Racing Legend Moss Had No Starts but Interesting Connections to Indy 500
April 14, 2020 | By Paul Kelly, Indianapolis Motor Speedway
Many of the greatest competitors in motor racing history have competed and won at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for more than 110 years.
Legends such as A.J. Foyt, Al Unser, Rick Mears, Mario Andretti, Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Emerson Fittipaldi, Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Tony Stewart, Michael Schumacher, Valentino Rossi and many more have graced Victory Lane at IMS.
One name conspicuously absent is English great Sir Stirling Moss. Not only did he never win at IMS, Moss never competed at the Racing Capital of the World.
Moss, considered by most to be one of the greatest and most versatile drivers in history, died April 12 at age 90 after a long illness. He was a four-time runner-up in the Formula One World Championship, with almost universal acclaim as the greatest driver never to win an F1 title. He won 16 of his 66 Grand Prix starts, a strike rate of almost 25 percent. Moss also won the 1955 Mille Miglia sports car race, was a class winner at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1956 and an overall winner in the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1954.
While Moss never turned a wheel in competition at IMS, he still had two interesting ties to the famed oval on the corner of 16th Street and Georgetown Road.
Moss’ full-time driving career ended in 1962, at age 32, after he suffered serious injuries in a crash in April at the Goodwood circuit. He recovered but felt that he lost too much speed and the psychological edge needed to ride the lightning bolt of speed needed to reach his previous mastery behind the wheel.
So, when famed team owner and car designer Colin Chapman brought his Lotus 29 cars to the Indianapolis 500 for the first time in 1963, Moss decided to cross the Atlantic to support Chapman’s drivers, friends and fellow F1 competitors Jim Clark of Scotland and Dan Gurney of the United States.
Moss also was fiercely patriotic about his motor racing, often choosing F1 machines from nascent English constructors such as Vanwall, BRM, Cooper and Lotus over more established Italian and continental European teams. So, he was proud to support the British racing green-colored, rear-engine Lotus cars in 1963 at Indianapolis.
The charismatic, ebullient Moss was a popular figure that May at the Speedway and was easily recognized because he was one of the few men at the time wearing a beard. He watched as Clark finished second to Parnelli Jones’ “Calhoun” roadster and Gurney placed seventh.
Moss did not return to IMS again, missing Clark’s historic victory in the Lotus 38 in 1965, the first rear-engine car to win “The Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”
But Stirling was not the first member of his family to visit IMS. In fact, his father Alfred “A.E.” Moss, raced in the Indianapolis 500 in 1924, five years before Stirling was born. A.E. Moss started 20th and finished 16th in the No. 28 Barber-Warnock Ford T/Fronty-Ford fielded by the Chevrolet brothers. Moss also drove in relief in the 1925 race for Herbert Jones, who ended up 19th.
A.E. Moss was in the United States in the mid-1920s to attend dental school and became a successful London dentist while continuing to race. He met his future wife, Aileen Craufurd, at the Brooklands Circuit in England in the 1920s, and they were married in 1928. Stirling was born in 1929, with daughter Patricia born in 1934. Pat Moss became one of the most successful female rally drivers in history, with three wins and seven podium finishes in international rallies.
The colorful A.E. Moss also was a founder of the British Racing Partnership (BRP) team that fielded cars in the “500” for Johnny Boyd and Masten Gregory in 1965 and Boyd in 1966.
A.E. Moss visited IMS as a spectator in 1968, regaling many with his charisma and charm at the Indianapolis 500 Oldtimers’ barbecue early in the Month of May. Seated next to him at that function was fellow Englishman and IMS Historian Donald Davidson, who still has fond memories today of that evening of good conversation.