A YEAR TO REMEMBER
Stirling Moss, Mercedes-Benz and the 1955 racing season

Article by Graham Robson
Images courtesy Mercedes-Benz Archives
 
Mercedes-Benz had returned to racing in 1952 after recovering from the destruction of war, intent on rebuilding its reputation by dominating Formula One. With no world-beating German racers available, the company had gone outside its borders and hired world-champion driver Juan Manuel Fangio.
By 1954, the new W196 race car had proven to be superb in Fangio’s hands, but it was clear that his “No. 2,” German driver Karl Kling, though competent, was not up to the same standards. The team had to find other options.



A motorsports marriage made in heaven

Stirling Moss was only 25 years old in 1954, but was already Britain‘s most successful race-car driver. Starting his career in 1948, he had proven his ability to do well anywhere, in any sort of car – but he had yet to win a Formula One World Championship race. The trouble was that he was a British patriot, and wanted to achieve that in a British car.

Because there were no competitive British machines, Moss purchased his own Maserati 250F. However, even in the Maserati, Moss found that he couldn’t match Mercedes-Benz and its W196; still, he proved he was best of the rest.

The mutual decision that brought Moss to the Mercedes-Benz team in 1955 was the nearest thing to a marriage made in heaven that motorsports could have inspired. After the end of the 1954 season, during which Moss had raced his Maserati in F1 as a privateer and Jaguar D-Types for the factory without much success, it was announced in December that he had signed with Mercedes-Benz for the 1955 season.

We now know that Mercedes-Benz team manager Alfred Neubauer first approached Moss November 4, 1954, offering a generous contract, but made it clear that Moss should consider himself as second to Fangio. Early in December, Moss traveled to the German Hockenheim circuit, tested a much-modified W196 single-seater, and soon produced lap times that Kling could not match – and got the job. After the deal went public days later, Moss enjoyed Christmas at home in England, then started a frenetic 1955 season.



A tumultuous season 

What followed? Readers may have heard some of the stories about Moss’s famous victory for Mercedes-Benz in the Italian Mille Miglia road race and his British F1 Grand Prix victory that followed two months later. But how many realize that Moss only raced for the Mercedes-Benz team for one season? In later years, he would race 300SLs, but these were privately prepared and entered.

But what a tumultuous season it was. In nine frantically busy months, Moss started in 13 important international races – seven of them in W196 F1 cars and six in 300SLR two-seaters. On almost every occasion, Fangio was his illustrious teammate and friendly rival; in half of those events, Moss loyally tucked in behind the master’s exhaust pipes to finish second to Fangio.

In his spare time when not racing for Mercedes-Benz, Moss would privately enter other races in other cars – whether they were single-seaters like his own Maserati 250F, two-seater sport racers, or even sedans. And in-between there was the traveling – endless commuting from the U.K. to Germany and the rest of Europe – and the Americas. Bear in mind this was before jet travel, when the British Comet was grounded and Boeing’s first jetliner had yet to fly.

How on earth did he manage? A well-honed body, stamina, guts and sheer application to his craft were all factors. Nonetheless, even the indefatigable Moss must have been exhausted by the end of the  1955 racing season.

It was typical of Mercedes-Benz to set out not just to win F1 and sports-car races in 1955, but to dominate both categories. A measure of this was the team’s juggling of three different wheelbases, open-wheel and fully streamlined W196 single-seaters during the season, and the enormous trouble of developing massive air brakes for the still nascent 300SLR two-seater sports cars. The outcome:

16 January 1955: Argentine F1 GP
W196 F1 car – fourth place, sharing the car with Kling and Hans Hermann

After an exhausting journey to Buenos Aires, Argentina – traveling in piston-engined airliners with cabin noise levels that would be considered quite unacceptable these days – the four-man driving team challenged the first contested F1 event of the new season with updated and shortened-wheelbase W196 single-seaters.
With the race held in sweltering sunshine, the victory went to Fangio, while Moss’s original car ran out of fuel and he subsequently shared another car with Kling and Hermann. 

30 January 1955: Buenos Aires GP
Formula Libre, using W196 F1 cars – second place

Two weeks later, the same cars ran with 300SLR-type 3-liter engines in the Buenos Aires GP, which was being run to Formula Libre regulations. On that occasion, the climate was not as oppressively hot as before, though Fangio (the “native,” of course, in his own country) was still the pacesetter. Moss followed closely behind Fangio in each of the two heats, and when the times were totaled, he was found to be just 12 seconds adrift of Fangio’s time. The pattern for the 1955 season was already set.



