Sir Stirling Moss honours Max Adventure with his Patronage

20th Jun 2009

Sir Stirling Moss OBE has kindly agreed to honour the Max Adventure team with his patronage for the London to Cape Town record attempt.

Although renowned for his Formula 1 and Rallying successes, Stirling Moss was also no stranger to long-distance endurance driving records. In December 1952, driving a Humber Super Snipe, along with 3 co-drivers, he set a new record for visiting 15 countries in Europe.

The team covered 3,280 miles from Norway to Portugal in mid-winter, through blizzards and over snow and ice-covered roads, including six major mountain passes in just 89 hours 59 minutes.

As a young man, Stirling Moss was one of the first customers of the Cooper Car Company when he persuaded his father, Alfred Moss, to get him one of the new Cooper 500 cars, with which he quickly demonstrated his ability with numerous wins, at national and international level.

He was a pioneer in the British Formula One racing scene and placed second in the Drivers' Championship four times in a row from 1955 to 1958 and finished second in the 1952 Monte Carlo Rally driving a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 with co-driver John Cooper. Having won the Monaco Grand Prix and finished second in the Monte Carlo Rally, he is the most successful driver to have competed in both events.

His first Formula One win was in 1955 at his home race, the British Grand Prix at Aintree, driving the superb Mercedes-Benz W196 Monoposto for a convincing German 1-2-3-4 win, with Karl Kling and Piero Taruffi in the international driver line-up. It was the only race where he finished in front of Juan Manuel Fangio, his teammate, friend, mentor and arch rival at Mercedes.

One of his most famous drives was in the 1955 Mille Miglia, the Italian 1597 km open-road endurance race, which he won in the record time of 10 hours, 7 minutes, and 48 seconds, finishing almost half an hour ahead of teammate Fangio in second place. His navigator in the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR #722 was journalist Denis Jenkinson. As navigator, he supported Stirling with notes about details of the long road trip, then an innovative technique. This assistance helped Moss compete against drivers who had a lot of local knowledge of the route.

In 1957 he won on the longest circuit to ever hold a Grand Prix, the daunting 25 kilometre Pescara Circuit, again demonstrating his skills at high speed, long distance driving. He beat Fangio, who started on pole, by a little over 3 minutes over the course of a gruelling 3 hour race.

Stirling believed the manner in which the battle was fought was as important as the outcome. This sporting attitude cost him the 1958 Formula 1 World Championship. When rival Mike Hawthorn was threatened with a penalty in the Boavista Urban Circuit in Porto, Portugal, Stirling defended Hawthorn's actions. Hawthorn was accused of reversing in the track after spinning his car. Hawthorn went on to beat him by one point, even though he had only won one race that year to Stirling's four, making Hawthorn Britain's first World Champion.

Stirling was as gifted at the wheel of a sports car as he was in a Grand Prix car. For three consecutive years (1958–1960) he won the grueling 1000 km race at Germany's Nürburgring, the first two years in an Aston Martin (where he won almost single-handedly) and the third in the memorable "birdcage" Maserati.

For the 1961 F1 season, which was run under 1.5-litre rules, Enzo Ferrari rolled out his state-of-the-art Ferrari 156, also known as Sharknose. Stirling was stuck with an underpowered Coventry-Climax-powered Lotus, but managed to win the 1961 Monaco Grand Prix by 3.6 seconds, and later also the partially wet 1961 German Grand Prix.

In 1962, Stirling was badly injured in a crash at Goodwood while driving a Lotus in the Glover Trophy. The accident put him in a coma and partially paralyzed the left side of his body. He recovered but decided to retire from racing. He made a brief comeback in the British Touring Car Championship in 1980 with Audi, and in recent years has continued to race in historic cars.

During his career, Stirling drove a private Jaguar, and raced for Maserati, Vanwall, Cooper, and Lotus, as well as Mercedes-Benz. He preferred to race British cars stating "Better to lose honorably in a British car than win in a foreign one".The British cars were often uncompetitive and this was considered the reason he never won the drivers' championship. At Vanwall, he was instrumental in breaking the German/Italian stranglehold on F1 racing. Stirling remained the most successful English driver in terms of wins until 1991 when Nigel Mansell overtook him, after competing in many more races.