with one hand. During the race he had avoided a couple of stark emergencies by sliding the car sideways.)

Moss runs in no rallies now (his sister Pat does; she is among the three greatest rally-drivers in the world, irrespective of sex, and she is indisputably the greatest woman driver living), but he did earlier in his career. He holds the most coveted of rally trophies, the golden Coupe des Alpes. The average speeds imposed by point-to-point rally organizers are usually so high that the cars have to go flat out most of the time, and it is a matter of record that Moss once made up 12 minutes going downhill in the Alps. A competent professional observer has recorded his emotions while sitting in the back seat of a sedan Moss was driving at 90 miles an hour on black glare ice in the mountains. They were mixed.

"We're just as likely to go off the road at 30 as at 90," Moss said, "so we may as well press on."

It is my own belief that these skills in their highest orders are not available to men of normal physical equipment. Whether they are or not, Moss' physical equipment is demonstrably not normal. His reaction time is from 2.5 to 3 times faster than normal. Like Joe Louis at his peak when, he has said, he often found that he had hit a man before his eyes had had time to record the opening, Moss has often braked, accelerated or changed course before his brain could record the reason for the action. His vision, before the Goodwood accident, was startlingly abnormal. Denis Jenkinson, one of the most reliable of observers, tells of an occasion when Moss identified a driver by name at a distance at which Jenkinson, who has normal corrected vision, could barely tell the color of the man's car. Moss' visual accommodation is fantastic: He can change focus from, say, one mile to 30 inches to one mile again virtually instantaneously. His perception approaches the extrasensory: He can reduce his time over, say, a 2.5-mile course by a second a lap exactly; he can add or subtract a fifth of a second to the time he takes to go through a corner; he can tell, running flat out, if one tire has a pound Stirling Moss (continued) less air than the other three; he can gauge the amount of tread left on a tire, in millimeters, at a glance.

Until Easter Sunday and Goodwood, it was usually held that no one had seen Stirling Moss make a major error of judgment. Off the road enough to bash a fender on a hay bale, yes, or run up on the curb, that sort of thing, yes, but serious, no. No one knows what happened at Goodwood. Thousands saw the accident, but no one knows what caused it, least of all Moss, who has the amnesia typical of his injury. Driving a Lotus, he was in fourth place in the ninth lap when the gearbox stuck in fourth gear. He came in, and the mechanics took five minutes to fix the gearbox. Almost any stop at all will ruin a driver's chances in today's G.P. racing, and when Moss went out again, he was three laps, or 7.2 miles, behind Graham Hill, leading. He had absolutely no chance to win, but typically ("One's a race-driver or one's not") he began to drive at the absolute limit. Last year, at the Zandvoort circuit in Holland in a similar situation, with no chance to win, he broke the lap record seven times in succession. He broke the course record at Goodwood, too, and made up an entire lap, 2.4 miles. He came up behind Graham Hill at around 120 miles an hour, out of a fast bend called Fordwater into a slower one called St. Mary's. It is not a stretch in which drivers ordinarily attempt passing. He shifted from fifth to fourth gear at the proper place, but at this point Graham Hill, looking into his mirror, was astounded to see that Moss' car was not slowing, but was coming on; observers on the ground saw him pull abreast of Hill's car and then go almost straight on 60 yards or so into an earthen bank. He did slow the car down to something around 60--80 miles an hour before he hit, but he did not spin it, which would have been logical.

The possible explanations were various: (1) He had finally made a major error in judgment and was trying to overtake Hill at a point in the circuit where it couldn't be done. There is always a first time. The great Italian driver Achille Varzi never had a real accident until the one that killed him at Berne in 1948. (2) When he lifted his foot off the accelerator after shifting from fifth to fourth, the throttle stayed down. This had happened to him in the same car the week before, but as he would be expected to do, he had managed. (3) The engine had suddenly cut out. When this happens, the car can go instantly out of control.

Laurence Pomeroy, a world authority on the racing car, was near. He considers that the behavior of the car was typical of a throttle jammed wide open, and that Moss had one second, or one second and a half at the most, in which to assay the situation, decide what to do, and do it. Most of Moss' retirements, and nearly all of his accidents, have been due to mechanical failure of the automobiles. He can't remember how many times he has had steering failure, completely lost the brakes, the clutch, the transmission, run out of oil, water, gasoline, been hit by other cars (one jumped completely over him and took the top out of his crash hat -- without hurting him). He lost one race because when he hit the starter button he found the battery dead -- in a car that had been two weeks in preparation for that one race! "I can't believe the number of races that I've honestly seen thrown away by something really stupid!" he says. Among the uninformed he has a reputation as a car-breaker. It is totally undeserved. The same was said of Nuvolari, who asked only that a car do what it was supposed to do. The ranking race-manager of all time, Alfred Neubauer of Mercedes-Benz, for whom Moss drove with great success in one of his two efforts with non-British cars -- the other was with Maserati -- jeers at the notion that Moss is hard on cars. So does Rob Walker, for whom Moss drives now. So does Enzo Ferrari, who knows more about automobile racing than anyone now active in the sport.

It is commonly said that had Moss been driving for Ferrari the past few years he would have been champion of the world three times at least. Instead, he drove British cars during the postwar years when they were not really in contention. When British Grand Prix cars, Lotus cars and Coopers running Coventry-Climax engines did begin to demonstrate superiority over Continental machines, Moss drove privately owned models, always a year behind, and a few miles an hour slower, than the ones the factory teams raced.

The only legitimate professional criticism that can be made of Moss is that he has not been a good judge of race-cars. He will concede the point. He has picked the wrong cars either because he didn't know they were the wrong ones, or because they were British and privately owned. He is fiercely patriotic, in the old-fashioned way. "Everything else is a suburb of London," he will say, and he means it. He has been on Queen Elizabeth's Honours List (Order of the British Empire) and he's proud of it.

In 1951 Enzo Ferrari offered Moss a place in his team for a race at Bari in Italy. When Moss appeared for practice the first day he asked which was his car, and was told that he had no car. Il Commendatore -- Ferrari, an arrogant and capricious man -- had decided to assign it to the veteran Piero Taruffi. Moss felt that he had been grossly maltreated and that, through him, his country had been insulted. He announced, profanely, that Ferrari had seen the last of him.

