Stirling Moss – fading, fast

The legendary Sir Stirling Moss

The word ‘legend’ tends to get somewhat over-used. In the world of motorsport, it’s usually reserved for drivers who have won multiple titles.

Despite never managing to win the Formula 1 World Championship, Sir Stirling Moss is a man eminently worthy of legend status. Even in coming close to the title in ’58, he lost out simply because he vouched for a fellow Brit accused of breaking the rules, even though it lost him the coveted ultimate reward.

So, not only a legend, but a gentleman. At 88 years of age, Moss has had a remarkable life in motorsport – across a variety of categories, he won 212 of the 529 events he entered, and survived accidents that regularly cost his contemporaries their lives.

His career ending shunt in ’62 left him in a coma and partially paralysed, but he recovered after six months. Even a fall down the lift-shaft of his home in his later years didn’t stop him.

Well over 50 years since he retired from top-level motorsport, he’s still viewed as one of the greatest drivers of all time – a man who should have won cabinets full of trophies, but battled luck as often as the other drivers.

After more than four months in hospital following a chest infection, he’s now retiring from public life too, to spend more time with his wife and family as his slow recovery continues.

Sir Stirling survived an era when ‘safety’ was barely considered, and is still spoken about warmly all this time later. We might not be hearing from the man any more as he fades from public view, but the legend will live on.

This post first appeared as the third piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 26th of January 2018. It was re-titled in print as "Stirling Moss legend lives on", removing the (deliberate) ambiguity of my original title.

I do worry that this is a prelude to sad news. Let's hope not.

Comments

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog