Moss vs Hawthorn: The race to be Britain’s first F1 champion

This episode of Colossal E is sponsored by REC Watches. REC Watches is a Danish independent watch brand, which has specialised in manufacturing timepieces infused with the DNA of famous legends since 2014. Past projects include watches made from Steve McQueen's Triumph TR6 motorcycle, Carol Shelby's prototype Mustangs and John Delorean's personal DMC12. REC's latest release is super special. In conjunction with classic team Lotus, REC have created timepieces featuring original parts from Atten Senna's 1986 Lotus 98T, chassis number four, which was driven by the great Brazilian during the last eight races of the dramatic 1986 Formula One Championship. Anorak Fakt. Yes, and the original aluminium plenum tubes from that very car have been reforged to form the watches out of chapter rings and tachymeter scales, which is quite something. Yes, and across the watch you'll find many design references from the car, including the black and gold colour tones, the large 12 number, skeletonised onto the rotor, and the movement backplate decoration, which mimics the car's Renault EF15B engine. As a direct result of using original materials in each timepiece, this collection is strictly limited to 989 watches with each individually numbered. So if you want one, head to RECwatchers.com. That's RECwatchers.com. Best of all, as a listener to this show, you can enjoy 15% off your purchase. Simply use the code "The Race at Checkout". That's "The Race" all one word at checkout. And now on with the show. The Athletic. Hello and welcome back to "And Colossally" that's history, the podcast that re-appraisers motor racing history. I'm Richard Williams, and as ever, I'm here with my friend and co-host Matt Bishop. How are you, Matt? I'm very well thanks Richard. And as ever, I'm very much looking forward to our latest step back in time, because in this episode we'll be talking about two hugely charismatic and wonderfully gifted drivers from the 1950s, Sterling Moss and Mike Hawthorne. And more specifically, we'll be discussing and analysing their duel in 1958 to become Britain's first Formula One World Champion. I imagine that many of our listeners, particularly those with a deep interest in motor racing, will be familiar with the names of both of them. And perhaps some of our older listeners will even remember watching both of them race. But for younger listeners, yes, I think we can safely say that both were brilliant racing drivers and both, as it happens, were British. But those commonalities aside, they really were rather different, weren't they Richard? They were. And that's one of the reasons I was very keen to do this subject. As you say, Matt, they were two very different characters. And in fact, I think their head-to-head rivalry represented the beginning of fandom in Formula One, in that people tended to pledge their allegiance to one driver or the other, Moss or Hawthorne, a bit like choosing between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the 60s, or I suppose, Blur and Oasis in the Britpop years. Well, I agree, but I agree other than, I don't think anyone called it fandom in the 1950s. And definitely not. And it wasn't always there. If we go back to the two biggest stars of the pre-war golden age of grown pre-racing, as many people think of it, I'm pretty sure that German fans of Rudolf Karachiover didn't find it necessary to dislike Tatsio Nivalari and Italian or vice versa. And it was the same for Fangio and Ascarie in the early 50s at the very beginning of the Formula One World Championship. You could like one more than the other, maybe, but you admired them both. Absolutely. But eventually, and no doubt, this was encouraged by the annual contest for the world title, rivalries became much more of a thing. So in the 70s, you had a loud oversus hunt, Sena vs. Prost in the 80s, and Schumacher vs. Hale in the 90s. These were increasingly bitter personal battles with fans really taking sides. And more recently, we've had Hamilton vs. Verstappen, where things have sometimes got out of hand in terms of abuse, thanks to the social media platforms, I suppose. So now it's actually more like football. We're instead of just loving the sport, most people support one team or driver and hate all the others. In F1, it's a constant exchange of insults between fanboys and haters. Fun for some, I guess, and maybe the people who run F1 and the broadcasters like it that way, because a bit of controversy always attracts attention. Yeah, I guess so. Well, look, as you say, Richard, social media hasn't helped. I'm far from being an expert when it comes to social media algorithms. But what I do know is that dissent and disagreement are definitely profitable for the likes of Twitter, or X, as we're supposed to call it, I think. And perhaps even drive to survive, which, let me make clear, has been a great thing in many ways and remains a great thing in many ways. But whose storylines tend to focus on conflict quite a bit? And maybe it has also stoked a kind of fan tribalism, if I can use that word. Which is what you were talking about, I think. Which perhaps some people who've been featured prominently on that show should have known better than to get involved in and thereby encourage. I'm thinking of senior team principals who were filmed too often, furiously, effing and blinding at one another. I mean, that really isn't a good example to fans in my humble opinion, especially young fans. And actually, it's not the swearing I mind most, to be honest. It really isn't the swearing at all, actually. It's the out and out hostility and disrespect. And yes, it then reappears in the social media tribalism that you've talked about. Anyway, we're probably getting into a subject that's best dealt with by another podcast. Oh, possibly, and possibly not. But let's go right back to the more genteel 1950s, wearing one corner, you have the dashing, but highly professional and media-friendly sterling moss, Mr. Motor Racing, who famously loved sticking it to Ferrari. And in the other corner, you have the Debenair Hawthorne, who actually raced for Ferrari, becoming incidentally the only man to win a Grand Prix for the team while wearing a bow tie. And who liked to celebrate a race win at Silverstone or Goodwood by stopping off at a pub or three on the way home? The pair of them certainly respected each other, but as you say, they were very different characters. They looked different too. Moss was compact and dark-haired before he started losing it, while Hawthorne losing his hair, that is. Yes, well, you made that clear, mate. Thank you. Well, Hawthorne was tall and blonde. And their rivalry was good news for the newspapers. Who also loved the idea of bold young brits going off to do battle on foreign fields? They did, yes. And one other thing I should have said that they had in common was age. They were both born in 1929 and both therefore came of age in post-war Britain. And another thing they both had in common was that Motor Racing was in their blood, as I'll explain. Hawthorne, who was slightly the elder of the two, was born in April, April 1929, five months before Moss, and Hawthorne was born in Mechstras, which is a town near Donkasta in South Yorkshire, which for non-UK listeners is in the north of England. It's strangely enough, mate. I discovered that the name Mechstras probably has its origins in the Old English language, Old English. It seems to have meant Mike's town. What a great anorak fact that is. Thank you. But Hawthorne didn't stay there long in Mechstras. I mean, he was educated at Ardinglye College in Sussex in the southeast of England before attending Chelsea Technical College and securing an apprenticeship with a commercial vehicle manufacturer. And that was quite apt really because his father owned the Taurus Trophy Garage in Farnham, in Surrey, also in the southeast of England, selling and servicing tasty cars such as Jaguars and Ferraris. And if you think the garage's name was a homage to Motorcycling, you'd be right because Mike's father did indeed race motorcycles. And sorry, you're going to have to allow me a rather personal anorak fact here, Richard. Are you ready? Oh no. Here it comes. Well, because a mechanic who worked at that garage and who actually travelled with Hawthorne to Grand Prix on the continent in the early 1950s, Spa and Rourn in 1952, I think, working on Mike's cars in his Cooper Bristol days was Hue or Huey, Suel, who married my grandmother's first cousin. I give up. You've win. There's no topping. There you go. So that's a bit of an anorak fact, yes. Anyway, as I say, Moss also had motor racing in his blood. He was born in London to Alfred and Aileen Moss, who both race, too, didn't they Richard? Yes, Moss' parents had actually met at Brooklyn's in Surrey, the Cathedral of pre-war British motor racing. And here's another anorak fact for you. Stillings dad, Alfred, was a descendant of a family of Ashkenazi Jews known as Moses, until they left Germany at the end of the 19th century, when they settled in London and changed their name. So Moss is derived from Moses. And since sterling Scottish mum had wanted to call him Hamish and was only narrowly overruled, he might have risen to fame not a sterling Moss, a great name for a racing driver, but as Hamish Moses. Didn't he actually say, "If I'd been called Hamish Moses not sterling Moss, it wouldn't have been so good for me." I'm sure that's true. I mean, that's a very headline, friendly name. Absolutely, yeah. Anyway, his father would become a very successful dentist, but he also had a passion for motorsport in his youth, and he competed at Brooklyn's in the 1920s. And then when he was spending a few months in the USA in 1924, studying dentistry at a college in Indiana, he actually entered the Indianapolis 500 and finished 16th. Fantastic. Pretty good, huh? Yeah. Alfred's wife, the former Aileen Crawford, was the great, great niece of Black Bob Crawford, a hero of the Peninsula War in the early 19th century, in which, as you will remember, Matt, Spain and Portugal and Britain fought the French. Well. It was a very keen equestrian, which was something she passed on to sterling and his sister Pat. But she also entered races and rallies in her own three-wheeled Morgan. And after they were married in London in 1927, she and Alfred competed together in rallies and trials. I have to say, the last minute has just been a screed of Richard Williams and Eric Fett's. More to come. Okay. And so, obviously, as with Mike Hawthorne, it almost seemed preordained that sterling moss would get into racing himself. And the two of them were just the right age to take advantage of the revival of motor racing in Britain just after the war. Because there were lots of decommissioned former RAF fighter and bomber bases ready to be turned into circuits with decent tarmac surfaces and a few straw bales lining the corners. And there were also lots of demob pilots who'd returned to civilian life, perhaps resuming their former careers but looking for some excitement in their lives again. And engineers and mechanics who knew how to turn bits of old Austin Sevens and fear topolinos or topolini into serviceable racing cars. And there were plenty of enthusiasts ready to organise the meetings, acting as stewards and scrutiniers and track marshals. So although the first post-war race was held in the white of a line outside Paris in 1945, it was in Britain that motor racing really started to boom over the next few years, with meetings up and down the country from goodwood in Sussex to Silverstone in Northamptonshire and Croft in North Yorkshire, all old aerodromes and the crowds flocked to them. They did. And it's fair to say that both men, talking about obviously Hawthorne and Moss again, made rapid progress in that burgeoning motor racing scene. Progressing, I suppose, by today's standards, looted criss-crossly quickly to the top echelon. And this podcast is all about re-apraising the history of most sport, not just this episode but the whole series. So it's worth our pausing and reflecting on their essence briefly. Hawthorne's first race of any kind was on September 2, 1950, when he drove his 1934 Riley Ulster Imp to a class victory in the annual speed trials on the Brighton Sea Front. Fast forward to June 1952, barely a year and a half later, when he was just 23, and he was racing a Cooper Bristol in the Belgian Grand Prix. Assisted, assisted by my grandmother's first cousin's husband, Hughie Sewell. Of course he was. I won't keep talking about Hughie Sewell, but it's worth a second mention. Anyway, by the end of the season, after a stellar third place at Silverstone and a fine fourth Zanfort, Hawthorne had been offered a works Ferrari drive extraordinarily fast progress. Moss, meanwhile, had driven cars from a relatively young age, but he started racing properly in 1948. For his 18th birthday, his father bought him a Cooper Japp, powered by a 500cc motorcycle engine, with which to compete in the then-new Formula 3 series. After a couple of good performances in Hill Climes, he entered and won his first single-seater race on the "Bruff" Airdrome, it was, wasn't it? The "Bruff" Airdrome in Yorkshire on April 7, 1948. Even after numerous wins at national level, he scored his first major international victory in the RAC Tourist Trophy in 1950 at the wheel of a Jaguar XK120 on the eve of his 21st birthday. Yeah, Jaguar had actually turned him down for a drive in one of their own cars. They said he was too young. But a conversation at the legendary Steering Wheel Club in Mayfair, where off duty racing people gathered, led to him borrowing a similar car for the race. And he beat the works' machines in absolutely foul weather, which made the racing world and Jaguar sit up and take notice. Absolutely, yes. And the next year still aged only 21, he started his first Grand Prix. The 1951 Swiss Grand Prix was at Bremgarten, which was a daunting place to race for anyone, still more so for a former one debutant. And the car he raced was an HWM, which to continue the southeast of England theme stood for Hirschem and Walton Motors in Surrey. It's now an Ashton Martin dealership, Anorak. And still called Hirschem and Walton Motors, I think. It is, it is. Anyway, back to 1951 and back to 21-year-old Sterling Moss, some people listening may be thinking, well, yes, but nowadays you get teenagers racing in Formula One. And they're right, you do. But today's teenage Formula One drivers have 10 plus years of racing under their belts in karting and all sorts of junior racing. And that really wasn't the case back in the day. Moss and Hawthorne didn't have that kind of apprenticeship. No one did. And I think it's worth underlining that because, well, it says something not only about racing at the time, but also about the talent level of both Hawthorne and Moss, that they could graduate to Formula One so quickly and almost instantly compete on, well, level terms, good terms, certainly, with much more experienced drivers. I mean, as early as 1953 at Reims, I'm jumping forward a bit, but anyway, as early as 1953 Reims, Hawthorne beat the great Juan Manuel Fanzjo in what was immediately christened the race of the century. I mean, damn impressive, very impressive. But as I say, I'm running ahead a bit now and I'm actually going to leave you to describe that race properly and in detail a bit later on in the pod. Yeah, I wonder if the early success of those two had something to do with horses and motorbikes. As a schoolboy, Moss won a lot of show jumping trophies. And Hawthorne was successful in motorcycle trials and scrambling as a teenager. I think that may have helped them develop their field for speed and movement and balance in particular, I think, but no doubt their natural talent was the big thing. But I think you're probably right. You've got a point, you know, they didn't just start racing from never having competed on anything or wheels. No, they got to feel for competition. Yes, yes, yes, yes. You mentioned that Hawthorne was offered a drive by Ferrari at the end of 1952, which he accepted, of course. And that's another intriguing sub-plot in our tale. Moss had been offered a drive with Ferrari a year earlier, but it never came off. And what actually happened played a big part in shaping his career. And so Ferrari probably noticed his talent first in 1949 when Sterling made his first trip to the continent and did well at Lake Garda in Northern Italy. He was racing his little Cooper Japp with a twin cylinder this time, a one-litre motorcycle engine, and he made a good showing against the works 12-cylinder 2-litre Ferrari's. And a year later, during the Grand Prix weekend at Monaco, he won the supporting race, the Freedom Monte Carlo for 500cc Formula 3 cars. He won the heats and the final. And at the start of 1951, there came the invitation from Ferrari, offering him a drive at the French and the British Grand Prix. That was a fantastic compliment for a young British driver at the time. It was a bit like Dick Seaman being invited to join Mercedes in 1937. Yeah. Good point actually, parallel. Yeah. Yeah. But, well, of course, Seaman was the inspiration for the only real inspiration for the generation of Moss and Hawthorne. He was the only bloke in the '30s who had really gone from Britain and taken on the continental side. They didn't have the phrase, "If you can see it, you can be it," but that's what he was. Yeah, yeah, he was. But anyway, Moss had to turn down the first of those two races for Ferrari because he was already committed to driving an HWM at Arvuss in Berlin. And so Ferrari, who wasn't used to being rebuffed, gave the car in both races to the Argentinian driver Jose Frailand Gonzales, who responded by winning at Silverstone. That was Ferrari's first ever Grand Prix win, while Sterling had to be content with winning the Formula 3 race. I have to say, can you imagine physically two more different 1950s drivers than Sterling Moss and Gonzales? They probably didn't even adjust the cockpit. Probably. I mean, for anybody who doesn't know, Sterling was Lissom and Nimble, and Gonzales was not. Not at all. Big check. He had white. Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, sorry, where were you before I distracted you? Nevertheless, it wasn't over between Moss and Ferrari or not yet. Enso invited Sterling to Modena, and he was amused when Sterling and his dad turned up in a Morris minor, which they'd driven all the way from London, was actually finished in Sterling's personal paint scheme, which was green and pale green. Mint green, I think. Mint green. Very odd. Long time. Probably the only Morris minor with that finish. So once again, Ferrari offered Sterling a car. At this time for the non-championship Grand Prix of Bari in Poulier, down the right hand side of it, the Italian coast. But the promise that if he did well, there'd be a full contract, a Grand Prix contract for 1952. And even as a possibility, this was big news. There was an editorial in Autosport, which said, it's known that Sterling is intensely patriotic and would prefer to drive a British car. Nevertheless, no one can possibly blame him for grasping the opportunity with both of his capable hands. I don't think Autosport wrote that when Oli Berman took the Ferrari drive in Saudi Arabia earlier this year. Well, I'm sure Oli is intensely patriotic too. I'm sure he is. I'm sure he is. And that's what Sterling hoped to do. But when he and his dad got to Bari after a flight to Rome and a very uncomfortable overnight train journey across Italy, they went to the garage where the Scuderia Ferrari had pitched its camp and discovered that there was no car for Sterling. Well, there was a car, but it wasn't his. The mechanics told him it had been assigned to a much more experienced man, Pierrotarrufi, Italian, of course. Sterling and his dad were furious, particularly when no explanation was forthcoming. And so Ferrari, of course, was almost 500 miles away in Modena and pretty much in Communicardo, I think. Sterling responded by vowing on the spot never to accept a drive from him again. And he kept the promise even when Ferrari sent him a telegram at the end of the season offering an exclusive contract. Part of him in his mission in life had become to beat the Ferrari's. And it took more than a decade for a reconciliation to come when they had another meeting in Italy and answer offered Sterling a car to race in the World Championship in 1962. We're getting ahead of ourselves here, but it's relevant. To be run by Rob Walker's team in Walker's blue and white colours. Ferrari had won the 1961 Drivers and Constructors Championship, so it looked as though after so many near misses Sterling would finally win the title. But before that could happen, he had his awful crash in a Lotus at Goodwood, which left him in a coma for a month and paralyzed down one side of his body for six months. That finished his Grand Prix career and left us with one of Motoracings great might of beans. Although, Enzo Ferrari always claimed that Moss was one of his favourite drivers, along with Nebelari. He did, yeah. And rightly so. Anyway, Hawthorne's 1953 Ferrari deal meant that he became a former one regular, slightly sooner than Moss did. But in 1954 Moss's manager, Ken Gregory, along with his father, I mean Sterling's father, negotiated the purchase of a Maserati 250F, the brand new model from Ferrari's local rival. And one of the most beautiful racing cars ever made, I might add. I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, I might even cavill with one of the, you know, it's perhaps the most beautiful. And what those who drove it said was also the nicest to drive. Absolutely. Absolutely. Anyway, it cost £5,500. They cost a lot more now. Anyway, it cost £5,500, which was actually to be fair, a hell of a lot of money at that time, but it proved to be a true investment because Moss won the 1954 non-championship Aintry 200, his first Formula One win. By the way, there were lots of non-championship Formula One races back in those days. And he finished a long way ahead of Reg Panels Ferrari 625. And a few months later, now with factory Maserati work support, Moss nearly won, nearly won the 1954 Italian Grand Prix at Monza, losing out only when an oil pipe broke with 10 laps to go. And how about this? In the crowd that day was a 14-year-old Tifazzo. His name, Mario and Dretti, and Rackfak. Sensation. Anyway, such impressive results earned Moss a move to Maserati's bends for 1955, alongside the aforementioned Great Juan Manuel Fanger. So from 1955 to the end of 1958, Moss and Hawthorne were both full-timers in the Formula One World Championship. And that feels like a good time for our first ad break. For the break, we mentioned that by 1955, Sterling Moss and Mike Hawthorne were both full-time Formula One drivers. Although we should make clear, as with most, if not all, other drivers at the time, they did plenty of sports car races and other events too. I'm going to ask you, Richard, how well known were they to the British public by that time? I'm asking you, without being cheeky, because I hadn't been born in 1955, nor would I be for another seven years, whereas you were already a schoolboy and doubtless, a regular ordusport reader. Not quite. The money from the pay-around didn't stretch that far. OK. And you never nicked a copy of Ordus board either. But those two were very well-known indeed by then, and not just to motor racing enthusiasts. In my memory, they were up there with the biggest stars of British sport, Stanley Matthews in football and Dennis Compton in cricket, Reg Harris in cycling and Roger Bannister, of course, in athletics. Moss and Hawthorne were young, and they were succeeding in a glamorous sport. Of course, the general public, including me, hardly ever saw them in action. There wasn't much sport on the single TV channel, two channels after 1955, and no-grown pre-racing on TV at all, apart from newsreel clips, if there was a big accident or something. British Pate, type of thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so they would be, you know, entry, 1955, you'd see 20 seconds or something. But otherwise, you just saw them in still photographs in the newspapers. But that didn't stop Moss and Hawthorne becoming heroes to people of all ages, but particularly I'd just say to schoolboys like me. I was very quickly a Moss fan. There was something I and lots of others liked about his sort of cool elegance at the wheel and his habit of winning against the odds. So it was very appealing. But it was Hawthorne, who of the two scored the first really major success when he became Britain's first world championship, Grand Prix winner in 1953 in France and then repeated the trick in 1954 in Spain. And now you're going to tell us about the race of the century. That race is 1953. Well, that first win at Reamson 1953 made headlines. The first Grand Prix victory for a Brit since Simon at the Nürburgring in 1938. And an incredibly dramatic one. Hawthorne's Ferrari and Fangier's Maserati, two red cars, raised neck and neck up the finishing straight at top speed on the final lap with Hawthorne gradually pulling ahead to take the checkered flag by a very narrow margin. Yeah, very, very narrow. I think it was barely a second. And the lead had changed if I'm not mistaken. Again and again, every lap for two hours and three quarters fantastic. Yep. And a year later, he showed it hadn't been a fluke by winning again for Ferrari at the Pedralbus Street Circuit in Barcelona. Moss, on the other hand, had to wait until 1955 for his first win in a world championship Grand Prix. It was at Aintry on the perimeter road of the Grand National course and it was in a Mercedes. He finished a couple of lengths ahead of Fangier, the World Champion and the team's number one driver. And the celebrations were huge, of course. British driver winning the game. the British Grand Prix. But afterwards some people wondered if Fangio had allowed Moss to win on home ground. Just as he'd let another teammate, the German driver Karl Kling, win the Berlin Grand Prix the previous year. Fangio, being a gentleman, of course, always denied it. Yes, he did, and well, look, obviously I don't know whether or not Fangio gifted that win to Moss or not. No one does. Well, no one does now. But I do remember, if I move the, if I may move the subject on slightly, I do remember that when in 2016 I took Kevin Magnuson to have lunch with Sterling and his wife Susie at their famously high-tech muse house in Mayfair, London, you must have been there. Yeah, wonderful. Absolutely, absolutely. Beloved magazine right to you know, interior decoration magazines. Wonderful, and privileged to be, to be inside it. Anyway, the reason I took Magnuson was that Moss was and still is Magnuson's all-time hero, which I think is a feather in a young Danes cap, don't you agree? Oh yeah. Absolutely. Anyway, that's why I arranged the lunch for us all. And while we were sitting there having by the way beer and twiglets, I had the feeling that that must have been served in the Moss's house for decades. It's a dinner of champion. You know, imagine Susie saying, don't worry, I'm sorry, lunch of chap. Yeah, lunch. Imagine Susie saying, don't worry Sterling, I've got the beer and the quid twiglets. Anyway, Kevin asked Sterling, what was it like to race against Fanger? It's a great question to be able to ask someone, a dwindling number of people, probably almost no one left that you could ask that question too now. And I'm not very good at the Moss impersonation, but I'll just show that I'm being Sterling Moss. He said, well, Fanger often got the better of me in Formula One, boy. Remember, he always called you boy. Yeah. And he was well into his 80s at the time. But in sports cars, I could usually handle him. And I remember Kevin just looking at me and saying, so cool, stage whispering under his breath. Anyway, anyway, back to 1955. Yeah, lovely story. But one of the things I liked about Sterling was hearing him say, somebody once said to him, don't you get bored telling people the same stories? They asked you the same questions and you tell them, you have to tell them the same stories. He said, no, he said, and that happens all the time. He said, but I always think when somebody asks me about something that I've spoken of millions of times, they haven't heard the answer from me. And that's true. Isn't that marvelous? It's marvelous. And it's true that he would give that to people. It's very generous. I look like he was a great man, but I'll just, if I may tell you one little story about that Magnuson lunch, Twiglitz and Beer. And Susie had prepared, you've probably seen Sterling's famous scrapbooks or some of that. Anyway, he took out some scrapbooks or she had rooted out some scrapbooks from the early 60s where he'd raced in Ross-Gilder, which is in Denmark. In fact, Kevin's hometown, very sweet of her to find them. Anyway, they turned the pages and he said, boy, you might want to look at this one. And there was a picture and of course it's in Danish. And what does it say, boy? Kevin read the headlines and said, it says you won. And then he turned a couple more pages. What does it say that one boy? It says you won again. Anyway, back to 1955 when Moss also won the millimetre, which was the grueling time trial around a thousand miles, as the name suggests, of Italian public roads. And he won it in a Mercedes 300 SLR sports car. Help by his co-driver, the journalist Dennis Jenkinson whom we often mention in this podcast. He charged from Brescia to Rome and back in 10 hours and seven minutes at an average speed of 97.95 miles an hour. And that's a record that stands in perpetuity since the race was abandoned after several spectators were killed two years later. Magnificent really wasn't it? Magnificent. It was a magnificent race and I actually drove the whole of that 1955 route a few years ago. It took me not 10 hours, but three and a half days. But you didn't have Jenk sitting next to you. I didn't know prompting me and I also observed traffic lights and speed limits. More or less. More or less. But anyway, we'll do a podcast on the millimetre one day because it really deserves it. It does. It certainly does. Back to the rivalry. Hawthorne also won a sports car classic that year, the 24 hours of the mall, sharing a works de type Jaguar with another Brit, either Buib. But the victory was tainted, to say the least, by Hawthorne's involvement in an accident four hours into the race, in which Pierre Le Vex Mercedes flew into the enclosure opposite the pits, killing himself along with 83 spectators, the youngest of them, an 11-year-old schoolboy. It seems incredible today that the race should continue to the finish, but it did. Mercedes withdrew their other two cars during the night, including the one in the lead being driven by Moss and Fangio, and Hawthorne and Buib took the win. They did indeed. And if I may, I'd like to read a short passage about that race, Lamont 1955, from Hawthorne's autobiography, Challenge Me the Race, which was published actually in early 1958. Quote, suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something flying through the air. It was Pierre Le Vex Mercedes, which went cartwheeling over the safety barrier, bounced once, then disintegrated with the force of an exploding bomb. It was all over in a second or two, but it remains fixed in my mind like a slow motion film. End quote. Then Hawthorne goes on to describe the accident in much more detail over quite a few pages, and he finishes that description of the race as follows. And if I may read just a little bit more, Richard, quote, "The next day, as the special editions of the newspapers began to arrive at the circuit, it was obvious that public opinion was going to turn against motor racing. But public opinion is something that is aroused and molded by people in far away newspaper offices, and radio stations, by politicians, and so-called informed sources. The tens of thousands of spectators at Lamont showed no anger, only a staggering fatalism. The accident might have been as remote as an earthquake in Chile, to the throng of people lining the circuit, for they stayed on to the end, despite the cold and driving rain. Indeed, as soon as the dead and injured had been removed, and the frightful evidence of carnage cleared away as far as possible, the spectators crowded back against the rails three or four deep, pressing right up against the burned out wreck of the Mercedes, and trampling into the mud the newspapers, with their screaming headlines about the disaster. Mud, but only a short while before, had been tinged with the blood of the dead and dying. Of course, there was worldwide shock and horror, but after a long and very thorough judicial inquiry, to which Hawthorne actually gave evidence, it was determined that no individual was to blame and no charges were brought. It was, as we'd say today, a racing incident, just one that killed 84 people and injured more than a hundred others. I mean, obviously it goes without saying we hope nothing like that ever ever ever happens again. But Hawthorne's description is quite vivid, isn't it? It's very vivid. I think if something like that did happen again, that would be the end of motor racing. It could be. It could be. And there was another controversy that involved Hawthorne and Moss in the early 1950s, and it was over national service. I dimly remember older brothers of friends doing national service. Yeah, I was just luckily few years too young to get caught by it. But with the Second World War still, fresh in people's minds, and British forces fighting in the war in career, all healthy young males had to spend 18 months in the armed forces and then stay on the reserve strength for another four years. You had to pass a medical examination and some people made efforts to fail it. Just as a few years later, young Americans would pretend to have, well, let's say, bone spurs in order to dodge the Vietnam draft. In Britain, whenever a celebrity appeared to be dodging the call up, the newspapers went to town. And while Hawthorne was racing in Argentina at the start of 1954, the Tory member of Parliament for Isha asked a question about it in the House of Commons, and the Daily Mirror ran an editorial headline, "Catch this dodger!" Hawthorne's dad explained that he'd been given a deferral in order to complete his engineering studies. That's the sort of thing that quite often happened, and then had been informed that his call up had been cancelled. And a year later, it was Moss's turn to catch the flag. Manishinwell, a very prominent left-wing Labour MP stood up in the House and said, "When I hear of these daring and correct courageous young people going abroad, racing around tracks to the danger of their lives, and when I hear of their physical incapacity, I wonder, I should have thought that if they are capable of doing one thing, they were certainly capable of doing the other. Again there were some hostile headlines. Still he was in America at the time, but his father sent Shinwell and every other MP, a copy of his son's medical records, which showed that in 1947, when he was 18, he'd volunteered for the RAF, but he'd been turned down when the medical exam revealed that he'd suffered from nephritis, which was a kidney disease, and that was during his days at Hayleybury School. It had actually cost him two years of his schooling, so he too was off the hook. And by this time, one way or another, Moss and Hawthorne were not just heroes to school boys, but familiar figures to the general public. They were indeed. And I actually think policemen in the 1950s did indeed ask speeding motorists the question, who do you think you are, Sterling Moss? Actually legend has it that Sterling himself was once asked that very question by a policeman who'd stopped him for speeding. I mean, that may or may not be apocryphal, but it's a lovely story and I'm going to say I believe it. Well, so do I, and it must be true. And he was actually done for speeding once and ban for a bit in his Morris minor, I think. And that made headlines too. I wouldn't mind having been driven by Sterling Moss in a speeding Morris minor. Anyway, what is without doubt is that Moss was also not just a speeder, but a bit of a ladies' man. If I may say so, when he talked of Crumpet, which he did often, he wasn't referring to a small circle of griddle bread made from an unsweetened batter of milk, flour and yeast. Was he? Yeah, yeah. They are very tasty, but that's not what Sterling meant. No, he meant beautiful women, which the word Crumpet used to be used to describe back in the day. Look, it's a totally unacceptable usage now, of course, and terribly passe, but we are going back more than 60 years. Anyway, Hawthorne was also a bit of a ladies' man, but while Moss used to eye women up in the crowd as he was racing through the streets of Monaco, or so, he said, Hawthorne would chat them up in village pubs in Surrey. I mean, whatever works, I guess. Having said that, Hawthorne did father a son with Jacqueline Delone, whom he met at Reims in 1953, one of his most glorious weekends, of course, so it wasn't always village pubs in Surrey for Mike. Moss was famously lean and fit as you've said, Richard. Hawthorne, by contrast, well, he wasn't fat, but he was certainly stocky. Can we call him stocky? I guess, yeah, yeah. He wasn't fat, but he was stocky. Well, he wasn't Gonzales. Don't give me rough. Definitely not, no. No, no. Anyway, although Moss went prematurely bald, he always looked younger than Hawthorne, I thought, despite Hawthorne's luxuriant shock of blonde hair. Hawthorne's sports jacket and bow tie almost ever present, even when he was flat out flailing away at the wheel of a Formula One car, believe it or not, also made him look old. Well, to modernize anyway. I mean, he had about him the look of a country square, didn't he? Yeah, there's a bit of the young farmer's club about him, I always thought. Anyway, they both smoked. Everyone did back then. Sterling smoked cigarettes, promoting Craven A, a once popular brand that disappeared in all but a very few countries long ago. Back in the day, though, Craven A adds, carried a photograph of sterling in a race helmet, puffing on a siggy alongside the quote, "When I smoke, I'm choosy. Craven A gives me all I want of a smoke and nothing I don't." Hawthorne famously smoked a pipe. "I wonder who is the last Formula One driver to smoke regularly?" Well, and admitted. "I do some research, isn't that?" And admitted. "And admitted." Yeah. "Actually, in last week's pod, Patrick DePierre we mentioned, he was definitely a big smoke." "Can't imagine any of the current ones." No, not even clandestinely. Yes, but perhaps, perhaps some of them, but we won't go there. Anyway, Hawthorne famously smoked a pipe and I'm absolutely sure that no current Formula One driver's smoke a pipe. Can you imagine Oli Bermann smoking a pipe? Anyway, Richard, let's get back to sensible conversation. You've mentioned Moss's nephritis, a kidney disease, but coincidentally, Hawthorne also suffered from a kidney disease, a much more serious one, in fact. And by 1955, he already had a kidney removed. And his remaining kidney was beginning to cause him problems in his final years. The story goes that he wasn't expected to see the age of 35. I mean, in fact, he didn't even see 30, but that was for another reason, as we'll discuss soon. But before we come to that, I just wonder, ask you, do you think they were friends? I mean, Hawthorne was extremely pally with Peter Collins, but what about Moss? What was the nature of the Hawthorne Moss relationship? Well, they got on well enough that Moss once gave Hawthorne a lift from England to a race in France. And in those days, the drivers from different teams regularly shared transportation and stayed in the same hotels and had meals together and swam in the hotel pools together during a race weekend. But the relationship between Moss and Hawthorne was nothing like as close as that between Hawthorne and Collins, as you say. Those two were genuine mates. Mon ami mates, in fact. And if any of our listeners don't know what I'm on about there, Mon ami mate is what Hawthorne and Collins call each other. And Mon ami. They got it from a cartoon strip, I think. A French cartoon? Indeed. What's somebody, you know, address somebody as Mon ami mate? Mon ami mate, so with them. And they called each other, "Morning Mon ami mate", etc. And actually, Mon ami mate is the title of Chris Nixon's excellent book about them, about Hawthorne and Collins, which dear listener, I mean, you really should buy if you spotted anywhere because it's quite hard to come by now and it's usually pretty pricey when you do. It's an absolute classic. And it's easy to imagine that Hawthorne was a bit wary of the kind of professional attitude with which Moss approached his career. And probably a bit cynical too, about Moss's ability to gather publicity. All his life Moss was more than happy to give interviews to road test to car for a magazine or to show up as a sponsor's event. When I was a cub reporter for a local evening paper, he took me for a drive in a big gatti to celebrate the opening of a new Mercedes dealership. You've just, I have to say, the way you've just dropped that in. When I was a cub reporter, I was driven by Sterling Moss in a Bugatti. Well, here's another one. Many years later, when I was working for a national paper, I sat behind him in a two-seater soapbox cart going down the Goodwood hill to publicise the festival of speed. And before we set off, I said, "You be Moss, I'll be Jengs." Anyway, there are two examples of how he turns being Sterling Moss into a very successful business, which could be sustained very profitably after the end of his grand pre-career. And Hawthorne was known to refer to him from time to time behind his back as Moses, his family's old Jewish name. Of course, that would be unacceptably antisemitic now. But back then, I have to say, it probably seemed like a bit of relatively harmless public schoolboy Joshing. In fact, during Moses' school days at Hayleybury, when he was a flying winger on the rugby field, he did hear occasional shouts of "catch the year." Again, not uncommon for the time, but completely unacceptable now. I mean, of course. Completely unacceptable and just almost amazing to hear to our modern ears. There you are. And as drivers, I think, of the two Moss was the purest favourite. He'd copied his relaxed, straight arms head back style from Nino Farina, the first world champion, that it became as much his own signature as the White Hellmitty War. Hawthorne, by contrast, seemed more obviously pugnacious at the wheel. You know, lean forward a bit more, not so elegant or very much lean forward rather than lean back driver. As I say, I was always a Mossman or boy, but I do think there's a danger now of underrating Hawthorne for various reasons. Matt, you and I would probably agree that Dennis Jenkinson, Motorsports Continental correspondent for many years, was as good a judge of a post-war racing driver as anyone. And here's what he wrote about Hawthorne in his great book, The Racing Driver, published in 1958, talking about drivers who had the fighting quality, he called Tiger. Quote, "One can quote examples of seeing Hawthorne Tiger ever since his Cooper Bristol days. Remember how he caught and passed a Villeuraisy who was driving the Big Ferrari at Borum Wood in the pouring rain back in 1952? And then the next year when he fought Fangio tooth and nail throughout the French Grand Prix and won. and unheard of thing for an Englishman to do. Or, more recently, his driver Naples last year to recover second place after being delayed at the pits by a broken fuel pipe. And the opening laps of the 1956 British Grand Prix at Silverstone with the BRM. Hawthorne Tigers, alright? Great stuff, and yes, I'd agree with you, Richard, that of the two Moss was the finer ever. But then, I mean then, in the 1950s, Moss was as good as anyone, actually better than anyone, other than Asgarian Fangio. Some might say Moss was the equal of Asgarian Fangio, in fact. But as we often say on Colossally, that's probably another podcast. Be quite a good one, actually. Anyway, Hawthorne was damn good himself. I don't know. We can never know whether Hawthorne's growing realization that his kidney disease might mean that he might never live to old age, or even to middle age, made him less risk averse. But I don't think so. His driving was never aggressive, nor even devil-may-care in the manner of, you know, Nino Farina. Well, not on track anyway. On the gilford bypass, one rainy day, maybe it was, but we'll come to that later. Of course, attitudes to risk were rather different in those days, and drivers were asked about it all the time in interviews. Moss was nearly killed several times, on the banking at Monzer in 1957, when the steering failed on his Maserati at 160 miles an hour. And at Spine, 1960, when a wheel came off on his lotus, and he broke both legs and crushed three vertebrae and was racing again within seven weeks. Unbelievable, not amazing. But here's what he said, quote, "If you ask me if it was a dangerous sport, I'd say yes, obviously. But what's the point of living if you can't do at least one thing?" As for Hawthorne, even after his involvement in the catastrophe at the moment, and the deaths of Luigi Musso and Peter Collins, he thought that a concern with safety precautions was something that could be taken too far. Bear in mind, too, that when he rejoined Ferrari in 1957, his teammates were Eugenio Castellotti, Alfonso Deportago, Musso and Collins, and within 18 months, all four would be dead. Quite a tally, quite a telling statistic. Yeah, that was an awful time. Yeah. And here's something he wrote, "Motoracing is dangerous. It's dangerous to climb up mountains. It's dangerous to cross main roads. It's dangerous to explore a jungle." Grand Prix racing is a calculated risk accepted by those who take part in it. No regulations could be drawn up, which would guarantee you safety. If you take away the normal hazards of motor racing, you take away the reasons for going motor racing. That's from a book called Champion Year, about the 1958 season, which he finished with his ghostwriter after the final racing Casablanca, and which was published a few months later after his death. Actually, it's an interesting point because, therefore, both Moss and Hawthorne had in common the view that danger was part of it. I think