For 10 years Moss raced against Ferrari cars, and beat them when he could, which was often enough. But, toward the end of that time, in sports-car and touring-car (gran turismo) events, he began to drive Ferrari automobiles, but never for the factory, only for private owners. The reason he did was simple enough: they were best. It is my opinion that the best very fast (130-170 mph) automobile money can buy is a Ferrari coupe, and I have believed this for some years. Ferraris have been very successful in long, hard races, like the Sebring 12-Hour Race, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. They are strong, reliable, hard to break, qualities very attractive to Moss, who has had so many fragile horses shot out from under him.

Enzo Ferrari once drove. Later, when he was a race-manager, Nuvolari drove for him. He could not be indifferent to ability on Moss' soaring level. Nor could Moss withhold respect at least from a man the product of whose hands came so near perfection. The climate around them began almost imperceptibly to better, and in April of this year, just before the Goodwood crash, Moss flew to Italy to see Ferrari. Ferrari sent a coupe to Turin for him to drive the 100 miles to the factory at Modena. Although he has been known to keep waiting for two hours a customer anxious to buy $50,000 worth of cars, Ferrari came to greet Moss immediately. He showed him through the Ferrari factory, one of the industrial wonders of Italy and considerably harder to enter than the Vatican. He showed him this year's cars and he showed him, incredibly, the drawings for next year's models. He gave him lunch and told him that he was as great a driver as Nuvolari had been, and greater than Fangio. He asked Moss to come to Italy and drive Ferrari cars. People who had long known Enzo Ferrari could not believe their ears when they were told of the conversation. "I need you," this harsh, imperious, gifted man said to Moss. "Tell me what kind of car you want, and I will make it for you in six months. Put it on paper. If you drive for me, you will tell me on Monday what you did not like about the car on Sunday and by Friday it will have been changed to your taste ... If you drive for me, I will have no team, just you and a reserve driver. With Moss, I would need no team ..."

They were together, with George de Carvalho of Time magazine, for four hours.

"It must have shaken you," I said to Moss a few days later.

"It did indeed," he said. "It was fantastic. Because Ferrari could make a new Stirling Moss (continued) car in six months, you know. A British company might take two years, but he really could do it; and he could, and I think he would, change anything you wanted changed from Monday to Friday, as Mercedes-Benz would ... but, I don't know, I think it might be anticlimactic, winning the world championship on an Italian car after all these years ..."

"He'd be world champion tomorrow if he'd sign with Ferrari," Moss' manager, Ken Gregory, said. "But he won't."

"I admit I like being the underdog, coming from behind, doing things the hard way," Moss said.

I think he may go to Ferrari, if and when he goes back to racing. And if he does I think it will be the ruggedness of the Ferrari that will draw him. No matter how resilient a man may be, no matter what reserves of spirit he has to draw on, it's hard to go to the rim of death and stay there in suffering for six weeks because a silly piece of steel broke in two.

But, arguing against joining a factory team has always been the necessity for Moss' conceding that someone else would be chief. Moss likes to run his own show. He drives Formula I, Grand Prix cars for Rob Walker, who is his friend. He drives sports cars for British Racing Partnership, which is himself, his father and his manager. And he free-lances. As the biggest drawing-card name in the business -- motor races in Europe often pull 250,000 spectators -- his starting-money fee is as high as $3000, paid for appearing and moving the car off the starting line, even if it dies 100 yards down the course.

Moss is as much a tycoon in his way as Ferrari. To an extent undreamed of by drivers before him, he has made racing a full-time business. His income from accessories and endorsements alone is important. One reason for the ferocity of his efforts to cure himself when he has been hurt is that he wants to get back to the mainstream of his life; but another is that when he is not in the car the major source of his income stops. He is not profligate and he is not penurious, but he likes money and he likes to live well. He dresses carefully. Five feet eight, he has the slim waist and wide shoulders that tailors like and last year he was listed one of the 10 best-dressed men in Great Britain. The last time I lunched with him he was wearing a jacket made without side pockets, so that he wouldn't be tempted to carry anything that would spoil the line. His choice of food is pedestrian, but his taste in restaurants is not. His house in London will be a showplace, and he is planning a beach house in Nassau, where he has a home. He moves among interesting people. When King Hussein of Jordan visited Prime Minister MacMillan and was asked whom he would like to have as a guest for dinner at 10 Downing Street he asked for Moss. Il Commendatore Ferrari cannot confer status on Stirling Moss, but he has other gifts to offer, and I think Moss may wish to think about them, once his curiosity about his Goodwood crash has been satisfied.

He is very deeply curious, and more than curious: if he believed that he crashed through his own error he would consider racing again irresponsible and he would retire. I suggested to him that when he is well enough to stand the shock he have himself put under hypnosis and let himself taken through the accident. Of course, he may not have been able to determine, in his second and a half, what was putting the car off the circuit into the bank, but if he did know, then the information is there, buried in his subconscious under the protective amnesia, and he could recall it in hypnosis, in the view of a pioneer in this form of therapy, a world authority whom I consulted. If Moss' memory does not return in the ordinary way -- and it almost certainly will not -- he is going to do this. He has had an interest in hypnosis for years, as in so many other things. If the process is successful I believe Moss will recall that the symptoms preceding the accident were those of a stuck throttle. If so, he'll be glad that he can still say that he's never had an accident that wasn't caused by someone else or by something's breaking on the car, but he'll be depressed, too, that he wasn't able, in that second and a half, to do more about it. He has done more, other times and other places.

