British Formula 1 driver Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss, OBE (17 September 1929 – 12 April 2020), died aged 90 after a long illness. Despite never winning a world championship, Moss was runner-up in the Formula 1 championship four times from 1955 to 1958 and was acknowledged by his peers to be the consummate “gentleman racer.”
However, Moss won 16 Formula 1 races, with a winning record of 212 of the 529 races in which he competed from 1948 to 1962. His record of holding the most Formula 1 victories as British driver stood until 1991 when it was taken by Nigel Mansell.
He celebrated his first international victory aged 21 at the 1950 RAC Tourist Trophy in Dunrod, Northern Ireland, driving a Jaguar XK150. After winning the RAC Trophy six more times driving a Jaguar C-Type, Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, Aston Martin DBR1 twice and the Ferrari 250 GT twice, he was offered a Formula 2 seat at the 1951 Bari Grand Prix by Enzo Ferrari.
In 1955, he moved to Mercedes-Benz after being approached by its racing director Alfred Neubauer, initially competing in the 1954 race season in a Maserati 250F at Neubauer’s suggestion. Despite being in an uncompetitive car, Moss consistently placed near the front with the Mercedes throughout the race calendar.
Perhaps his shining moment as a sportsman and racer came when he defended rival Mike Hawthorn from being given a penalty for driving in reverse on the track during the course of the Portuguese Grand Prix in 1958. Hawthorn then won the championship, beating Moss by one point despite having only won one race the whole season to Moss’ four.
Moss announced his retirement from Formula 1 in 1962, after crashing his Lotus and being in a coma for month with the left side of his body paralysed for six months. Testing the next year in a Lotus 19, Moss felt he had “not regained his previously instinctive command of the car.”
He continued racing, making one-off appearances and returning to full-time racing in 1980, driving a works supported Audi for GTi Racing in the British Saloon Car Championship. A chest infection caused Moss to be admitted into a Singapore hospital for 134 days in 2016, followed by an announcement he would be retiring from public life in 2018.
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Not due to COVID-19 right? RIP a true racer.
As far as we can determine, Sir Stirling passed away from natural causes. He had been in poor health since a fall in 2010 and hospitalisation for respiratory infection in Singapore in 2016. Sir Stirling retired from public view in 2018 but had been active in attending races and meeting Formula 1 fans previously for a long time.
If only Stirling Moss had run F1 instead of Bernie….