Brabham by Tony Davis

Author:Tony Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

Moss comes to grief (1962)

With his Lotus 24 still on the way and his 21 a pile of ash and twisted metal, Brabham had to skip the non-championship Glover Trophy F1 race at Goodwood on Easter Monday. Graham Hill in the BRM P578 won ahead of Bruce McLaren in the Cooper T55, but all that was overshadowed by Stirling Moss’s horrific crash at St Mary’s Corner. It was the crash that would end Moss’s F1 career, without him achieving the reward so many thought he deserved: a world championship.

Moss would spend a month in a coma and several more months partially paralysed. When he tested a race car a year later, he found he no longer had the uncanny, instinctive control that made everything come together in a ‘sort of joyous flow’. He decided he would not return to front-line motor sport. Yet he always accepted the risks that came with his favourite sport. ‘There is fear and you have to conquer the fear. It’s one of the ingredients that I found attractive,’ Moss said in 2006. ‘If you were able to remove that, it would’ve lessened the attraction as far as I was concerned.’146 Although it was never clear whether Moss’s Rob Walker Lotus 18/21 Climax was to blame for this crash, Moss did have that wheel fall off at Spa two years earlier and was always aware of the extra risk when driving a Lotus. ‘Colin [Chapman] was a brilliant engineer, there’s no doubt about it,’ he said. ‘He just went too close to the bone, in my opinion.’

Jack said of Moss: ‘He was easily the quickest driver around, and there was only one catch; he didn’t really know how to save the car.’ This wasn’t Jack being holier-than-thou, because he said this in the context of his own foible of caring too much about the car. Jack freely admitted if Moss’s car stayed together, Moss usually won. That made him the ultimate target. ‘I never had the same feeling about beating anyone else,’ said Jack.147

‘He’s the one person my dad always talked about as the greatest rivalry I think that he had in his racing career,’ said Geoff Brabham. ‘[Dad] really enjoyed racing against him, and I think they became reasonable friends afterwards.’

Jack had his Lotus 24 V8 ready for Silverstone in May, and he towed it to the track himself. It wasn’t set up properly and the rev counter had failed, but he nursed it home in sixth. Plenty more disappointments were to follow, either through mechanical unreliability or people shunting into him. At Rouen he had a major failure. A damper mount broke clear off. Jack lost control ‘in the biggest possible way’ though he was unharmed. He brought the Lotus home in fifth in the British Grand Prix, his right foot burned from a hot pipe.

A few days later the Climax V8 was taken from the Lotus and put in the Brabham BT3. The new ‘BT’ nomenclature was a sop to Ron, a reference to the surnames of the two partners.

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