For example, in 1957 he started the Mille Miglia, the Thousand Miles openroad race in Italy, abandoned now. The last running was in 1957, the year Portago was killed. Moss started in a big Maserati, the last car to leave the line at Brescia for the run to Rome and back. With him was Denis Jenkinson, his navigator in the 1955 Mille Miglia, which they won at the all-time record average speed of 97.9 mph. They had barely started, they were only a few miles out, when they had what Moss calls not an accident but an incident: the brakepedal shaft broke in half. He told me about it in a letter a few days later:

"... I was approaching the corner at approximately 130 mph in fifth gear. I estimated that the corner could be taken at about 90, therefore it was a fairly sharpish curve, to the left. I lifted my foot off the accelerator and put it on the brake, and, on increasing pressure on the pedal it suddenly shot forward and broke off. More or less at the same time I was dropping the car down into fourth gear." (Usually, in this situation, the driver applies the brake with his toe and works the accelerator with his heel.) "I pulled the hand brake on, which was useless; pushed the car into third gear, immediately followed by second. I remember the car fishtailing a little. At the same time as all this I attempted to put the car into a bit of a broadside to lose a little speed. I managed to get the car around the corner and then dropped it into first gear. Finally Denis Jenkinson and I had to jump out and stop it manually! When I tell you there were absolutely no brakes at all it is no exaggeration ..."

That is how Moss considers an emergency should be managed. He had pulled the car down from 130 miles an hour to 2 or 3 mph, in a brutally short distance, without enough braking power to stop a child's tricycle, in a corner, on a narrow road lined on both sides with people standing shoulder to shoulder, and he hadn't so much as brushed one of them. On a closed-course circuit, with room in which to maneuver, he would probably have kicked the pedal to one side and gone on without brakes.

He and Jenkinson turned the car around by hand, so as not to let it roll into the ditch, and roared back to Brescia. Moss came out of the car in a rage, waving the broken brake pedal over his head. There was talk of sabotage, but it wasn't true. The pedal shaft had been made of a flawed piece of metal.

Moss was the more annoyed because he would like to have topped his running of the 1955 Mille Miglia for Mercedes-Benz, a classic performance, one of the greatest motor-races ever run. Not only that, it was probably the best-reported motoring performance of all time, because Denis Jenkinson, Moss' codriver, is uniquely equipped as a journalist. An ex-motorcycle sidecar champion of the world, he is completely tranquil at any speed; he is a profound student of the behavior of the automobile at high speeds, knows exactly what is happening at all times, and is an excellent writer.

Moss had asked Jenkinson if he would try the race, because he believed that with someone of Jenkinson's ability and temperament it might be just possible for a non-Italian to win the race. As a rule the Mille Miglia was held to be an Italian monopoly, because no one not an Italian could hope to learn the road. (Moss was the first Englishman to win it, and the second non-Italian. Caracciola won it in 1931 for Germany.) In really high-speed driving it's no use to come around a corner and look to see if the road goes straight, or right, or left. If you don't know which way the road goes (continued on page 154) Stirling Moss(continued from page 78) before you see it, you will be absurdly slow or you will crash. It is sometimes necessary to go through a right-hand bend with the car pointing to the left. An Italian like Piero Taruffi, who won in 1957, having driven Brescia--Rome--Brescia scores of times in his 54 years, knew which way the road went. (He was also a famous mountain driver.) Moss realized that neither he nor Jenkinson nor any other Englishman could memorize 1000 miles of Italian road -- but he thought it might be possible to plot or map 1000 miles of road, if he could find a man cold enough to sit beside him, read the map, and tell him which way the road went after every curve.

Moss and Jenkinson ran the course in practice again and again, smashed two cars (one of them against an Italian army truck full of live bombs), and put it all down on a strip of paper 17 feet long, rolled into a plastic tube. They then made up a set of hand signals, since the car was an open one and conversation would be out of the question. A signal might mean "right-hand bend, flat out in fourth gear, straight afterward." Finally, Moss developed so much confidence in Jenkinson that he could unhesitatingly accept Jenkinson's signal that the road went straight after a blind brow ahead; he could hold his foot flat on the floor, go over the crest at 170 miles an hour, let the car fly through the air for 50 yards, and press on. They went into cities at 125--150 mph. It was what Jenkinson termed "nine-tenths and ten-tenths motoring" -- absolutely flat out, nothing left. He told of their 300SLR Mercedes-Benz passing low-flying airplanes; of Moss, going down a steep hill in third gear, shifting up to fourth and standing on the accelerator pedal. "It took a brave man ..." he wrote later. Jenkinson was burned by the hot gearbox; the sideways g forces in the turns made him vomit; he lost his glasses overboard in the slipstream, but in 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds of driving he made not one mistake and missed giving only one signal, when a full tank sloshed a pint of gasoline down his neck. Afterward he found it extremely difficult to express his admiration for Moss' mastery of one of the fastest cars in the world over 1000 miles of ordinary Italian roadway. As for Moss, he said, "I might have finished the race without Denis Jenkinson, although I doubt it, but I couldn't possibly have won without him."

Moss went to the festive victory dinner in Brescia. Then, noticing that he wasn't really tired, although he'd driven 1000 miles since morning, he got into his own car and drove to Stuttgart, Germany, and on from there to Cologne, where he took a plane to England.

In Germany, in 1961, he had another legendary triumph: he won the German Grand Prix on the Nürburgring in a car that was demonstrably 20 miles an hour slower than the favored Ferraris. The Nürburgring, in the Black Mountains, is one of the most frightening and difficult of circuits, 14.2 miles to the lap, with up- and down-hill grades as high as 1 in 5, and 174 bends and corners. It is a "driver's circuit," which is to say that the driver is more important than the car; skill counts on the Nürburgring, and the courage to put your foot flat on the floor can never be decisive, although you can't win without it. A virtuoso can do wonders on the Nürburgring. In 1935 Tazio Nuvolari beat the combined Mercedes-Benz and Auto-Union teams of Germany, held to be absolutely unconquerable except by each other, and he beat them in an aging Alfa-Romeo that was 20 miles an hour slower than they were. Moss' 1961 run on the Nürburgring, in an aging, outmoded, privately owned Lotus running against Phil Hill, champion of the world, leading the factory Ferraris, was the first to be seriously compared with Nuvolari's victory of 26 years before. Moss beat the Ferrari team by 21 seconds, which is a long time as Grand Prix racing goes today.

The car he used was the same Lotus with which he had won the 1961 Grand Prix of Monaco earlier in the season, another race held to be an imperishable example of his skill, a classic. Again, he did it on a driver's course: the Monaco G.P. is run through the streets of Monte Carlo. The knife-edge corners of marble buildings, glass shop fronts, trees, the deep water of the harbor wait for the driver who makes one small mistake. This year, the trees killed one driver and flying debris from another crash killed a track official. Only virtuosi can do 100 really fast laps through the streets of Monte Carlo. "To go flat out through a bend that is surrounded everywhere by level lawn is one thing," Moss has said, "but to go flat out through a bend that has a stone wall on one side and a precipice on the other -- that's an achievement!