they all did in those days. I think they did. The attitudes varied slightly in some prefer the safety of old aerodrome circuits, others like Moss preferred road circuits with the telegraph poles and ditches in their farmhouses and stuff to run into. Amazing. Anyway, we've now talked about both Hawthorne's books, Challenge Me the Race and Champion Year. I like them. I like them both. I know they were both ghost Britain, but the thoughts were probably Hawthorne's. Yes, I think they're very, very good reads, even now all these years later. They bring that world to life again. I recommend them. If anyone's listening, Challenge Me the Race and Champion Year. They're not too expensive. They can't find them online. Anyway, as I say, whatever their differences as men or indeed as drivers, Moss and Hawthorne were quick and competitive, both of them, which is how they came to be duking it out for the Formula One Drivers World Championship in 1958. So let's set the scene, shall we? At the beginning of the 1958 Formula One season, Hawthorne had scored two championship status Formula One Grand Prix wins, both of them for for R.I. in 1953 and 1954, as we've mentioned earlier. Also, he'd finished third in the 1954 Formula One Drivers World Championship. Moss, meanwhile, was a six-time World Championship status Formula One Grand Prix winner, heading into 1958 and he'd had a run of three successive second-place finishes in the Formula One Drivers World Championship in 1955, 1956 and 1957. So he really was a bonafide superstar and he was considered by most people who knew how many beans made five to be the natural heir to Fanzhou, who of course would won his fifth Formula One Drivers World Championship in 1957 and would retire in 1958, aged 47. Yeah, Moss had built that reputation off the back of some really sensational wins. Wins that even today are up there with the very best in motor racing history. In 1957 alone, there'd been three historic Grand Prix wins, the Vanwall, the British team, he'd finally got to drive a competitive British Grand Prix car. He'd shared the winning Vanwall at the British Grand Prix with Tony Brooks and that was at Aintry, the first World Championship Grand Prix win for a British driver, British car combination, beating the Ferraris and Maseratis. There were two of them, Brooks and Moss because Brooks started the race with an injury. Moss has car broke down, Brooks brought his car in and Moss took it over and in those days you could share the win and the championship points. And then Moss beat the Italian teams on their home ground first at Pescarra and then at Monza. Pescarra actually, just correct me if I'm wrong Richard, but I believe there's a rather good book that's been written about that race. Can you remind me who wrote it? Why would anyone want to write a book about one obscure motor racing in 1957 anyway? It was, by the way, it was my friend Richard Williams and do buy it, it's excellent. The last road race, that's what it's called. That's what it's called. And Moss was like Fanzhou in that you could put him into almost any car and he'd win. And indeed his sixth World Championship wins to that point had come with three different teams, Mercedes, Maserati and VanWall. Yes. And it's fair to say that Moss had done a lot more winning at the top level, heading into the 1958 season than had Hawthorne, we've made that clear. Because Hawthorne had actually had a pretty lean few years in Formula One following his early breakthrough victories. In fact, even making the podium had been a struggle for him in the mid-1950s. 1955 and 1956 were terrible years for him. I'm talking about Hawthorne. He scored no Formula One World Championship points at all in 1955 and in 1956 he scored four, only four. Why? Why so? Well, we've mentioned earlier that Hawthorne's dad owned a garage in Surrey and when he died, when Hawthorne's father died, I mean, Mike made the decision to move to a British team, VanWall, for 1955 so that he could take over the running of his father's garage. Anyway, after a couple of unsuccessful races for VanWall in early 1955, Hawthorne headed back to Ferrari. But his desire to continue to race sports cars for Jaguar, with whom he'd won that tragic Lamar 24-hours race in 1955 as we've explained, actually off the back of a brilliant drive, it was a brilliant drive by him, although of course it was overshadowed by the tragedy that we've talked about. Anyway, that enthusiasm for racing Jaguar sports cars encouraged him to leave Ferrari for BRM for 1956, which didn't work out either. And he also suffered a couple of bad crashes that year, which left him, well, perhaps a little disillusioned with racing in general for a while, didn't it? Yeah, possibly. Possibly. Anyway, that disillusionment didn't last long because a move back to a works Ferrari drive for 1957, where he was united with a fellow Brit, Peter Collins, who became his great-great mate, his monami mate, in fact, reinvigorated his career. And that feels like the perfect time to take our final ad break. So here we are then. We've arrived in 1958 at last, a season in which the Formula One Drivers World Championship would boil down to a straight fight between Sterling, Moss and Mike Hawthorne. And if that wasn't honour enough, whichever of them won it would become Britain's first Formula One World Champion. High stakes. The season was to be 11 rounds long, well, 10 if you discount the Indy 500, which you probably should, because it was run to different rules and was erased that none of the Formula One big hitters ever really entered in those days. Although strangely, it did count for the Formula One World Championship. in the fifties, didn't it? Anyway, so the season began in Argentina in January, but remarkably, there were only 10 entries, 10 cars entered. Why was that Richard? - Well, the main reason was a big change in the F1 fuel regulations for 1958. From that year, alcohol-based mixtures were banned, and all the cars had to run on regular pump fuel, and that meant significant modifications. Of the big teams, the Maseratis and Ferraris were ready for that. The VanWalls and BRMs weren't, so they didn't go to Argentina. And that didn't suit Moss, who decided he couldn't afford to miss the chance of getting some points for the championship. So after persuading VanWall to let him drive another car, just for that one race, he got his friend Rob Walker, the heir to the Johnny Walker whiskey fortune, to lend him his little Cooper climax. Now, that was basically a Formula 2 car, with a slightly enlarged two-liter engine, and they'd be up against the two and a half liters of the Italian cars. And it was rear-engine, or mid-engine, to be more exact, at a time when every Formula 1 world championship race had been won in a car with the engine in front of the driver. So when Moss arrived at the Buenos Aires autodrome, no one expected the Cooper to be able to compete with the more powerful Ferraris, even when he qualified seventh. But through a very clever piece of strategy, Moss managed to beat Luigi Mussos Ferrari into second and Hawthorne into third. Because while the Italian teams were making pit stops to change their tires, Moss's mechanic, the great Alphrancis, put out a new set on the pit counter, making it look as though the Cooper would be coming in soon. And it would have to be a slow stop, because taking off each Cooper wheel required unscrewing four nuts, whereas each Ferrari wheel, wire wheels, had only a single knock-off hub, anorac fact. It certainly is, and I'm happy to hear you record it. Thank you. And that was probably the greatest bluff in the history of motor racing. Instead of changing his tires, Moss managed to run all the way through on one set of Dunlops. And by the end, they were so far gone that the rubber had worn down, and he was looking at the canvas underneath. But he managed to hang on, and he finished two and a half seconds ahead of Musso, who was furious that his team had been fooled. I have to say, it is one of the great victories, because it had that tactical gamesmanship, but totally legit. Yep, absolutely. And then Moss had to be able to handle the tires, even as they were falling apart. And Musso was catching him, of course, at the end, or fresh tires. So it must have been brilliant to be there. Oh, imagine it. Imagine it slowly dawning on the Ferrari team, oh God, we've been hoodwinked here. And here are a couple more Anorak facts for you, Matt. It was Cooper's first world championship win as a constructor, and the first Grand Prix win for a rear-engine car, or mid-engined, since auto-union in the 1930s. Nice one. Nice one, Richard. Or nice two, I should say. God knows how many Anorak facts we've clocked up this podcast. But anyway, plenty. Anyway, Cooper won the second race of the 1958 season two at Monaco, albeit, imagine that in this day and age, it was four months later. I mean, that wasn't rare, really, in those days, to have a four-month gap between races. No, I mean, sometimes there was a four-month gap at the end of the season two between the penultimate race and the very last one, in which tension could build for the drivers championship showdown. A different world, as we've said a few times. Anyway, that second Cooper win of the 1958 season at Monaco really put the rear-engine cat among or the mid-engine cat