Jeffing Marvellous

This is the first article I wrote for the 2009 Sir William Lyons award (more about this in the next blog entry). The brief was to construct an overview of a topical / legendary figure in the world of motorsport, and in my opinion there are few more topical or legendary than the man I chose to write about.

What flies around light bulbs at 100 miles per hour?

I started inflicting this joke on my playground pals long before I really knew who Stirling Moss was. When asked by these befuddled buddies to explain the punch line, I would proudly proclaim that Moss was the greatest racing driver of all time. Clearly, they would say, I had never heard of Nigel Mansell.

Moss at the 2009 Goodwood Revival

In some ways they were right. After all, Mansell’s record of thirty-one race victories in Formula One remains to this day unmatched by any other British driver. Yet, there is so much more to Moss than F1 and podium finishes that comparisons with Mansell – or any other driver for that matter – simply don’t cut it. And besides, my dad told me the joke, so there.

The first time I saw Mr Goodwood in the flesh, the occasion couldn’t have been more fitting. Leaning against a bale of hay just yards from the track, I watched as he drifted his beloved Maserati 250F through the famously fast chicane at the inaugural Goodwood Revival meeting in September 1998. To see the then 68-year-old Moss racing flat-out, on the same track that had brought him so much success but which so nearly took his life in a career-ending crash thirty-six years earlier, was truly spine-tingling.

It was also a living, roaring testament to the man’s class and strength of character. The event’s organisers had made painstaking efforts to ensure the Goodwood circuit would be every bit as demanding as in its heyday, but Moss’s effortless style made it look like he was driving a life-sized slot car.

Incredibly, Moss never won the Formula One title in an otherwise glorious career that saw him win more than two hundred races across all formulae. Indeed, it was a well-documented show of characteristic sportsmanship that ultimately cost him and his Vanwall team the World Championship in 1958.  In such a relentlessly competitive sport, Moss seemed to prefer losing with honour over winning without, a trait which goes some way to explaining the great regard in which he is still held today, culminating in a knighthood back in 2000.

The 2009 Revival meeting coincides with Sir Stirling’s eightieth birthday and will see a collection of eighty of the ninety-six cars he raced during his career, specially assembled to mark the occasion. It is sure to make for a wonderful tribute, but it leaves me wondering: will we be honouring any of our current British motor racing stars in quite the same way, fifty years from now?

With Formula One in its present state, so dominated by money and team politics that even Moss himself no longer considers it a sport, it is hard to imagine the likes of Lewis Hamilton or Jenson Button being remembered with quite so much fondness. We might find ourselves making jokes about them in the future, but it is perhaps unlikely the punch lines will have anything to do with extreme speed. Or for that matter, moths.