"Last year at Monte Carlo," Moss told me, speaking in what was for him an oddly slow and sober fashion, "I was absolutely flat out at my own rating. That is very unusual. One doesn't very often run a race flat out -- ten-tenths. Nine-tenths, yes. But at Monte Carlo every corner, every lap as far as I remember I was trying to drive the fastest I possibly could, to within a hairs-breadth of the limit. Driving like that is tremendously tiring, just tremendously tiring, most people have no idea what it does to one." (On a hot day cockpit temperatures may reach 150° F; a man may lose 5--8 pounds; on some confined circuits, Monaco is one, crash-causing carbon monoxide poisoning from the car just ahead is a real danger.)

Three quarters of the way through the 1961 Monte Carlo race, Phil Hill, lying second, signaled the Ferrari No. 2 man, Richie Ginther, running behind him, to take up the attack on Moss. Ginther, a tiger, drove the race of his life and Moss beat him by three seconds and a bit. The Monte Carlo crowd, sophisticated in motor-racing, was hysterical; the knowledgeable people in the pits, knowing Moss was doing something that really could not be done, were transfixed. Rob Walker, who owned the car Moss was driving, and who used to drive as an amateur, said, "The last few laps I stopped watching; I couldn't look anymore, I couldn't stand it."

This year, 1962, Moss didn't run at Monte Carlo. He watched the race on television in his room in Atkinson Morley's hospital. There were the last few laps to run, and Phil Hill, champion of the world, was increasing his lap speeds fantastically in an attempt to catch Bruce McLaren, winning, when the BBC shut the program off in order to accommodate a serial. Moss was furious, but his primary concern, characteristically, was to get a radio going in time to hear the end of the broadcast. He has a curiously equable temperament for one so volatile. Race-driving sometimes makes short tempers. I have seen wrenches thrown, and the French driver Jean Behra, killed at Avus in 1959, once Punched a Ferrari team manager, but Moss has never gone past the gesture of fist-waving, which is merely a convention, at a driver who balks his passing. A good boxer and beginning judo player (green belt), he hasn't had a fight since he was a boy in school. He is never rude and rarely cuttingly sarcastic, but he will occasionally defend himself with a short answer.

Bone-deep toughness and a curious tendency to return to dead-center egotism have marked every man and woman I've ever known who had accomplished much, or who had come anywhere near the aura of greatness, whether statesman, artist, writer, film producer or whatever. Moss is of this pattern, as he must be, and differs from the norm only in demonstrating less overt ego and more humility than any other great accomplisher I've known. I remember saying to a bullfighter, years ago, before I knew better, "You are the most completely egotistical bastard I've ever met." He said, "You don't understand. When I go in there, if I don't really and truly believe I am the best in the world, I had better not go in at all." That is part of it, that and the obsession. Everyone who accomplishes greatly is obsessed with one purpose, nearly blind to all else; he can only with difficulty tear his mind away from the one thing that is important to him to consider lesser matters -- and everything except his central purpose in life is a lesser matter. In the light of the obsession I know he has to live with, I am inclined to marvel at Moss' gaiety every time I see him. I know very well he forces it, but still, it's there.

I amuse myself, when I have an appointment with him, by being punctual. He is unfailingly punctual, and he is the only person I know who really appreciates punctuality. Just before Easter I had an appointment with him for four o'clock one afternoon. I have an accurate watch, and I opened the door of his office within five seconds, plus or minus, of the hour. He looked at his own watch. "God, that's wonderful!" he said. "You're spot-on time!" He was as pleased as if I'd brought him a present. He was ready to go, but an emergency had come up, he had to make one phone call. He had to hire a carpenter, the crew working on his new house was a man short. The house is in Shepherd Street in London's West End, a building he had gutted and redone to his own design. He has some ability as a designer. There are offices on the ground floor, living quarters on the next three: a garden, a penthouse, sunken bath with bedside controls, television set in the ceiling of the master bedroom, closed-circuit TV to the front door. He was living there in a jungle of electric conduit, wet plaster and sawdust. In a two-car garage on the ground floor next to the office there was a yellow Lotus Elite and we got into it. I asked him how he liked it.

"There's nothing like it," he said. "There is no other motorcar, this side of a race-car, that handles like an Elite. Coming back from Snetterton the other day I averaged 60 without ever going over 70, and I think that's remarkable. It's the best thing of its kind in the world."

I was pleased to hear that, because it had been my own opinion for some time. We ran out into the traffic of Park Lane. He drove fast, but not conspicuously or spectacularly so; there was nothing remarkable about his driving except the machinelike precision with which he shifted gears.

A couple of girls in a Mini-Minor ran up beside us and looked in and smiled. "Crumpet to port," I said. "I see," he said. We smiled at them. "The one driving is nice," Moss said. He let them pass and in the next block passed them. If he had stopped, they would have pulled up behind him. Moss' stunning effect on many women demonstrates no technique, but derives from his brute energy, his profound interest in what goes on around him, and his civility. He is essentially kind. Last year he saw on television a man who was paralyzed and who needed, for business, a small truck. Moss bought one, had it fitted with hand controls and delivered -- in the strictest secrecy. Nothing was known of it until the story leaked following the Goodwood accident. Also after the accident two brief letters from spectators were printed in a motoring magazine, remarking that before the race began, a time when most drivers are apt to be edgy, Moss had found time to take a man in a wheelchair on a 30-minute tour of the paddock area to show him the cars; and had taken someone else, similarly immobile, on a complete tour of the circuit in a car, pointing out the various corners so that the announcer's comments would be more graphic to him. He then found the man a good vantage point from which to watch the race, and took him to it. In talking about him women insistently remark about his force, his impact and his kindness, which they usually cite as thoughtfulness -- and those of them who know they are listed in a series of little black books, with coded reminders, are not much the less moved. Oddly, though he may complain that the day is ruined if he comes into London airport at midnight and doesn't have a date waiting, Moss is psychologically out of phase with the Don Juan role. He was perfectly faithful to his wife during his marriage and indeed for some time afterward. Fidelity to one woman would be his free choice, but it was suggested to him that it's possible to forget one woman with many. I don't know if, another time, he'd have stopped and let the two girls in the Mini-Minor stop behind him, but he has driven alongside a girl before this and made a date without much more than slowing down enough to be heard. At any rate we turned off abruptly and lost them.