among the front-engine pigeons. Quite a lot of people had thought that perhaps Argentina had been a fluke. But despite Enzo Ferro's insistence that, quote, "the horse should always pull the carriage," unquote, "car design was only going in one direction, and that was in a rear-engine direction." Anyway, this time the winner wasn't Sterling Moss. It was Maurice Trantignol, whom we mentioned briefly actually on our last podcast about French drivers. And Trantignol won that Monaco Grand Prix in Rob Walker's Cooper, beating Luigi Musso's Ferrari. So Musso had been done twice over, really. And actually, it was Musso who took the early championship lead because Moss and Hawthorne were both retired at Monaco. Moss would win the next race, though, taking the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort by nearly 48 seconds as Hawthorne finished a lap down in fifth. But there was a reversal of fortunes in the following round at Spa as Hawthorne finished second behind Van Walst Tony Brooks, Moss's number two. And Moss, who'd taken the lead from third on the grid at the start, Mr. Gear and Bluey's engine on the first lap retiring on the spot. And that tightened things up significantly in the championship standing. It did indeed. And things would remain tight after the next race, which was the French Grand Prix at fearsomly fast reams, which we've mentioned before, on a track that played perfectly to the strengths of Ferrari's Dino 246, Hawthorne took the pole ahead of Musso, and Collins made it to Ferrari 124. Moss was only sixth on the grid, qualifying two seconds slower than Hawthorne. And in the race, Sterling could do little to challenge his title rival, really, who beat him into second place by nearly 25 seconds. It was Hawthorne's first Grand Prix win since the 1954 Spanish Grand Prix. And it would also prove to be his third and last World championship status, Formula One Grand Prix win. Anyway, sadly, it's a race that will always be remembered for the awful death of Luigi Musso, who crashed at high speed at the kink just after the pits on lap 10, sending car and driver some assaulting through the air. Musso was rushed to hospital, be the died of his injuries later, depriving Italy of its last remaining top-line driver of the era. And also very sadly, as we'll get to soon, he wasn't the only driver to be killed in Formula One that year. No. There were rumors, and there were never more than strong rumors that Musso had been trying too hard, because he wanted to win the unusually large amount of prize money on offer at Reams in order to cover losses on his car dealership back in Rome. And his gambling debts. And he was selling American cars, wasn't he? Yeah, some packards, possibly a car. A few stewed abacus or something like that, yeah. In Rome. I mean, his idea. Yeah. I've never seen a packard in Rome. He was probably trying to sell them to the people from the film industry, maybe the booming Italian film industry in Rome. Yeah, well, never. Anyway, his girlfriend, Fiamma Bresci, claimed afterwards that his English teammates, Hawthorne and Collins, had ganged up against her Luigi, which forced him to drive beyond his limits. I find that very hard to believe, although I can completely understand how her grief might have made her think it. She said some very-- she said she hated them, in fact. She did. She hated them immediately afterwards. But then she said also said that she saw them playing football with a tin can in a hotel courtyard one day, and she thought, I can't really carry my hatred of these two guys with me forever. There we are. Fair enough. Musso was quick. He wasn't fangeo quick or moss quick, but he was capable of winning a Grand Prix if they weren't around, although sadly, he never managed it. And as you've said, Matt, he was the last of a generation. Italy and Ferrari didn't have another driver of that quality until the rents of Bandini in the '60s. But anyway, the next race was another good one for Hawthorne in championship terms, as he finished second behind Collins in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. And at this point, you have to remember that Collins was also very much in the running for the World Championship. But even better for Hawthorne was that Moss, who'd taken pole position, picked up another non-score after suffering yet another engine failure. Yes. And those failures were beginning to derail Moss's World Championship Challenge. And he'd suffer another one at the next race, the Nürburgring, DNFing again, did not finishing again. Hawthorne also DNFed at the Nürburgring though, but, but, far, far worse. He had to endure the loss of Collins, his great friend and teammate, who was killed after his car left the track and struck a tree head on. I mean, Richard, how devastating was that? Not just for Hawthorne and Ferrari, but also for motorsport in general, particularly in the UK. I mean, was there ever a sense that Hawthorne might quit the sport at that point there and then, do you think? I mean, in Hawthorne's book, "Champion Year," which you've mentioned already, and which he dedicated to Collins incidentally, he finished the chapter on the tragedy of the Nürburgring with the following very short paragraph, quote, "Fame somebody once said is the span of a day, but to live in the hearts of people that is something. They are words that might well have been written with Pete in mind." I mean, he was extremely fond of Collins, wasn't he? And dreadfully upset when he died. Yeah, he was devastated. And after his friend was killed, he may have begun to think about quitting at the end of the season once the championship had been decided. But if he did, he didn't tell anyone. And as we often find ourselves saying, in those days attitudes to death were just different. Very often I'd look at my dad's daily telegraph on a Monday morning and see that a top driver had been killed in a Scari Castellotti, Deportago, Musso Collins, and later on Jean-Berrari, Harry Shell, Von Tripps, the Rodriguez brothers, and Bandoni, of course. And Jim Clark, who was my next hero after Moss. When you just reel those names off one after another, it really brings it home. And there were more. Yes, those are just the really famous ones. Yeah. And it was awful. And it was shocking every time. But it was never really a surprise. And it never seemed like a reason for anyone to stop doing it. So Hawthorne didn't quit. He raced on. And three weeks later, at the next race in Portugal, on the challenging Boa Vista Street track in Oporto, he finished second behind Moss. But only after an act of extraordinary sportsmanship from Moss, that's remembered to this day. And it happened on the final lap of the race with Moss leading and Hawthorne's second. Mike had actually spun, and in restarting his Ferrari and getting back onto the track, he'd briefly pointed the car against the flow of the racing traffic. That was against the rules. A marsh reported him and he was duly disqualified. But, very dramatically, Moss intervened on Hawthorne's behalf, going to the meeting of the race stewards afterwards to argue that the Ferrari had been on the pavement, not on the racetrack itself, when Hawthorne was getting going again. And Mike was reinstated to second place. Had Moss not supported him, Hawthorne would have been disqualified, and his championship chances would have been severely damaged. I had no hesitation in doing it. Moss once told the journalist Maurice Hamilton, adding, "I can't see how this is open to debate." He wasn't on the circuit. The fact that he was my only rival in the championship he meant didn't come into my thinking. Absolutely not. Matt, was this the greatest act of shivalry and sportsmanship in F1 history? Good question. Well, it was certainly one of them, yes. And are we going to resist the temptation to compare and contrast the sportsmanship of Moss in 1958 with the antics of some of today's Formula One stars or indeed some of today's Formula One team principles? Yes, I think we are. Let's stay with 1958, you agree? Yes, today for sure. Okay. Next up was Monza. Moss took the poll. But he went out, retired, after just 17 of the 70 laps with a broken gearbox. The race was won by Moss's VanWall teammate, Brookes, Tony Brookes. His third win of actually a brilliant season. He would have been a worthy champion too. Absolutely. And you called him Moss's number two, which is technically true at the time, but he wasn't anybody's number two. Anyway, Hawthorne finished second. So Hawthorne had a hefty lead going into the last Grand Prix of the season. But VanWall had won the Constructors World Championship at Monza, the first ever incidentally, because prior to 1958 there'd been no such thing as a Constructors World Championship. Anarek, fact. Yep. And as you say, that set up a final race showdown in Morocco with the Aindabb Circuit in Casablanca, hosting its first World Championship Grand Prix and, as it would turn out, its last. Only the top six results from each driver counted towards the title in those days. So the maths was a little tricky to work out, especially for a maths dunce like me. But essentially, to win the title, Moss needed to win the race and grab the extra point for setting fastest lap with Hawthorne finishing no higher than third. Or to win without the fastest lap with Hawthorne again