Fangio and Moss Rival, team-mate, pupil and friend

A young man in an HWM

At Bari on 9 July 1950 Fangio finished second behind Nino Farina, and third, 2 laps down, came a small British car, an HWM, with a driver of 20. The ghost-written memoir of 1961, a book Fangio later disowned, remembers him: “I immediately sensed the makings of a great driver in that young man” (attributed).

They had met once already on the track, at Reims in 1949, in the Formula 2 race that To Europe tells; Moss’s own memory of their first meeting is told in 1950.¹

For four years they were rarely rivals on equal terms. At Bremgarten in May 1951, the first championship race both started, Fangio won and Moss was eighth in the HWM. In June 1952, at Dundrod, BRM gave them one car to share in practice, days before the crash at Monza that 1952 tells. Through 1953 Moss drove Connaughts and Coopers against Fangio’s Maserati. For 1954 his father, Alfred, and his manager, Ken Gregory, bought him a Maserati 250F of his own, and at Monza that September he led the Italian Grand Prix. Motor Sport wrote that “…the young Maserati driver was now in the lead, with the two greatest drivers of this present age pressing him hard”. Then an oil pipe failed; he pushed the car to the line and was classified tenth. Fangio, who won, is said to have called him the moral victor.

Number two

For 1955 Moss joined Mercedes-⁠Benz, to drive the W196 beside the World Champion. He told Picture Post why:

He’s the greatest driver in the world. So far ahead that I don’t know who to put up beside him for comparison.

In 2007 he still said that Fangio had been his main reason for going. He took the second car without its being written into any contract, and he would have done it for no one else: “I would have done anything for Fangio.” Only once, he remembered, was he given anything like a team order, at the Nürburgring, probably in the Eifelrennen for sports cars that May: “It was the only time in my career with Mercedes that I came under team orders … Alfred Neubauer said it would be nice if Fangio won and I got the message!” (attributed)

In the Grands Prix they ran so close together that the press called them the train, and at Le Mans Alfred Neubauer put them in the same 300 SLR so that they would not race each other. In the sports cars it was often the other way round. Moss won the Mille Miglia, the Tourist Trophy and the Targa Florio with Fangio second each time; Fangio won the Eifelrennen and the Swedish Grand Prix at Kristianstad with Moss second. Moss said he could beat Fangio in sports cars, and that for some reason Fangio did not like them.

Moss spent the season watching from a few feet behind, and never quite worked out what he saw: “If I knew how he did what he did, I would have then done it myself!” What he could see was balance, a feel for the car that let Fangio go nearer the edge than anyone else. It was not engineering, Moss insisted: “In the briefings he always used to say, ‘I’ll go with Stirling’s set-up’.” Karl Kling, their team-mate, agreed: “Moss was very fast, and much better at setting up the car than Fangio, who tended just to drive it as it was.”

Aintree, 16 July 1955

The British Grand Prix of 1955 was Moss’s home race, run at Aintree, outside Liverpool. He took pole, the four Mercedes-⁠Benz finished first to fourth, and he won by 0.2 seconds, his first World Championship win; the race, and the arithmetic that made Fangio champion that afternoon, are told in 1955. At Aintree Fangio slid on to the grass at Melling Crossing. He blamed Michael Tee, the photographer from Motor Sport, whom he had been using as a braking marker until Tee moved away to change his film.

Nigel Roebuck was 10, and he was in the stands. On the last lap, as he remembered it, the leading Mercedes-⁠Benz slowed almost to a crawl and let Fangio’s car close up; then, out of Tatts, the last corner, both drivers put their feet down and crossed the line half a length apart. Moss told Roebuck what he had been doing:

I backed off on the last lap, because I wasn’t sure of what we were supposed to do — but when the Old Man was still behind me at the final corner, I can tell you I gave it everything on the run up to the line!

A spectator in the stand at the last bend wrote in 2003 that he had seen Fangio lift off quite deliberately just as he was about to pass. Moss, on another occasion, said that he had waved Fangio by on the run to the line, knowing that he could not do it. The prize, Moss remembered, was £500, for the whole team.

Did Fangio let him win? Denis Jenkinson’s report at the time leaned that way: it had Fangio letting Moss by on the third lap, and Moss thanking him at the prize-giving for allowing him to win. Neubauer’s memoir, published in English in 1960 with a foreword by Moss, gives the race 13 words and does not say. Fangio’s own answer, in 1979:

I don’t think I could have won, even if I’d wanted to. Moss was really pushing that day and his car had a higher final drive than mine. It was quicker.

Moss never knew. In 1998 he wrote, “I’ve never really known whether he let me take that home win.” In 2003 he put it another way: “But he wasn’t the kind of guy who would ever have let me know it … He had too much class for that.”

Opponents again

Mercedes-⁠Benz left racing at the end of 1955, and for three more seasons the two of them were on opposite sides. In 1956, Fangio at Ferrari and Moss in a works Maserati, Moss won at Monaco and at Monza, and both times Fangio was second in Peter Collins’s car; the title went to Fangio by 3 points. In 1957 Moss drove for Maserati once, in Argentina, where they also shared a Maserati 450S in the Buenos Aires 1000 km, and then went to Vanwall. By the summer the British car was the faster one, and he won at Aintree, sharing the win with Tony Brooks, at Pescara and at Monza.

From Pescara onwards Moss finished ahead of Fangio in every race they both started: Pescara and Monza in 1957, and the Argentine and French Grands Prix in 1958, the first in Rob Walker’s little Cooper, the second, Fangio’s last race, at Reims. In between, in February 1958, both went to Havana for the Cuban Grand Prix, and on the eve of the race Fangio was kidnapped from his hotel. What he said to his captors about Moss is told there.

To the future World Champion

Moss was runner-up again in 1958, a point behind Mike Hawthorn, and he never won the title. The friendship outlasted the racing. In 1991 he and Doug Nye made a book of pictures of Fangio, Fangio: A Pirelli Album. In 1994, when Fangio seldom left his house in Buenos Aires, Moss flew out to see him, and in July 1995 he was one of the men who carried Fangio’s coffin in Balcarce. In 2007 he gave the verdict he had always given: “He was the greatest of them all. … He has to be number one, for me.”

Moss died in 2020, at 90. In 1998 he had written about a present Fangio gave him when he stopped racing:

In all the time I knew him, we had to communicate in Italian. He spoke no English, I speak no Spanish. When he retired, he gave me a clock. It’s on my wall to this day. It has an inscription round the rim: To the future World Champion, signed JM Fangio. I’d been runner-up to him three years running, and I think he expected me to take the title when he stopped – which of course was not to be.