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A Mercedes teammate of five-time Argentine world champion Juan Manuel Fangio, the Briton won 16 grand prizes in the 1950s and early 1960s, when the sport was at its most deadly and boldest point.
Four times championship runner-up, and also third overall three times, no other driver has won as many races without taking the title.
Stirling Moss: talented pilot and British sports icon
Widely regarded as the best driver to ever win the Formula One World Drivers’ Championship, the British Stirling Moss, who died on Sunday at the age of 90, was synonymous with the dangers and dramas of all forms of motorsports in the 1950s and early sixties.
Moss was also the first Briton to win his grand prize at home, beating Fangio at Aintree in 1955, and became synonymous with speed.
Motorists arrested for showing too much haste could expect police to ask, “Who do you think you are? Stirling Moss?”
Moss once revealed that a police officer had also asked him the same question “but I couldn’t find out if he was kidding.”
But for his sense of sportsmanship, Moss could have been Britain’s first world champion in 1958 instead of Mike Hawthorn.
He lost the title by a single point that year after asking the butlers to reinstate his disqualified compatriot at the Portuguese Grand Prix.
“I felt it was pretty bad and I went and gave evidence on behalf of Mike and said he shouldn’t be disqualified,” Moss, who won four races that year for the Hawthorn one, told Reuters in an interview at his home in 2009.
“Obviously they gave him back his points and that took the title away from me.”
Moss was never so close again but he did not regret it.
“I am in the exclusive position of people who say I should have won it and never did,” he said when he turned 80. “The most important thing for me is the respect of the other drivers.”
The Briton ended his professional career after an accident at Goodwood in 1962 that knocked him unconscious for a month and was paralyzed for six.
He kept two folded and buttoned flyers hanging on the wall of his central London home as keepsakes of great ‘jokes’, one labeled ‘Spa 1960’ and the other ‘Goodwood 1962’.
“I think in hindsight I retired too early. I would love to have continued and had every intention of competing until I was 50,” he said in the 2009 interview.
“I was very fit, at the height of my game and that meant I had to work to live. That was a little shocking.”
MEMORABLE CAREERS
Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss knight in 2000 for motorsports services, the London-born dentist’s son retired from all forms of motorsports only in 2011 when he was 81 years old.
He was due to compete with his own restored 1961 Porsche RS61 in a Legends race at Le Mans in June of that year and had also raced his 1,500cc Osca at historic events.
The 1961 Monaco Grand Prix was, in his opinion, the largest in Formula One, but the 1955 Mille Miglia, a sports car race on Italian public roads, was just as memorable.
He covered the last stage, about 83 miles from Cremona to Brescia, at an average speed of 165.1 miles per hour from a permanent start.
At his peak, Moss participated in as many as 54 races a year worldwide, compared to 21 on the 2018 Formula One calendar, in addition to testing.
“All I had to do was get there, practice the car, run the car and then I could go. Go and chase girls or whatever I wanted to do … it was a fabulous life,” he said.
Moss became ill in Singapore in late 2016 and spent 134 days in the hospital battling a chest infection.
He also survived a three-story fall through an elevator shaft at his London home in March 2010, breaking his ankles and four foot bones.
In January 2018, he retired from public life entirely to rest and spend more time with his family.