finishing third or lower, but again without the fastest lap. You did that pretty well for a maths dunce. White convincing for somebody who took three goes to pass a level maths. Yes, okay. So Hawthorne took the pole, but Moss was next to him on the grid, and the 10th of a second slower, and he took the lead at the start and led all the way to the finish as well as setting the fastest lap. And behind him is VanWall teammate Tony Brooks held second place, keeping Hawthorne at bay until his engine blew up just after half distance. Phil Hill, Ferrari's replacement for Peter Collins, took over second place, but near the end, when it became that he wasn't fast enough to challenge Moss, the American obeyed instructions to slow down and let Hawthorne buy. So Hawthorne got the six points for second place that he needed to clinch the championship by a single point from Moss, and at the end, Moss got out of his car and shook Hawthorne's hand. So you've got it done, you old son-so, he said, except he probably didn't say so. He probably didn't. For VanWall though, it was hard to celebrate becoming the first ever champion constructor. Tony VanDeVell, the team's owner, had achieved his long held ambition of beating those bloody red cars, the Ferraris and Maserati's. But late in the race, the engine of the team's third entry had seized, causing a crash and a fire in which its driver, Stuart Lewis Evans, had been very badly burned. VanDeVell used his private plane to fly Lewis Evans straight back to England, where he was taken to the specialist Burns unit at East Grinstead Hospital in Sussex. But six days later, he died. On the plane, VanDeVell had told his team manager that Lewis Evans wouldn't be lying on that stretcher if it wasn't for my bloody stupid hobby. A month later, he'd withdraw the VanWall team from further immediate involvement in Grand Prix racing. And once again, Matt, imagine that happening today, a team winning the constructor's title and then shutting its doors. More or less unthinkable, I'd say. Anyway, Tony VanDeVell wasn't the only one deeply affected by the tragedy. Lewis Evans' close friend and kind of manager, Bernie Eccleston, we've heard of him, was also on that plane, occasionally lifting a cup of sweet tea to his mortally wounded friend's lips. Eccleston sold his connoit team and completely disappeared from the sport for several years. Anyway, Hawthorne won the World Championship, having won just one race that season, one championship status, Grand Prix, just one to Mosses III and Brooks III. The only other driver to win a Formula One World title with us few wins was, I think you know this Richard, Keke Rosberg in 1982, Anorak Fakt. Anyway, back to 1958. What happened next? Well, after the Moroccan Grand Prix had finished and Hawthorne had been declared Formula One World Champion, the Ferrari team manager, Romolo Tavoni, slapped his victorious driver on the back and said, "Next year we'll do it all again." But in champion year, the book champion year Hawthorne wrote that he shook his head and replied, "I won't be racing next year. I'm going to retire." Of course, you'll be racing next year, Tavoni replied. But no. Hawthorne had decided to give up racing at the end of the year, and he was as good as his word. In due course, he issued a statement to the press association announcing that retirement. And so Ferrari was hopping mad to say the least. And he'd been missing out on the extra starting money due to having a world champion in his team at every race in 1959. Poor old Enzo Ferrari. Quite often hopping mad, actually. You know more than I do about him, but I'm not wrong, am I? No, I mean, it was part of his repertoire of gestures, I think, hopping madness. Absolutely. Then we've talked, we've hinted about this already. Let's go forward to 1959, January 1959, and a wet day on a difficult and dangerous stretch of the Gilford bypass in the southeast of England. While driving his very souped up 3.4-litre Jaguar Mark I, in convoy with Rob Walker's fast and exotic, gallwing Merc 300SL. And no overall speed limit in those days. No overall speed limit. Anyway, they were driving together Hawthorne and Walker and Hawthorne lost control on a right hand bend, glanced an oncoming Bedford, Bedford Laurie, and skidded into a roadside tree so hard that it was uprooted. I mean, he was killed instantly. He was 29. At the inquest, there wasn't inquest, Walker refused to reveal when I think repeatedly I'm told asked by the coroner how fast they've been driving, and his refusal prompted press speculation that they'd been racing each other. And perhaps they had in later life walker no longer than I did in fact. Anyway, the coroner returned a verdict of accidental death. It's rather poignant that if that was a race between them, it was a race between a green jaguar and actually I can't remember the colour of Rob's. So it was a mother German car in the city? Yes, anyway, it was a tragedy and I think Hawthorne is underrated now. You've mentioned that Richard and I would go along with it. As we've said no, he wasn't as good as Moss nor was he as good as Fangio or Ascari, but he was as good as Collins probably in my view and he raced with more margin than Collins, his mon ami mate. Perhaps he wasn't quite as good as Brooks, I'm a big Brooks fan actually. And while we're on the subject, this is what Moss said about that. Quote, "My compete were both bloody good, but I wouldn't rate either with Tony." So Moss was destined never to win the title. Although he might have done, if he hadn't crashed at Goodwood on Easter Monday 1962, much later he said after the events of 1958 he'd lost interest in the whole idea of the championship, although not in winning Grand Prix. And who can blame him? He tried to put it all into perspective when he told the American writer Ken Purdy in an absolutely marvelous book called All But My Life. Quote, "So Mike won the championship once and Phil Hill won it once and Graham, he meant Hill of course, won it once and remember he was speaking in 1963. And Jack Brabham won it twice. Do I have to win it three times to prove I'm a better driver than Jack is?" Fangio won it five times. If I won it six times would that make me a better driver than Fangio? No, it wouldn't. Winning it ten times wouldn't make me a better driver than Fangio because I'm not. Fangio was better than I was and that's that. So much for the stories that statistics tell. And he said he never regretted what he did in Portugal, the gesture that cost him the title in the end. Do you believe in that? I do believe him, yes. And in a strange way I actually think Sterling Moss is failure to win the Formula One World Championship actually adds to his allure and his mystique because he'll probably forever be known as the greatest driver, never to have won the Formula One World Drivers Championship. But listen, he started 66 World Championship status Formula One Grand Prix. He won 16 of them. He bagged 16 pole positions and 19 fastest laps. In the Formula One Drivers World Championship he finished third three times and second four times, but never first. But you could see what he meant and still means to people when his life was celebrated in a memorial service at Westminster Abbey this summer with a packed congregation including several World Champions and with some of his most famous cars including the literally priceless Mila-Millia Mercedes parked outside in the sunshine. It was a very emotional day. But Hawthorne isn't forgotten either. Every year on January the 22nd, that's the anniversary of his death, a group of enthusiasts and people who knew him gather quietly and informally to pay tribute at his grave in a cemetery in Farnham. That's a different scale of tribute maybe, but it's no less profound and heartfelt and perhaps in keeping with the man, indeed so. And that feels like a great place to say and colossally, that's history. We hope you've enjoyed our look at the two men who inspired the generation, who inspired the generation, who inspired the generation of Lando Norris and George Russell. I thought you were on, uh, uh, Gris repeat, repeat there like a stuck record, but now I see what you're on about. Thank you. Anyway, if you'd like to share your thoughts on today's episode or any of the other subjects we've touched on in this series, you can get in touch via podcasts at the hyphen race.com or via social media. I'm at the bish f1 and Richard is at our Williams 1947. By the way, I'm on Twitter and now Blue Sky, you're not yet on Blue Sky are you? I haven't yet made the chat. You might, you might, people on Blue Sky asked me to persuade you to do so, so I'm here by doing that. Anyway, remember, if you want to enjoy ad free listening or treat yourself to some colossally merch merchandise, there are links to both the race members club and the race shop in the episode description. And actually now is the perfect time to join the race members club as we've got a special black Friday offer where you can get 30% off your first month. So that's it for this week. Until next time with thanks to our very patient producer, Johnny Reynolds and to you for listening and of course to my call phone and sterling moss for their immense and unforgettable contribution to the history of the sport. It's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from him.