Moss was born in London to Alfred and Aileen Moss, both amateur racing drivers. His father had competed at the 1924 Indianapolis 500 and his sister Pat became a successful rally driver. Moss received his first car, an Austin 7, from his father at age nine. He began his competitive career by purchasing a Cooper 500 in 1948, funding the deposit using winnings from horse-riding competitions over his parents' initial objections.
He demonstrated immediate natural ability, winning in Formula Three at national and international levels. 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. He would go on to win the Tourist Trophy six more times across his career. In 1954, Moss became the first non-American to win the 12 Hours of Sebring, sharing a 1.5-litre OSCA MT4 with Bill Lloyd.
After impressing Mercedes racing boss Alfred Neubauer during the 1954 season, Moss joined the German factory team for 1955. His first World Championship victory came at the British Grand Prix, leading a Mercedes 1-2-3-4 — the first time he had beaten teammate and mentor Juan Manuel Fangio. Whether Fangio allowed Moss to win in front of his home crowd was a question Moss put to Fangio repeatedly; Fangio always replied that Moss had simply been better on the day.
That same year Moss achieved what journalist Doug Nye described as "the most iconic single day's drive in motor racing history" — his victory in the Mille Miglia, Italy's thousand-mile open-road race. With co-driver Denis Jenkinson, who had prepared a set of pace notes and a system of hand signals to communicate above the engine noise, Moss completed the race in ten hours and seven minutes. The achievement stood in sharp contrast to the Le Mans disaster of the same season, in which 83 spectators died in an accident involving the Mercedes and Jaguar teams. At the end of 1955, Mercedes withdrew from motor racing entirely.
Across four consecutive seasons, Moss finished second in the Formula One World Drivers' Championship. He was runner-up to Fangio in 1955 (Mercedes), 1956 (Maserati), and 1957 (Vanwall), winning multiple Grands Prix in each season. In 1958, he won four races but lost the title to Mike Hawthorn by a single point — a margin that would not have existed without Moss's own sportsmanship. When Hawthorn faced disqualification at the Portuguese Grand Prix for bump-starting his stalled car illegally, Moss argued successfully before the stewards on his behalf, preserving the six points Hawthorn needed. Hawthorn won the championship by one point. Moss also lost a further point that year when his pit crew signalled "HAWT REC" (meaning Hawthorn had set a record lap) and Moss misread it as "HAWT REG," believing Hawthorn was on regular laps — so he did not attempt to set a faster time.
From 1959 to 1961, Moss competed for privateer entrant Rob Walker, winning multiple races in each season and finishing third in the championship three times. In 1961, despite Ferrari's technically superior new 156 with a V6 engine outpowering his Climax-engined Lotus in most conditions, Moss won the Monaco Grand Prix by 3.6 seconds and the German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, demonstrating the driver skill that made him so revered.
In 1962, Moss crashed his Lotus in the Glover Trophy at Goodwood. He was in a coma for a month and temporarily paralysed down the left side of his body. He recovered, but after a test session in a Lotus 19 the following year found he was lapping a few tenths of a second slower than before. He felt his instinctive command of the car had not returned, and retired from professional racing. He was 32.
Moss raced from 1948 to 1962 in as many as 62 competitive outings in a single year, driving 84 different makes of car. His tally of 16 Formula One Grand Prix victories remained the record for a British driver until Nigel Mansell surpassed it in 1991. He won the Monaco Grand Prix three times, was a five-time winner of the International Gold Cup, and four-time winner of the British Empire Trophy. In endurance racing he won the World Sportscar Championship races at the Nürburgring in three consecutive years from 1958 to 1960.
Moss preferred to drive British cars wherever possible: "It is better to lose honourably in a British car than to win in a foreign one." He was instrumental, driving for Vanwall, in breaking the German and Italian constructors' dominance over Formula One in the late 1950s.
In British popular culture, Moss became synonymous with speed. The rhetorical question "Who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" was reputedly asked by traffic police of speeding motorists for decades; Moss himself claimed to have been stopped and asked exactly this. He was named BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1961 and inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1990. He was knighted in 2000 for services to motor racing. In 2016 a quantitative academic study ranked him 29th among Formula One drivers of all time — a ranking widely considered an understatement by those who knew his work. Moss died on 12 April 2020 at his home in Mayfair, aged 90, following a long illness.