Stirling Moss Breaks Ankles In Three-Storey Fall
Formula One hero injured in accident at home
Moss fell three storeys onto a concrete floor after a lift malfunction meant he stepped into an empty lift shaft.
The veteran of 16 Grand Prix victories and numerous sports car triumphs broke both ankles and four bones in his feet, as well as causing damage to some vertebrae.
Moss is still in intensive care, but is no longer in danger.
Everybody here at PH Towers wishes Sir Stirling the very best for a speedy recovery.
Sir Stirling is no stranger to recovering from serious accidents, however. A crash in a Lotus at Goodwood in 1962 (see the image to the right) put him in a coma and virtually ended his career.
By 1964, Moss had recovered sufficiently to make this amazing video, some in-car footage taken at Brands Hatch in a Lotus. Considering this is barely a couple of years after Stirling's big crash, his confidence and deft touch behind the wheel is amazing, especially on the 'fast lap', which starts just past the two-minute mark.
Some video of his Mayfair pad....
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/06/08/video-sir-stirl...
Some video of his Mayfair pad....
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/06/08/video-sir-stirl...
Sounds like a close shave, hope he get's back on his feet OK.
I remember reading about his house - the lift in particular....
Stirling Moss is in the ground-floor office of his London house and is filling his bath on the third floor. How is this possible? There is only one Stirling Moss, and although Britain’s most renowned racing driver often tipped the needle past 100mph in his heyday, even he can’t be in two places at once. The secret is remote control: 78-year-old Moss presses a button on a control panel behind his desk and the taps automatically start running upstairs. “In five minutes and 20 seconds, it will fill the bath to exactly the right depth, with water of exactly the right temperature,” he says. “Meanwhile, I can just carry on with whatever I’m doing.”
This house, which now has six levels, from the basement to the guest suite on the fourth floor, was built for the racing star at the height of his fame in 1962. He was living in another property on this Mayfair street – a house he bought for £12,000 in 1954 – when he noticed a plot of land for sale. It wasn’t the most attractive patch, having been roughed up by Germans, but he managed to buy it for just £5,000. He had some ambitious plans: “It was the last second world war bomb site in Mayfair,” he says. “And I realised if I bought it, I could build exactly what I wanted.”
What he wanted, clearly, was a gadget-packed pad that would be the envy of a superhero or a Bond villain. Sit on the sofa in the room Moss likes to call “the nook” on the first floor, press a button on the wall, and a motorised section of the beamed ceiling slowly descends to become a table above your lap. On the second floor, a giant tray slides smoothly on tracks through the service hatch between the kitchen and the dining room to facilitate food service. Other remote-control buttons in the same panel open wooden cabinets containing the hi-fi and one of several televi-sion screens dotted round the house. Seated at his desk in the office, Moss presses a button and another section of this ceiling descends, apparently suspended by string. “It’s so my secretary can pass me letters and things to sign from upstairs,” he says.
If you don’t feel like negotiating the spiral staircase, there is a unique lift, specially made for Moss out of racing-car carbon fibre by the Williams Formula One team. Even the lavatory seats are special, being electrically heated for maximum comfort. “I’ve always loved gadgets,” says Moss. “My father did, too. He was a dentist by trade, but he was a frustrated engineer and was always inventing things.”
From the Times
Scary stuff. Get well soon!
Here's hoping he makes a speedy recovery!
I've twisted my kneck stepping off a curb a bit too suddenly. Tough old bugger.Anyway, hope he gets well soon, I met him at Goodwood in 2003 in the drivers locker room......he's very short.....perhaps even shorter now
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