Stirling Moss And The Two Wins That Made Him A Legend Part 2

1955 Mille Miglia

Death is not an option for 26-year-old Stirling Moss – long before the British monarchy thought it fitting to put a ‘Sir’ in front of his name.

It is not an option for 35-year-old Denis Jenkinson either. The year is 1955 and the setting is Italy.

Arguably the brightest racing talent in the pre-Jim Clark era of grand prix racing and probably hands down the best in sportscar racing – regardless of the presence of Juan Manuel Fangio – Stirling Moss considers death to be a mere inconvenience if one is not up to the job of driving on public roads at speeds exceeding 280kmph.

Moss and the ‘embedded’ journalist Jenkinson were both vehemently opposed to the introduction of safety measures in motorsport.

To them, it didn’t matter that racing cars at the time had no seatbelts and it was considered safer to be thrown clear of a car in the event of an accident.

You know the saying right? If you can’t handle the heat, then stay out of the kitchen. You find this philosophy prevalent among the participants of the Isle of Mann TT to this day.

Moss and Jenkinson both reiterated this philosophy with a vengeance in the mid-1960s when Jackie Stewart set about trying to make racing drivers not only race and live to tell the tale, but also get compensated well for undertaking such a dangerous profession.

As far as they were concerned, motorsport, in the way that it was run in those days was no place for amateurs or playboys with nothing better to do than to burn through the money they inherited.

It was, in fact, the death of such a playboy that led to the end of the Mille Miglia after its 1957 edition. The said playboy went by the name Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, 11^th Marquess of Portago.

Thankfully no one was required to address him by that tongue twister of a name, and he was commonly referred to as Alfonso de Portago.

It’s not as if Portago couldn’t drive a racing car. He most certainly could, and really fast, aside from generally being athletic and daring enough to try his hand at a lot of other things to get his adrenaline going.

But the Mille Miglia - as Moss and Jenkinson knew all too well as they went about writing a road book as detailed as possible – always gave drivers many chances to make a fatal mistake, should they be lucky enough to survive the first one.

For a driver of Stirling Moss’ caliber, something would have had to go seriously wrong for him to suffer a crash bad enough to end his life.

In the case of the crash that ended his racing career in 1962 at Goodwood, he was attempting to pass Graham Hill on the outside. After his car hit a low bank that was constructed to protect spectators, he was trapped in the wreckage for almost half an hour before rescuers got him out.

He only ever tested race cars after that, even though he was just 32 years old.

Heading back to when he was 26 and he was tearing through Italian traffic intersections at around 250kmph, there was no other car to pass or fight against on track, unless he caught up to a straggler or someone with mechanical issues as the cars were let loose in two minute intervals.

Here the only person who can make a fatal mistake is the driver and the rival was the timekeepers’ stopwatches. And Moss was not that kind of driver.

Moss and Jenkinson’s winning average speed of 157.650kmph - over 1,597km of a course comprising of Italian public roads – is a record that stands to this day. It is testament to the fact that the Brit was not one to tolerate mistakes – from himself or others. Fifty-five years ago in Italy, tearing through the streets from Rome to Brescia and back to Rome…death was not an option.