30 April–1 May 1955: Mille Miglia Sports Car Race
300SLR – first place with Denis Jenkinson

Back in Europe, Mercedes-Benz had already spent much time in perfecting the 300SLR which, in general layout if not in detail, was almost a two-seat version of the W196, though with a 3-liter derivative of the straight-eight engine and a streamlined body style. Prototypes were seen being tested before the end of 1954, but it was not until April 1955 that they were first raced “in anger.”

Having spent three months recovering from the rigors of the Argentine races (including driving an Austin-Healey 100S in the 12 Hours of Sebring race, where he won his capacity class, and racing his own Maserati 250F in several British events), Moss then prepared for the prestigious 1,000-mile Mille Miglia race in Italy. Using public highways throughout the event, the Miglia started and finished in Brescia, near Milan, turning about in Rome.

Moss’s victory in this event, of course, is now legendary. He elected to take British journalist and experienced motorcycle racer Denis Jenkinson as his co-driver. To alert Moss to route changes on the complicated route, Jenkinson used a pace-notes system the two developed for the race. During 12,000 miles of practice in March and April, not only in 300SLR “hacks,” but also in a 300SL road car, Jenks recorded each turn and elevation change on the course. In the race, Jenks read the notes off a continuous ribbon of paper running from one roller to another in an aluminum box under a plexiglass window, a device that Moss invented for the race.

Victory came after more than 10 hours’ flat-out motoring – Moss left Brescia at 7:22 a.m. and returned at 5:29 p.m. – in a seemingly unburstable 300SLR, the result being that he averaged an astonishing 97.99 mph. The story is – and well authenticated – that soon after the finish, Moss was still so hyped up by the wakey-wakey pills that Fangio had allegedly provided that he jumped straight into a Mercedes-Benz road car and drove several hundred miles – to and back from  – the factory in Stuttgart.



22 May 1955: European F1 GP, Monaco
W196 F1 car – ninth place

After just two weeks of rest (rest that included competing in his Maserati in a race at Silverstone, in England, where the car blew its engine), he then flew to the south of France, ready to compete in a new lightweight, short-wheelbase W196 in the European F1 GP round the Monaco circuit. Having secured a front-row grid position, Moss soon settled into second place, close behind Fangio’s sister car. On lap 50 of the 100-lap race, he took the lead when Fangio’s car broke its transmission. However, on lap 81, his own engine expired. Moss coasted to the finishing line, and as the race concluded, pushed the car across the line, to officially finish ninth. Mercedes-Benz managers, they say, were flabbergasted. At least it wasn’t far to fly home from Nice to London.



29 May 1955: Eifel Sports Car Race
300SLR – second place

The following weekend, Moss and Fangio took part in the Eifelrennen Nürburgring in identical 300SLRs. Moss dutifully trailed behind Fangio and the two enjoyed a trouble-free run to take first and second place.

5 June 1955: Belgian F1 GP
W196 F1 car – second place

Much soul-searching had followed the W196 engine failures experienced at Monaco, but it was typical of Mercedes-Benz that just two weeks later, in Belgium, the cars were not only back in top form, but the engine problem had been identified, parts were redesigned, and the problem banished to the unhappy-experiences files.

Three long-wheelbase W196s, with Fangio, Moss and Kling driving, started the race in ideal conditions; only Kling’s car finally retired, with a broken engine oil pipe. Moss once again settled dutifully down behind his Argentinian master, and after 160 trouble-free minutes, that was how it all ended – with Moss just eight seconds behind Fangio.

11–12 June 1955: 24 Hours of Le Mans
300SLR – Moss and Fangio, withdrawn while leading the race

Most motorsports enthusiasts, I am sure, know what happened in this fated sports car race, which was held on the French circuit just six days after the effortless demonstration on the Belgian Spa circuit. It is well known that it was a 300SLR guest-driver, the Frenchman “Pierre Levegh” (a pseudonym), who collided with an Austin-Healey 100S that had moved in front of him to avoid hitting a Jaguar slowing for a pit stop. Levegh’s car was launched into the grandstand and more than 80 people were killed in the inferno that followed.

If it is even reasonable that a brief report of the motor race be mentioned, the 300SLRs had been equipped with massive driver-operated airbrakes: Fangio and Moss shared driving in one car, and Levegh and John Fitch operated the second machine. In the first half of the 24-hour race, a colossal battle took place between the German cars and Jaguar’s long-nosed, disc-braked, D-Types.