We went into the little ground-floor apartment in Earl's Court Road. I unlimbered a tape recorder, plugged it in and tested it carefully. There was an electric fire in the grate. It was cold outside; a heavy, wet wind leaned on the side of the building and shook it.

Unlike some drivers, for Moss the automobile has no compelling fascination as an automobile; and he doesn't like to fiddle about with them either. He won't say so, but obviously automobiles bore him. He is like a painter asked about brushes. He's interested in what a man can do with automobiles, and what they can do for him.

"It's odd, how many commonly held ideas are all wrong," he said. "The notion that you need a lot of raw courage to race, for instance. Actually I don't think courage is any advantage at all except in certain special circumstances. It's a disadvantage. If a driver has too much courage it's difficult for him to discover his limitations until perhaps it's too late. We've both known people who had more courage than judgment and they are no longer with us.

"I would say courage comes into the equation, oh, let's say you're driving a car of a team and a wheel falls off a teammate's car and you see it at the side of the road and you have to keep going, in a sister car, identical. That takes a certain amount of courage.

"It took courage as far as I was concerned to do the record attempt with the MG on the salt flats in Utah [where he set five world records] mainly because they buttoned me into the thing and I knew it took three miles to stop it and there wasn't a hope in hell of getting out of it if it caught fire. That I didn't like. I had quite a long time to think about it, while the thing was building up to 100, 150, 200, 250 miles an hour, and the whole situation was made worse by the fact that when you've gone through the measured mile you cut the ignition and put your foot flat down on the accelerator to suck any flames through the engine and out the pipe and when you did that you got a smell of fuel, of fumes throughout the car ... you wouldn't get out because, to start with, the cockpit lid came down from the front, you knew wind pressure would hold it down even if you could undo it; there was a release inside, but if the thing went on fire you'd be all thumbs. That sort of thing takes a certain amount of courage.

"My greatest recollection of fear? There were two times, one was at Monza [in Italy in 1958] when the steering sheared on the big Maser, the wheel just came loose in my hands; I had time to think about it, but there was nothing I could do. I stood on the brakes, which were nothing, they were sports-car brakes, you couldn't even feel them. The car was doing 160 miles an hour; I thought maybe I could steer it by holding the bare steering-shaft between my feet, which was silly of course; I knew I just had to sit and wait and I knew damned well I had to be killed. I was sure we were going over the top of the banking and I didn't think the retaining wall would hold the car and of course it didn't; I ripped steel posts out of the concrete for more than 50 yards. That Maserati slid for a quarter of a mile, blowing its tires, buckling the wheels ... when it stopped, and still right side up, I was surprised to find myself alive, I can tell you that.

"The other time was when a wheel came off the Lotus at Spa [in Belgium in 1960]. I was doing about 140 when the car suddenly went into a very violent oversteer condition; first I thought I had hit oil, then I saw the wheel roll past me. I knew I was going to crash, I jumped on the brakes and tried to spin the car around. It's best to hit going backward, it distributes the shock more evenly over your body. I took about 50 miles an hour off it before I hit. I was thrown free, which I much prefer to staying in the car. I was lying on the side of the road and I couldn't see and I couldn't breathe, and that frightened me. I was in great pain around my chest and I was afraid I had broken ribs and that they would puncture my heart or my lungs, which was how Bobby Baird died. I was more afraid of that happening than I had been when I knew I was going to hit the bank at around 100 miles an hour."

The Spa incident made minor medical history. Moss had two broken legs, a broken nose, a broken ankle, three broken ribs and three broken vertebrae. But he had normal pulse and normal blood pressure! Belgian doctors told him he would be in a plaster body cast for six months. He insisted on being flown to London, where a specialist he trusted told him that he could heal easily and slowly in plaster or painfully and quickly without it. He elected the quick, hard way in St. Thomas' hospital in London. Three weeks after the accident I telephoned him from New York.

"How are you really?" I said. "I hear all kinds of things."

"I'm in good shape," he said. "I'm going bike riding tomorrow."

"You mean on a stationary bicycle?"

"No, I mean a real bike."

"You're out of your mind. What happens if you fall off?"

"I don't intend to fall off."

Punch ran a Russell Brockbank cartoon showing Moss careening across a Thames bridge in a hospital bed with an engine on it, an ambulance in mad pursuit. Five weeks after the accident he went to the Silverstone circuit to see if the crash had taken anything from him. He broke the course record. Two weeks after that he won the Swedish Grand Prix and set a new record. Eight weeks after the accident he ran in the Portuguese Grand Prix. His car stalled and officials objected to his pushing it downhill to start it. "I can't very well push it uphill," he told them, "after all, damnit, both my legs are broken.

"I remember feeling some fear in Portugal that time," he told me. "I was driving the same car I'd crashed at Spa and that circuit is tree-lined and I remember going through a really fast corner, 130 miles an hour or something like that and the idea flashing through my mind, what would happen if a wheel came off here? All one can really do is put it out of one's mind. One's just got to conquer that. It isn't courage, it's just a case of overcoming whatever it is that worries you.

"People think courage is required for things that don't need it at all. For example, people say to me how do you dare take your hand off the wheel to wave to someone in a corner, maybe they've heard me on the subject of one-hand driving on the road, which I think is so stupid. What they don't know is that once a car is presented to a corner, all things being equal, that is, avoiding oil on the track or something funny happening, that car has a sort of line of destiny, a line on which the damned thing is going to go no matter what; once a car is set up for a corner, it should hold its line. I remember doing a demonstration in a Healey, in about a 90-mph wide right-hand sweep, where I started on the left, set the car up and then told the student to watch the steering wheel, and I would go from the very left verge, clip within a couple of inches of the apex and go out to the exit to the very verge within say 3 or 4 inches, without moving the steering wheel a fraction of an inch over, say, 250 yards. Of course you do compromise with the throttle, but I think once you've got it set up you should be able to go to nine-tenths motoring anyway. It's only when you're right on the ragged edge, at ten-tenths, that you do need quite a lot of steering to keep the thing exactly in balance, but one doesn't go beyond nine-tenths all that frequently. And so, once you've got the thing set you can let go with one hand or the other, it doesn't make much difference."

