“Do you want to talk to Sir Stirling?” It’s a question that only has one answer for any motor racing enthusiast: yes. 100 per cent yes, in fact. Even if, as we're guided over to the seat where one of the best-loved (well, comments about female racing drivers notwithstanding) racing drivers the world has seen is sitting, our minds are racing. What to say? What to ask? Should we mention
the Cygnet
? How to offer up our respect and admiration without coming across as obsequious bootlickers?
Moss confers with Bez and that 007 bloke
But Sir Stirling seems remarkably tolerant of questions he’s almost certainly given answers to thousands of times already. He’s ageing well, still in good spirits and beneath a tanned, crinkled brow, his crystal blue eyes still burn brightly, behind them memories of more incredible achievements and more amazing experiences than anyone else in the room can ever hope to match.
The car we’re sitting next to – the Aston Martin DBR1 that Moss has just driven in the centenaryparade lap – seems as good a point as any to start off with. How did Sir Stirling find it? “It was a great car to race, but a lousy car to drive,” he says. “It comes into its own when you’re really driving it hard. Pussying it around really isn’t its best style.” So there was no temptation to say ‘sod the 60km/h limit, let’s give it its head’, then? “No, no,” he says with a smile. “The thing I do when I drive a car like this is to try and feel how good it was, you know.” But Sir Stirling implies that there is still a desire to do so, even if he wouldn’t go through with it. “I mean I had to do a thing the other day in a C-Type Jag,” he adds, “and of course, it’s like having a beautiful girl, but she won’t go to bed with you!”
With time short, we turn our attention to the track. Was driving it again a bit of a blast from the past? Sir Stirling says so. “What I did do, I must say, was to go on the line, which was interesting for me,” he says. “As much as at any circuit in the world, there are certain corners here which make an enormous difference – the corners on the way back from Adenau have quite an incline. Of course, going at the speed we were going just now, they just didn’t exist, but I still went on the line I’d be on. But you see, when you’re racing, you’ve got so much centripetal force pushing you out.”
DBR1 great to race, but lousy to drive, says Moss
Those racing days are clearly still fresh in Moss’s mind – in particular the time he raced the DBR1 here in 1959. “I chose a chap called Jack Fairman to drive with. He was a good driver, not fast, but a safe driver. And I could say ‘Out of the 44, I’m just going to give you two laps’ and he was happy with that.”
It turned out to be a gruelling race, though, with a coming-together putting Fairman and Moss way down the pack. “Jack got pushed off by a small car and had to push the Aston out of a bloody ditch to get it out. I’d already taken my helmet off thinking ‘He’s not coming back’, and then suddenly they were telling me ‘He’s coming in!’ But we’d lost minutes. Then I had to go like hell, which I enjoy, because then they don’t mind if you really, you know, beat yourself.” Moss didn’t just beat himself, though – he went on to win. That must have felt pretty good, I say, but Moss isn’t one for self-celebration. “I enjoy racing as the underdog,” comes the reply. “The public always cheer on the underdog. The fact was that I happened to have lost four to five minutes, or they had been lost for me, and there I was trying to catch up. I enjoy racing with that much pressure.“
All too soon, our five minutes together are up, and Sir Stirling is whisked off, doubtless to fulfil yet more duties. And we're left with the slightly dazed feeling you get when you suddenly become aware that you’ve just been in the presence of true greatness.