Dueling with Stirling Moss in the St. Mary’s Trophy | Frankel’s Insight

Looking down the list of competitors against whom I’d be racing I spotted Derek Bell, Richard Attwood, Jackie Oliver, Sir John Whitmore, Henry Pescarolo, Desire Wilson, John Fitzpatrick, Hurley Haywood, Marc Surer and Arturo Merzario, not to mention Tony Dron, Barrie Williams, Rauno Aaltonen, Andy Rouse, Rupert Keegan, Tiff Needell and David Leslie. Yes, that lot. And me. Rarely has imposter syndrome run quite such a riot through my head. And of course, there was Sir Stirling Moss, who also happened to be a friend.

Stirling would be driving a Lotus Cortina, a pleasure that would have been denied him in period, while I would be in an Alfa GTA, the car that effectively ended the career of the Cortina as a front-running European saloon car. In the moments before the race, I let my mind drift into a fantasy land where the lighter weight and additional power of my Alfa offset exactly the talent behind the wheel of the Lotus, and we spent the entire race fighting for position around the swooping curves and corners of the fabulous Goodwood Motor Circuit. It would never happen of course, but there seemed to be no harm imagining.

And then we were in the collection area and I’m parked next to the Moss Cortina because we’d qualified next to each other, Stirling’s best time 0.6seconds quicker than mine. There’s a tap at the door and Lady Susie Moss leans in to say, “he’s sent me over to stick a banana up your exhaust pipe.”

But although we lined up next to each other on the grid, I got a ridiculously good start while Stirling was hemmed in and when I looked for him in the mirror, he was barely visible at the back. And I thought no more about it for a couple of laps as I kept busy trying and failing to fend off all those faster cars with their faster drivers that I’d muscled by at the beginning.

But once they’d gone and I looked up again the mirror was full of white Lotus with, framed by its windscreen, a Herbert Johnson helmet and a very familiar face beneath it. The dream had become reality.

And with it came a terrible quandary. In my idle moments, I’d always imagined myself chasing Moss, learning from his lines and techniques so it never occurred that at the moment of engagement, I might be leading him. Should I bust every gut to keep ahead, so I was satisfied that, come what may, we’d have had a proper race, or should I step aside and watch a masterclass play out in front of me?

And it was only a peculiar sense that it would be somehow disrespectful to gift my place to Moss that I decided to tough it out, pushing the little Alfa seconds a lap faster than it had gone in qualifying. But every time I looked up, he was looking right back at me. And I couldn’t maintain that pace much longer.

Had Anthony Reid’s Jaguar not been good enough to distribute its coolant all over Lavant, Moss would have been past and gone. But it did and the race was stopped with me still ahead of the now septuagenarian Boy Wonder. But at the restart it was Moss who got away faster and me left trying to cling to his fast-moving shirt-tails. Nothing was going to deny me this moment and by pushing the GTA harder than I thought it or I could go, I kept up.

What I saw will never leave me. I will be personally very happy simply to make it to my 76^th birthday, but this 76-year-old was deliberately provoking tail slides in 100mph corners, drifting the Cortina around the track as if he’d been driving it all his life; he’d never even sat in it before qualifying.

Once, I saw the back step out in the middle of the Fordwater kink – one of the most terrifying curves of any track and the place that led to his near-fatal accident a couple of hundred yards down the track in 1962. He made no attempt to recover the slide, but merely held it there, completely happy and at home in an environment most of us would associate with considerable peril.

As I started blatantly to copy those techniques I could replicate – his surprisingly tight entry into Woodcote, his generally early apexes and his inch-perfect braking points, keeping up became easier and, with the benefit of an inherently quicker car I wondered if I actually had the front to try and slide down the inside of Stirling Moss. And once again, I though it would be an insult if I didn’t. But as the laps counted down I couldn’t find a way, he was driving as his reputation promised: no quarter given but scrupulously safe and fair.

I did get past in the end, slithering by on a few extra inches of tarmac he provided at the right-hand curve leading into St. Mary’s where his Lotus 18/21 had buried itself in the bank some 45 years previously. To be honest, I thought he’d gifted the place to me (and a bit of me still does) but whatever the case, I crossed the line fractionally ahead, our fastest laps separated by 0.12seconds.

As we cruised down the back straight on our way back to the pits, he pulled alongside, grinning for Britain with a thumb hoist aloft. He was still smiling when I went up to see him in parc fermé. All he said was “that, boy, was bloody good fun.” It was more than I could ever have wanted to hear.

And that was that. Or so I thought. A week later the telephone rang. “Andrew? Stirling. You do know there was a yellow flag at that corner? You don’t think I’d have let you by that easily do you? We have unfinished business. Going to Angouleme? Damn. How about Spa? Good. We’ll take it up there.” The tone is light-hearted to a fault, but reveals the competitive fire that still burned within this extraordinary man.

Sadly, at least for wheel, we never again found ourselves sharing the same small patch of tarmac, but it hardly mattered. I’d gone to Goodwood and chased and been chased by Sir Stirling Moss. It would all be downhill from there.

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