(A racing car, at racing speeds, spends quite a lot of time going sideways, "drifting" with all four wheels sliding equally. This is generally held to be the fastest way through a bend, although there is some indication that modern suspension techniques are altering the picture. When the car is going fast enough, and it must be going very fast, the driver will provoke a drift by turning the steering wheel sharply and abruptly -- but always smoothly -- and by hitting the brakes hard, once. The car's adhesion to the road is broken, and it is thereafter steered with the gas pedal, more gas increasing the angle of drift, or slide, nose pointing to the inside of the bend, and less gas decreasing it. Going through a series of S-bends very fast, a driver can be extremely busy with the steering wheel, and a layman sitting beside him would be quite unable to tell what he was doing. He would be altering not so much the direction of the car in the sense of steering the front of it, as altering the whole attitude of the car relative to the road, pointing it now this way and now that way in various sliding positions, breaking and restoring adhesion of the front wheels separately, the rear wheels or all four together. Going through a long S-bend at, say, 125 miles an hour, a driver of Moss' caliber may change the whole direction the car is pointing on the road as many as six times. Maintenance of inch-by-inch control of a car doing perhaps 150 miles an hour partially forward and partially sideways is the essence of the difference between race-driving and ordinary driving. It is a difficult skill to acquire, since it can't be learned with the car going at a safe slow speed. Also the sudden appearance of a patch of oil, sand or water can fatally upset the requisite balance.)

At the Sebring circuit in Florida, top speeds can get to 150 or so, but there is one acute-angle corner that can't be taken at much over 30. The French journalist Bernard Cahier was standing beside this bend drinking a Coca-Cola when Moss came by and gestured that he wanted one, too. Cahier handed it to him next time he came around and got the empty bottle back the following lap. A couple of bystanders with stopwatches made the curious observation that Moss was no slower in the lap in which he drank the Coke than in the one before it or the one after it.

"It's those two extra arms he puts on when he gets into the car," someone said. Another time at Sebring, banging a sedan through two right-angle corners flat out, he was seen to wave to a friend and almost simultaneously crawl over the seat back to slam a loose rear door.

At a teaching session Moss was demonstrating spins to a succession of students. A photographer who knew him focused on the spot he had stopped the first time and made a dozen more pictures without moving. Moss would come screaming down the track, throw the car sideways, spin it like a top and put it almost into the tire marks it had left the time before. Said another photographer: "I've checked. The man doesn't cast a shadow."

Moss likes to teach novice drivers and does it well. He learned a great deal from Juan Manuel Fangio when they both drove for Mercedes-Benz, and apparently feels he should pass on what he can. When Innes Ireland, now an internationally ranked driver, was failing to qualify for the Grand Prix of Monaco, Moss told him, "Come around behind me. Just get on my tail and stay there." Moss shrewdly judged the maximum pace Ireland could sustain, Ireland followed his line, his attack in every corner, and qualified. Moss is not wildly popular with other drivers perhaps largely because he is so obsessively concerned with the job, but their respect for him is unlimited: "He never stops trying." "He never has an off day." "He is absolutely dedicated." "Some people can drive only Grand Prix cars well, or sports cars or something else, but Moss can drive anything that has four wheels and a place to sit." No one has ever accused him of anything remotely approaching dirty tactics, although, like all "real" professionals, he knows how much of the road is his and he wants it. If other drivers find it hard to accept the fact that he earns perhaps 10 times the average top-line driver's salary, they do not say so. There are drivers running today who can give Moss a very hard time, but there are many others who can be hanging on the ragged edge of disaster, going just as fast as a stout heart will allow, when Moss runs up from behind, immaculate in white, utterly relaxed, and blasts on by with the invariable wave of the hand in thanks for moving over, and perhaps at the same time a big smile for a friend beside the road . . ."He makes it look as if you're not trying," one said. "He makes the hard things look easy."

At Silverstone in 1960 Moss hit an oil slick at 140 miles an hour. The car went into an uncontrolled spin. It had spun six times when the crowd heard the blip of the engine as Moss dropped down one gear, and on the seventh spin, as the car came around with its nose pointing the right way, he put his foot down and screamed away, waving to acknowledge the frantic hand-clapping he could see if not hear. One had to go back to 1939, and Nuvolari steering across a pool of oil through a gaggle of wrecked cars at Donington to find a tour de force with which to compare it.

One measure of Moss' virtuosity is his preference for a wet course. Many drivers will concede a sinking sensation when they know they will have to drive in the rain; Moss is delighted. He will drive as fast in pouring rain as in sunshine, and since most others will not, he's more likely to win. He is as fast in the wet as Caracciola was, and Caracciola's eyes were so peculiarly constructed that he could drive at top speed in a pouring rain without goggles, and in fact preferred to. In addition to being physically insensitive, oculists said, Caracciola's eyes admitted abnormal amounts of light. So do Moss', obviously.

Nuvolari is said to have contributed to racing the idea of the controlled fourwheel drift; Moss brought to it a radical concept of braking. It has from the beginning been held basic to the driving of any automobile, passenger or racing, that the brakes should never be applied in a corner. Brake before the corner, accelerate coming out of it, is holy writ. Braking while actually in the corner was supposed to bring automatic disaster -- and it did often seem to. Moss upset all that. He applies brakes when the car is in the actual corner, turning, and then instantly bangs on full acceleration, so that the car is always under either heavy braking or severe acceleration, and spends no time merely coasting. The difference can amount to useful fractions of seconds, and in the frantic world of Grand Prix racing, a tenth of a second in each of 10 corners can make the difference between losing and winning, or between winning desperately or winning almost tranquilly.