Immediately after the crash that took place after just two-and-a-half hours into the race, there were suggestions that the race should be abandoned, or that the German cars should in any case be withdrawn; neither occurred at that time. Ten hours into the race, however, Mercedes-Benz directors meeting in Stuttgart told Neubauer to withdraw the 300SLRs. This was done while Moss and Fangio were leading by two clear laps and the sister car driven by Kling and André Simon was third overall.



19 June 1955: Dutch F1 GP
W196 F1 – second place

Still, there was no rest for the team and its star drivers. Had Moss even been home in the last two or three weeks? We doubt it. A week after the Le Mans disaster, with deep gloom surrounding the sport, three immaculate W196s (Moss’s a medium-length-chassis example and Fangio’s, the even shorter version) took the start on the sandy Zandvoort circuit for the Dutch GP. Need one say that the W196s dominated the entire weekend, took the front row of the grid, and that within minutes Fangio and Moss were running nose to tail ahead of the entire field. Nearly three hours later, they were still there, still in formation, and there was little doubt that Moss could have fought with Fangio, rather than following him, if the team’s rules had allowed it. 



16 July 16 1955: British F1 GP
W196 F1 – first place

Now there had been time for Moss to relax, if only a little, as four weeks separated the Dutch from the British GPs. On the Aintree circuit near Liverpool, all four cars of the shortened-wheelbase variety were dominant, and all four cars finished – first, second, third and fourth – with Moss amazingly taking the highest of victories.

Perhaps we’ll never know if reverse-team-orders were applied in this race: Moss and Fangio swapped the lead several times in the first 26 laps before Moss took over and led to the end; the winning margin was a mere car’s-length; and Moss’s victory speech implied the swap. “Fangio is the greatest driver in the world,” Moss said. “He could easily have come up, and made it a different story. But, being a sportsman, he allowed me to realize my greatest ambition. ...” We may draw our own conclusions.



7 August 1955: Swedish GP
300SLR – second place

Next up, and only three weeks after his historic British GP victory, Moss flew to Sweden to take part in the Swedish Sports Car GP, which covered 32 laps of the Rabelov circuit at Kristianstad. Two of the Le Mans 300SLRs, complete with the air brakes still fitted, had been reprepared, and were to be driven by Moss and Fangio.

Where Moss was first off at the Le Mans start, he soon ceded the lead to Fangio in this race, the two of them demolishing the opposition, including Eugenio Castellotti’s 4.4-liter Ferrari and two 3-liter Maseratis. Following the script (and contracts), Moss was due to finish behind Fangio, which he did, completing the 78-minute race just three-tenths of a second behind Fangio. Mission accomplished.

11 September 1955: Italian F1 GP
W196 – did not finish

Following the Swedish GP, Moss then enjoyed a five-week holiday from his Mercedes-Benz duties, though he still found time to race his own Maserati F1 car in a British event, a Porsche in the British Nine-Hour Motor Race (where he was eliminated by another spinning car), a humble little Standard Ten in a saloon car race at Oulton Park, and in his own Maserati in another small F1 race at Aintree.
At about this point in the season, an unnamed journalist quipped, “A stationary Moss gathers no sterling.”
Back to serious business in the Italian GP, where the newly constructed steep banking at the Monza Autodrome was used for the first time, Moss soon settled into his habitual place immediately behind Fangio, and was then frustrated when his car first suffered a shattered windscreen, which needed to be replaced, and then the transmission broke.



17 September 1955: RAC Tourist Trophy
300SLR – first place with Fitch

Just one week after the Italian race, Moss and the entire factory team turned out for the British Tourist Trophy race, which was held on the Dundrod circuit in Northern Ireland, a twisty and dangerous circuit of public roads that were closed for the occasion. 

This was an event marred by several horrendous crashes, but Moss, who was sharing the driving in the seven-hour 84-lap race with Fitch, was never involved. The battle for the lead was with Mike Hawthorn’s Jaguar D-Type, and was almost lost for the Germans when Moss put his 300SLR into a stout grass bank and tore the offside rear bodywork. Fitch, through no fault of his own, lost some ground, and in the second part of the race it was Moss who caught and passed his rivals. Twenty laps from the end he was back in the lead, the Jaguar’s engine expired in the closing minutes, and Moss won, beating his teammates Fangio/Kling by a full five-minute lap.
It was an amazing performance – all on Moss’s 26th birthday.

