Today Moss is in incorrigible form, dishing it out to the Vettel haters,
decrying them as a blight on the sport. The German is, in Moss’s opinion at
least, a modern-day Juan Manuel Fangio, the Argentinian great whom Moss
rates as the finest Formula One driver to have lived.
“For a man to be that much ahead every time, every race, whatever the circuit,
whatever the conditions,” Moss says. “Vettel is just in a class of his own,
really. As was Fangio. As was [Ayrton] Senna.”
Barring a late intervention from Typhoon Fitow, which may or may not roll
through these parts some time around Sunday afternoon, Vettel looks a solid
bet to stretch his 60-point lead at the top of the Formula One drivers’
championship standings in Korea this weekend. And if he does so, Moss will
be delighted for him.
He had no issue with Vettel’s decision to disregard Red Bull’s team orders in
Malaysia this year and overtake Mark Webber to claim a controversial
victory.
“Well, he’s a racer what’s wrong with that?” Moss says. “You’re either a racer
or you’re a driver and there’s a big bloody difference. Drivers are easy to
find and racers aren’t.
“We had team orders in my day, of course we did,” Moss adds. “If the wheel
came off the No 1’s car they would call in the other car. That was accepted
and understood. It isn’t done today because the races are so short. It was a
three-hour minimum back then.”
There is a tendency among a minority of fans to disregard what Moss says as
the ramblings of a former great, now out of touch with modern cars,
engineering and social graces.
To do so would be to ignore the wealth of knowledge that Moss accrued in a
14-year driving career during which he won 212 of the 529 races he entered,
including 16 Formula One grands prix.
Moss would regularly compete in more than 50 races in a season, in a variety
of formulae, very often on the same day. The races would each last for hours
and his life was on the line in many of them.
He admits himself that he has no real feel for the the current cars, with
their sophisticated aerodynamics and mind-blowing G forces. “I tried a
Tyrrell once and it went off like a rocket,” Moss says. “But I didn’t like
it as much as driving my old cars.”
Yet despite that, Moss remains an avid fan of the sport, never missing a race.
As the son of a dentist who dabbled in a bit of inventing – Alfred E Moss
patented the WWII Morrison Shelter – he loves technology. His house, “the
last bombsite in Mayfair” which he bought for £5,000 in 1962, is filled with
racing mementos, photo albums and gadgets, from hydraulic tables that drop
down through the roof, to electric curtains.
He is looking forward to the engine changes next year, he says, and would love
to have raced when there was pit-to-car radio. “It got pretty lonely out
there when you set off for another lap of the Nordschleife,” he remarks,
drily.
For all that, however, he would not swap eras with today’s drivers, despite
earning only £25,000 a year at his height of his career. “My bank manager
might find it more exciting but I wouldn’t,” he says. “For me the danger was
the excitement. And the camaraderie.”
Moss tells a wonderful story about catching the eye of one “piece of crumpet”
during a Monaco GP and he recalls another time when he and Peter Collins had
finished a practice session at Monaco and went for a coffee at the Hotel de
Paris where they were upbraided by “an old English lady who asked us why we
couldn’t go and practise somewhere else!”
As for the circuits, one suspects that Moss would have little time for this
weekend’s offering in Korea.
“Spa and Monaco are the only two places they haven’t screwed up,” Moss says
sadly.
Silverstone? “Awful. Awful. Really if you go back to 1950 you see a pretty
good circuit but since then they’ve been ripping it to bits.”
He smiles. “But then I believe that racing should be dangerous and not
everyone agrees with that.”
- Stirling Moss supports the Samsung Smart Motorsport team samsung.com/uk/smartmotorsport/