Moss can make an impression of serenity and tranquillity, although he has probably never known a moment's tranquillity in his life, but sooner or later the extra nerve endings will show through, and the sandpapering on them: he was telling me how he had momentarily "lost" the car during the last New Zealand Grand Prix.

"A driver senses the loss of the vehicle before it becomes apparent to anyone else, through the steering wheel. It's a funny thing, it's practically a noise. When you lose the back end of a car you just feel it go. When you lose the front end you feel a 'growl' through the steering wheel. You hear a sort of rumble. There can't be any sound, you'd never hear any sound, you're wearing earplugs and the engine is screaming away just behind your head, but I can assure you that you nearly hear this sensation, this growling rumbling sound as the thing is losing adhesion. When you lose the whole bloody vehicle you don't get either of these sensations, I suppose the two together just cancel each other out, you just know the car is moving sideways more than it should be at that moment; say it's moving 8 feet sideways per 80 feet forward, and that may be exactly what you want, but if the rate rises to 9 feet sideways per 80 feet forward you know somewhere inside you that this is not right, and if you've worked out the equation quickly enough, you know there's not going to be enough road ... I wish I could explain that phenomenon of the noise better, I cannot."

The complexity of Grand Prix driving is so great, one marvels that so many survive it. For example, no Grand Prix car has fewer than four gears; many have five, and six will be common next year. If he is to stay in contention, a driver must keep the car under power as much of the time as he can, therefore he makes gearshifts with stunning speed, as nearly instantaneously as he can. The torque, or twisting effect on the gear shaft, is such that although he has put the gear lever into the proper slot for, say, fourth gear, coming out of third, he may get second. If he cannot correct this situation within half a second or so the car may go out of control and off the road. He may shift gears 500 times in the course of a race. He has only to miss once, he has only to lose the braking effect of one downward shift going into a corner, to kill himself. Race-cars used to be strong and substantial, a factor that was sometimes of use to a driver in a crash. The Bugatti of the 1930s had a chassis frame that was a girder seven inches deep at one point. Today's G.P. cars weigh less than 1000 pounds, and the most advanced design, one that will surely be widely copied, has no chassis or frame of any kind: it is not inaccurate to describe it as three long, very stiff gasoline tanks with an engine bolted to one end, steering gear bolted to the other end, and a reclining seat in the middle. It is conceded that damage to this car in any kind of crash is likely to be substantial -- but it's 40 or 50 pounds lighter than competing models, and that's important. Seeing 30 gallons of gasoline poured into the thing, a sober citizen might not wish even to sit in it with the engine running. Its driver will be expected to work it up to 180 miles an hour on some courses, and to run it within six inches of another car if that is necessary. If he declines, he will not be asked a second time. Many are waiting for his seat. But he won't decline. If he can get 185 out of it, he will.

E molto difficile ...

"You see people who go in over their heads too early and they're not with us anymore," Moss says. "Or you see others do it, like John Surtees, but he has so much sensitivity and ability and sheer feeling for a vehicle that he gets away with it; you have a feeling that even if he loses it he'll get the thing straight before he hits what he's going to hit and he'll hit it with the right end of the car and all that. And others you just know if they can hit in the wrong way they'll bloody well hit in the wrong way and the wrong place. You see drivers who have tremendous accidents and sometimes they're not as bad drivers as you think; and others like poor Pete Collins [killed at the Nürburgring in 1958] have a slight one and he's not with us anymore -- and Pete didn't really drive over his head.

"Someone whose judgment I respect told me that he believes that the accidents happen before the man gets into the car. In many cases I'm inclined to agree with him. Attitude of mind and mental condition and knowing when you're dropping off in effectiveness ... physical fatigue comes on slowly, slowly, it could be measured with a micrometer, you're giving energy gradually but continually, and then quite suddenly you're into your reserve, you're a fifth-second slow in reacting to something, and perhaps that's when you leave us ...

"I don't know what makes one go on. People often ask, do you think of giving up racing when someone's killed, a close friend perhaps? Yes, surely. You must think, there but for the grace of God ... but you hope, of course, that you have a little more experience or a little more ability or a little more luck or a little more something and so it's not going to happen to you. If I were killed racing I wouldn't want any driver to give up racing or even pull out of the race it happened in ... it's not going to do me any good. [Talking to Walter Cronkite of CBS, Moss said, "I never say to anybody, 'See you next week.' If they say it, I say, 'Well, I hope so.'"] I understand racing, I know it may happen, and if I knew any way to lessen the chance I would do it -- as I think I do now. I race as safely as I know how -- with the possible exception that I drive cars that are more likely to fail than others, they are less robust, and in that I'm foolish, and I know it. But other considerations enter there -- my wish to drive nonfactory cars, and British cars, and so on ...

"But there's not much point in looking into the past. I won't do it. I will not allow myself to live in the past, not the slightest bit. The only way I know what I did yesterday is to look it up in my diary. I keep a full diary, and I do it every night no matter what. And do you know, sometimes I find it difficult to remember, at night, what I've done that day, never mind yesterday. I upset my friends. I said to David Haynes, you must see this terrific film and he said, look, old boy, we saw it together last Thursday. I said to him, by God next year you must come with me to South Africa and he said, you know, we got back only a week ago ... he understands, it's just that there's so much going on today and tomorrow and next week, and I must think that way, because there are so many heartbreaks for me in racing that if I worried about yesterday ... as it is now I can lose a race, I can lose the world championship on Sunday and I can be out enjoying myself on Monday, and I mean enjoying myself. Nothing is sillier than this notion that racing drivers have a death wish. Most of them enjoy life infinitely more than the average man, and it's nothing to do with eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die, either. I've been accused of living a 29-hour day and I plead guilty, with pleasure. I live for the day. If I won the world championship on Sunday, Sunday night I'd be swinging but Monday morning I'd be back in the office.

"You could say it's an odd life and I'd agree, but it's like a story I remember your telling me in a letter a long time ago, about the man who was told the roulette game was crooked, and he said, yes, I know, but it's the only game in town.