16 October 1955: Targa Florio
300SLR – first place with Peter Collins

According to the original Mercedes-Benz master plan, the 300SLRs were then scheduled to compete in Venezuela, so Moss set off on a holiday in the south of France for a few days. That lasted for just one week, for in the meantime Neubauer’s calculations determined that success in Sicily’s Targa Florio that followed in October might secure the World Sportscar Championship instead. A change of plan immediately followed and – as The Star contributor Karl Ludvigsen later wrote – a convoy of eight sports cars, 15 private cars, eight heavy trucks and 45 mechanics traveled to the Mediterranean island to compete.

Moss’s co-driver was Peter Collins, and they set amazing times in a race that lasted for more than nine hours on a 44.7-mile open-road circuit. Although they eventually won,  beating – guess who? – Fangio and Kling in a sister car, the car went off the road on several occasions, once needing the help of hordes of onlookers, and a five-minute delay to get it back on track.

No wonder it was so knocked about and looked fit only for the scrap yard when the 13 laps were completed. But it proved, once and for all, the current dominance in sports car racing of the Moss-plus-Mercedes-Benz combination.

And that – suddenly, abruptly, and brutally – was that. Even before the start of the Targa Florio, the company had decided to withdraw from motorsports, informing Neubauer, but forbidding him from telling the drivers and mechanics until after the event. Quoting the letter sent to Neubauer: “After mature deliberation the management committee has decided ... to absent itself ... irrevocably from motor racing for several years. …”

And so it did. On October 22, 1955, just six days after that historic triumph in Sicily, the world’s press was informed – and Stirling Moss found himself out of a job. Of course it would not be the end of his career, but rather the further blossoming of a glorious phase in his life, for within only nine months, Moss had won three World Championship sports car races, one Formula One race – and finished behind Fangio, in a sister car, on no fewer than five other occasions.



What next?

As promised, Mercedes-Benz was serious about its withdrawal from motorsports, for the W196 and 300SLRs never turned another wheel in competition, and the next works cars were 220SE Saloons that appeared – and excelled – in rallying beginning in 1960. Later works race cars were also saloons, but even then, they needed development enthusiast Erich Waxenberger to make that possible in the late 1960s.

For Moss, it was a case of onward and upward.  In 1956 he became Maserati’s F1 star in 250Fs, in 1957/58 he started winning F1 races in British Vanwalls, after which he freelanced in Coopers and Lotuses. Oh yes, and starred on the Aston Martin racing sports car team, too.

Then came his dreadful crash at Goodwood in 1962, which brought his active racing career to an end. But Moss was by no means finished with automobiles or motorsports. He added his knowledge and experience as a commentator to ABC coverage of motor racing through 1980 while occasionally racing in world rally competitions. For the subsequent three decades he has been active in historic racing, finally retiring in 2011. He was knighted in 2000 for his many contributions to British industry, so if you meet him at one of the many Mercedes-Benz events in which he participates today, you should address him as Sir Stirling.
 


OPPOSITE PAGE: Brescia, Italy, May 1, 1955. A jubilant Stirling Moss, here with Mercedes-Benz racing director Alfred Neubauer, has just won the 1955 Mille Miglia in his now-forever-famous 300SLR, No. 722. His record time of just over 10 hours, at an average speed of almost 100 miles per hour, stands to this day.
 
OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: Stirling Moss and his friend, British motoring journalist Denis Jenkinson, drift through a corner at speed in their 300SLR during the Mille Miglia. Moss, who drove the race with near superhuman skill and concentration, aided by Jenks’s considerable navigational skills, did manage to visit a ditch and collect the odd hay bale, which left a telltale chunk of straw in the front intake. BOTTOM: in the Eifel Sports Car Race at the N¸rburgring May 29, 1955, Juan Manuel Fangio and Moss finished an effortless first and second respectively, once again driving the mighty 300SLRs to a crushing victory.
 
OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP: Stirling Moss wins his first Formula One race, the British Grand Prix at Aintree in July, just beating teammate Juan Manuel Fangio in an identical W196 over the finish line. MIDDLE: The teammates celebrate their 1-2 win in the paddock. Second place finisher Fangio wears a traditional laurel victor’s wreath, a charmingly archaic custom soon to disappear from racing circuits everywhere.  BOTTOM: Moss takes the checkered flag in the RAC Tourist Trophy race on the Dunrod circuit in Northern Ireland. His co-driver in the 300SLR was American driver John Fitch.