Stirling Moss

Moss was born in London to Alfred and Aileen Moss. His father was an amateur racing driver who had competed in the 1924 Indianapolis 500, and his mother had participated in hillclimb events. His younger sister Pat Moss became a successful rally driver. At age nine, Moss received an Austin 7 from his father and raced it around the fields of the family's country house.

He was a gifted horse rider and used winnings from equestrian competitions to purchase his first racing car — a Cooper 500 — in 1948, persuading his reluctant father to support the venture. Moss was educated at Haileybury, where he endured bullying due to his Jewish heritage, which he later said provided motivation to succeed.

Moss was immediately successful in the Cooper 500, winning races at national and international levels in Formula Three. His first major international victory came on the eve of his 21st birthday at the 1950 RAC Tourist Trophy in Northern Ireland, driving a Jaguar XK120 — a race he would go on to win six more times across his career in various machinery.

In 1954, he became the first non-American to win the 12 Hours of Sebring, co-driving a 1.5-litre O.S.C.A. MT4. That same year, following advice from Mercedes racing boss Alfred Neubauer, Moss acquired a Maserati 250F for the Formula One World Championship season. Despite the car's unreliability he impressed sufficiently to be signed by Mercedes for 1955.

Moss's first World Championship victory came at the 1955 British Grand Prix, leading a Mercedes one-two-three-four result and becoming the first British driver to win his home Grand Prix in a British car. That same year he won the Mille Miglia — the thousand-mile Italian road race — in a time of ten hours and seven minutes, co-driving with journalist Denis Jenkinson who prepared pace notes and communicated via hand signals over the engine noise. Motor Trend described it as "The Most Epic Drive Ever." Moss also won the Targa Florio and the RAC Tourist Trophy in 1955.

He finished runner-up in the World Drivers' Championship in 1955, 1956, 1957, and 1958. In 1958, racing for the Walker privateer team, he won four Grands Prix but lost the title to Mike Hawthorn by a single point — a margin that would have been reversed had Moss not defended Hawthorn before race stewards following the Portuguese Grand Prix, where Hawthorn risked exclusion from the results. Moss's intervention preserved Hawthorn's six points; Hawthorn eventually won the title by exactly that margin, having won only one race to Moss's four.

From 1959 to 1961 Moss raced for the Walker privateer team in Coopers and then Lotus machinery. He finished third in the championship in all three seasons. Particularly notable was his 1961 Monaco Grand Prix victory, where his underpowered Climax-engined Lotus defeated the dominant Ferraris of Richie Ginther, Wolfgang von Trips, and Phil Hill by 3.6 seconds — a tactical and driving masterclass in compensating for a power deficit.

In 1962, Moss crashed his Lotus in the non-championship Glover Trophy at Goodwood. The accident left him in a coma for a month and temporarily paralysed his left side. After recovery, he tested a Lotus at Goodwood in 1963 but found himself lapping a few tenths of a second slower than before and felt he had not regained his instinctive command. He retired from professional racing at that point.

Moss won 212 official races from 529 entries across all disciplines, driving 84 different makes of car. His 16 Formula One victories remain the record for a non-World Drivers' Champion. He was a three-time winner of the Monaco Grand Prix, a four-time winner of the British Empire Trophy, and a five-time winner of the International Gold Cup. In sports car racing, he won 12 World Sportscar Championship rounds and three consecutive 1000 km Nürburgring races from 1958 to 1960. He also broke several land speed records across different categories, including five International Class F records at Bonneville Salt Flats in 1957 in the MG EX181.

Moss became a commentator for ABC's Wide World of Sports for Formula One and NASCAR events from 1962, continuing until 1980. He was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1990 and knighted in the New Year Honours 2000 for services to motor racing. In 2006, the FIA awarded him its Gold Medal for his outstanding contribution to motorsport.

A museum in his honour was opened in his name. He received the 2005 Segrave Trophy. McLaren-Mercedes named a limited-edition version of the SLR McLaren after him in 2008. His name became a cultural touchstone in Britain during his career; for decades, the rhetorical question "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was reportedly posed by traffic police to speeding motorists.

Moss died on 12 April 2020 at his home in Mayfair, London, aged 90, following a long illness.

Stirling Moss stands as the defining example of a driver whose talent clearly exceeded his championship haul. The 1958 title — lost by one point in direct consequence of his own sportsmanship — is the most discussed missed championship in Formula One history. His versatility across Grand Prix cars, sports cars, rallying, and endurance racing in an era when drivers competed in multiple disciplines in a single season was exceptional. He preferred British cars on principle throughout much of his career, and his role in breaking the German and Italian dominance at Vanwall in 1957–58 cemented his place in the national sporting identity. For decades he held the record for most Formula One victories by an English driver, until Nigel Mansell surpassed him in 1991.