"I think racing destroyed my marriage, but I'm not really sure, sometimes I think I don't know what did do it. I live in a suitcase and an office and at race meetings, and that's hard for a woman to accept. Secondly, I have no privacy. I've had reporters phone me at three in the morning many times, I don't know how they get the number so easily. I've been called on the radio at four A.M. in the Australian bush. I've been called at six A.M. in Bangkok, from London, to be asked one quite silly question -- and, by the way, that means going to the central post office to answer, you don't just pick up the phone in Bangkok. Then, a woman doesn't like being put on exhibition every time she goes out for a drink or to the theater. And the strain of racing is terrible for those who watch. It makes me very nervous to watch my sister Pat race, I'm far more nervous watching her race than I could ever be before a race myself. A driver's wife goes through all that, again and again ... and there is the endless press of things that must be done, nagging little details. Of course you can avoid much of that, if you'll compromise. I think that if a driver is prepared to be No. 2, is willing to be No. 2, then I think the life is easy. But if you're not prepared to be No. 2 ... then it's hard. Katie was everything to me. I was shattered when we parted. I very nearly came unstuck."

Moss met Katie Molson, an extremely wealthy Canadian girl, pretty, gentle, brown-haired, in 1953 and again in 1956. They were married in 1957 and parted in 1959. Moss thought of Katie as very much a woman, a lady, and a tomboy as well. He considered her ideal, and still does. She was in Nassau when the marriage collapsed. Moss did not return to their apartment in London; he said he could not go through the door again, and he never has. He insisted that the failure of the marriage was his fault, must be his fault. His friends told him that it was not his fault, and not Katie Moss' fault, and not any one person's fault, but a complex of events and circumstances. I don't know if he has come to believe it. He missed no races, though.

"In the end, finally," he said, "one has one's work. The major satisfaction in my life is racing, obviously, and I enjoy it even when I'm frustrated; sometimes I think maybe most when I'm frustrated, I think, God, I can't damned well win, I've lost five laps in the pit, it's impossible to win now, mathematically impossible, but then I begin to think, well, my God, even if I can't win I'm going to damned well go, and then I can enjoy really fast motoring, for the exhilaration of it and because I'm trying to prove something to myself; they may have five laps' lead on me, but I'm going to take one back, you know; and the lap record is always there to be broken, and you can say to yourself, let's really get going, let's try to drive the perfect lap, all the way around and not one mistake, not one mile an hour slow or 10 revs down, and this to me is an interesting thing. Often I turn to myself and say, well, let's try to turn one perfect lap. Invariably something, somewhere, isn't just quite right, and you say, well, that's finished, now let's try another, try again. I've never made a perfect lap, of course, although people have said I have.

"You go through a corner absolutely flat out, right on the ragged edge, but absolutely in control, on your own line to an inch, on top of everything, and the exhilaration, the thrill is tremendous; you say to yourself, all right, you bastards, top that one, match it, even, and you feel like a painter who has just put the last brushstroke on the Mona Lisa or something, after years of trying ... it's rewarding. And you must grant that it's not monotonous. No art can be monotonous, and I believe that driving, as practiced by some very few people in the world, is an art form, and is related to ballet. It is all discipline, rhythm, movement. It is like skiing, too, very much like skiing ... the same but never the same, never monotonous ...

"Monotony in life would drive me mad in no time at all. I can't bear inactivity; I get disheartened sometimes when I stop moving. If you turned to me right now and said, we've finished, you're to go home and sit down and think for a while, I wouldn't dream of doing it. I would find that very bad. I fill every moment. When you leave me here Ken Gregory and some people are coming for a meeting. After that I'm going out to dinner. Then I'm going dancing. [An earnest exponent of the Twist, Moss has been known to dance from early evening until dawn--nonstop.] I don't know how long I'll stay out, but one thing I'm sure of, when I go to bed tonight I hope to be very tired, because I don't want to think, I don't like thinking, unless it's about a specific, solvable problem. As far as life is concerned, and what life is going to offer me, I find it terribly depressing. When I look at the future I find it terribly depressing."

He spoke so vehemently that I was surprised. "Do you really?" I said.

"Yes, terribly, because I can't see, in the ultimate, what there can be of happiness. I know that to some people achievement in business, in work, is happiness. To me it's not, it's a fulfillment, but not necessarily happiness. It's a pleasure, but pleasure isn't happiness. My idea of happiness seems Utopian to me and it may seem absurd to you; it is to be married, and have two or three children, and a house in the country if you like, and to go away for two weeks on holiday -- and, most of all, most importantly, to be able to accept that life as happiness. Do you understand? To be able to accept it, that's the whole heart of the matter. I cannot at the moment. I'm hoping that with maturity I will be able to, or that at least some form of compromise with it will be possible. I'm not unhappy. I'm in a state of suspended animation, in a transition period which is tolerable, and which keeps me from being depressed ... I dance, I run about, I do a bit of designing and this and that, it's activity, I keep my finger in the dike, it's not going to patch the bloody thing but at least it's stopping the water pouring in. I'm waiting for maturity to come to me, and I'm doing what I can to bring it. I don't know if one ever feels happiness, or if contentment is the maximum we can hope for. As I said. I'm not unhappy. If I were to be killed tomorrow I wouldn't feel that 32 of my 32 years had been unhappy ..."

We talked, and the thin brown tape silently took it down. Dusk sifted out of a wet London sky. I had told Moss I'd need three hours, and at five minutes of seven the tape ran out. He made me a drink, Scotch. He couldn't find a bottle opener for the orange squash he wanted and I fiddled the top off with my knife. We talked about some other people for a few minutes. He phoned for a taxi. I told the driver to go to Charing Cross. As I opened the cab door I looked back. Moss was standing in the middle of the little room, looking through the window. I waved to him. He waved, and moved across the room. He looked grim, and, somehow, weirdly, sheathed all in gray, or white. I was suddenly and inexplicably immersed in a crushing sadness and in pity for him.

I was in Belgium on Easter Monday and I didn't see Moss again until early June, when I went to Atkinson Morley's hospital. I stayed for a couple of hours. Judy Came did a scalding imitation of her Hollywood manicurist phoning a boyfriend. I told the old story about Beatrice Lillie, Lady Peel and the butcher's wife. Moss explained how he had gone about convincing a nurse that a urinal should be called something else. The Grundig man came, tacking shyly into the room against a gale of laughter. I left.

"Come back soon," Moss said. "I'm not going to hang about here forever."