I had a very interesting chat with my friend Simon Taylor yesterday.
Stirling Moss’s famous scrapbooks have just been loaned by his widow Susie to the RAC Club library in Pall Mall, London. Leafing through them Simon suddenly noticed an entry for August 12, 1950, in which an indistinct photo of an HWM is listed as being SM, “retired due to gearbox failure, set fastest lap at 67.67mph’. The race in question was at Berne, Switzerland.
Simon freaked out – because here was a race he knew he hadn’t mentioned in his recently-published and very fine HWM history. So he double-checked, and then dug deeper.
Hmm – 1950 Prix de Berne Formula 2 race around the Bremgarten circuit really took place there on June 4, 1950 – not on August 12, 1950.
HWM entries for Rudi Fischer (finished 6th), John Heath (8th) and George Abecassis (9th). No Moss – sometimes listed only as DNA – ‘did not appear’ (or ‘did not arrive’).
Hmmm again.
In Stirl’s scrapbooks it is very evident that the early ones, 1948-49 had been assembled by him. From 1950 the hand-written notes and headings differ, presumably reflecting a secretary or maybe Ken Gregory, or some factotum instead, having put them together in period. And upon close inspection of the cutting photo under that August heading it’s clearly Rudi Fischer in the car at Berne – not Stirling Moss at all.
Simon began to heave a sigh of relief. He hadn’t screwed up – but several others had.
Now the first book to offer a comprehensive listing of SM’s racing he thought was Ken Purdy’s ‘All But my Life’ – produced after Stirl’s career-ending 1962 crash at Goodwood. He lists the Prix de Berne as having been held on August 12, at the Bremgarten, with Moss retiring after having set fastest lap at 67.67mph.
Well now – the fastest F2 lap at the Bremgarten back in 1950 actually averaged 152.02km/h – 94.48mph. So where could that alleged, pathetically slow, ’67.67mph’ come from?
Previous race for Moss had taken place on August 5, 1950 – ‘The Daily Telegraph’ 500cc F3 race meeting….at Brands Hatch.
There he’d won a Heat in his Cooper-JAP Mark IV and had set a new lap record calculated at the time as an average of 67.54mph – a respectable short-circuit Brands Hatch speed in a 500cc F3 car, then transposed to a Bremgarten alleged fastest lap in a 2-litre HWM.
Simon then studied the ‘All But my Life’ table and recognised – from his vast magazine publishing experience – the dead hand of a hot-metal typesetter, missed by a proof-reader. The block of type relating to Brands Hatch had instead, almost certainly, been misplaced to the phantom ‘August 12 Prix de Berne’ just below– faithfully following the gen featured in the contemporary Moss scrapbook for 1950.
OK – the plot now thickens. When I produced ‘My Cars – My Career’ with Stirl in the late 1980s I was paranoid about getting his racing record right. Now you know that despite this I still screwed-up by missing the Sandown Park, Melbourne, races (recently discussed here on TNF thank you very much). Now I began to appreciate I’d also stuffed up his 1950 record within that Appendix material by including this phantom Prix de Berne appearance of ‘August 12’ – just like Purdy.
But – when our late mate Alan Henry did his ‘Stirling Moss – All My Races’ book in 2009, he made the same error – but compounded it. On page 51 of that book this August 12, 1950, ‘Prix de Berne’ is listed with Stirling (first person) apparently maintaining that “I was back behind the wheel again at Bremgarten for the Prix de Berne. It was some consolation that I led the race and set the fastest lap, but eventually the gearbox broke and I had to retire again”.
Hmmmmmmmmm – well unfortunately, that was not the case.
Stirl’s racing programme instead had been interrupted by his injurious crash during the Naples GP on July 22, 1950 – after which he only returned to driving in time for the Brands Hatch 500cc F3 meeting on August 7. He did not race five days later at Berne – because the Prix de Berne had actually been held there on June 4 – more than six weeks earlier.
In fact his next race after Brands Hatch would be on August 14, at Ostend, Belgium, again in the 500cc Cooper-JAP.
So here’s another instance of the Moss record total of races etc having been compromised – for which read ph------up - by us scribblers.
But in this case it all seems to date back to that original compiler of the Maestro’s personal album for 1950. While my racing record in ‘My Cars – My Career’ repeats the Purdy error, interestingly in our 1950 HWM chapter text ‘SM’ explains how he missed the Bremgarten race because “…I developed some form of jaundice and missed the trip”. At least we got that bit right.
In any case, if I still had a dog I might now go and kick the poor thing. Dammit. The next time Simon rings I’ll hang up.
Still – some do say that confession is good for the soul. For those fellow enthusiasts who care about all this old nonsense, it should also be good for setting the record right…
DCN.