Interview: Stirling Moss on the Mille Miglia

In 1955, Stirling Moss won the world's most famous road race, the Mille Miglia, completing the near-1000 mile distance in a barely believable 10 hours seven minutes and 48 seconds, at an average speed of 98mph.

His car, the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, number 722, is now reckoned to be the most valuable car in the world. More importantly, Sir Stirling's win is widely regarded as the single greatest drive in motorsport history.

On the 60th anniversary of his amazing win, TopGear.com caught up with the great man to discuss love, death, flying Mercs, and the lure of the Mille Miglia.
 

"Winning the Mille Miglia was a more difficult challenge than the Le Mans 24 Hours. The stress on the car was far higher, you were racing on public roads... it's a much more intense 10 hours than anywhere else."

On driving unknown roads

"Driving in a road race where you don't know the circuit is quite different, and demands a different technique... I could learn the Targa Florio, where I knew how to set the car up for each corner. I couldn't for the Mille Miglia: you can't learn 1000 miles, there are spectators lining the road and you can't even see the apex of the corner, so you drive with the knowledge that maybe as you go round it's going to get tighter. In other words, every one of those 1000 miles was a great big adventure."

On being afraid

"The Mille Miglia was the only race that really frightened me, at least until the moment the flag fell. There were hundreds of cars participating, although I didn't have to overtake them because half of them fell off. Italian hairdressers you see, with go-faster stripes."

"I wanted to do the Futa pass in an hour, but we missed it by about four minutes. I had Denis Jenkinson [famed motor sport writer and Sir Stirling's co-driver] doing pace notes: if he hadn't been there I would have been much slower. No one had done pace notes before, the idea didn't exist. The difficult corners were the ones taken at 120 or 130mph. The average speed was up to around 110 or 115mph, coming up to places like Florence. That could be quite demanding. It's a long way to go when you're concentrating that hard. The physical effort is quite considerable."

On the physical challenge

"The steering is never heavy on a racing car, because you only use the wheel to present the car, then you put your foot down and that takes over. You use the power to steer it. The biggest effort is in being ready to catch it - you need to be ready to react instantly. Ultimately, the mental thing is much more tiring than the physical thing."

"Not that many cars could win the Mille Miglia - the car needed to be very fast, very strong, with a great organisation behind it. So it does take a fairly unique machine. The Mercedes 300 SLR was a large car but it was well suited to the event. It was also reasonably economical... we were getting eight or nine mpg, which at that speed is not bad at all.

"We refuelled; we stopped at Pescara and threw in five gallons. The whole back of the thing was basically fuel - more than 40 gallons. Anyway, I was leading by the time we got to Rome. Which worried me, because the saying was, ‘first in Rome is never the first home'.

"Nobody had ever won it who had been first in Rome. And I'm superstitious. The car handled differently when we arrived there empty, then left fully fuelled. It obviously affects performance, too, when you bung on that much fuel."

"I remember going over a hump-backed bridge. Jenks had given me the signal that it was OK. Well we went over this damn thing at 150 or 160mph. In practice, you see, we probably hadn't gone any faster than 120mph. Well, at 160mph we took off and the bloody thing was flying.

"It was a dead straight road, but I knew it was a bit dodgy. We were airborne for quite a few seconds. The steering obviously went a bit light... and we landed and Jenks and I looked at each other and just went [rather quizzical expression crosses his face]. We certainly had our moments. In the final stage of the race I was doing up to 180mph. Only in Italy..."

On the Mille vs F1

"Is it my greatest achievement? Of its type, yes I suppose so. You can't really compare it with, say, when I won the Monaco GP in 1961. It's about confidence. You have to be confident in your car as well as your own ability. I was 25 years old at the time, and terribly fit. I never did any exercise but I'd be racing three days a week. It added up to something like 250 days a year competing in a car."

"When you get in a motor car, you hope it becomes an extension of you. I'm so competitive I'd race you on foot to the bottom of the street. I just loved the adrenalin rush. I smoked a couple of fags, but didn't touch a drink until I was 32.

"Drivers sometimes used Dexedrine and Benzedrine in those days in a race: I don't know what class of drug it is now, but it was just a wakey-wakey kind of thing back then, the sort of thing wartime bomber crews used..."

[Fangio - who finished second, 32 minutes behind Moss but driving alone - gave Moss something called a Dynavis on the 1955 Mille Miglia, a pill to combat thirst and dehydration. Increased stamina was a side effect]

On dealing with death

"There was a different mindset. One of the reasons I went into racing was because it was dangerous. We lost three or four drivers a year. You just had to have the confidence to believe that it isn't going to happen to you.

"It may be foolhardy but you're not going to be able to live with it otherwise. The challenge of a race for me is overcoming big obstacles. One of them is another driver, and the other is the circuit. And if you lift off too much then you're not quick enough and you don't do it."

"You knew the risks: and if you weren't up to it then do something else. You're either someone who relishes the thrills and risks of what you're doing, or you're not, and you should be a librarian or a chef. We all knew what the dangers were; I mean there was nobody else in the car holding your foot down..."

On losing friends

"World War II was still fresh in people's minds and that made a big difference. At that time death was quite common, we'd lost God knows how many people in the War. So if somebody was killed doing something, well it was unfortunate but the view was that it happens.

"Now it just wouldn't be tolerated. I lost a lot of friends racing and it was awful. But the only way one could accept it was to say, they knew the danger, I know the danger, I love it and they were loving it and they died doing something they loved. That's how you make yourself accept a difficult situation."