Moss joined the Mercedes Benz team for the 1955 season, having proven his credentials racing a Maserati 250F in 1954. The season comprised 11 rounds, although four were cancelled after the horrendous accident at Le Mans, when a Mercedes Benz 300 SLR driven by Pierre Levegh was launched into the crowds opposite the pits, killing himself and over 80 spectators.
For six out of the remaining seven races in that truncated season, Fangio and Moss would often run nose-to-tail at the head of the field in what would become known as ‘the train’, Fangio winning four races and Moss taking his maiden GP victory, appropriately at the British Grand Prix.
If Fangio had the measure of Moss in Grands Prix, then Moss had the upper hand in sports car racing, driving the Mercedes Benz 300 SLR which was, in effect, a Grand Prix car with full bodywork and two seats.
Mercedes missed the first two rounds of the season, in Argentina and America, but would go on to win the RAC Tourist Trophy in Ireland and the Targa Florio in Sicily (both Moss victories.) The team was leading at Le Mans before the accident, causing Mercedes to withdraw the remaining cars and handing a subdued and hollow victory to Jaguar.
Before Le Mans, however, there was the small matter of the Mille Miglia race to be run. This took place on a circular 1,000-mile route from Brescia in the north of the country, down the Adriatic coast and across to Rome, before heading north back to Brescia, comprising ordinary roads of every type around Italy, over the course of a full day. There were many different classes into which cars and drivers could enter, from diminutive Citroen 2CVs all the way up to the class that would provide the overall winner, the no-holds barred sports cars vying for the Sportscar World Championship, comprising entries from Ferrari, Maserati and Mercedes Benz.
For this race, drivers were permitted to carry a passenger, although Fangio chose to drive alone, as did his second team mate Karl Kling. Moss chose to run with a passenger/navigator and was accompanied by Denis Jenkinson, or ‘Jenks’ as he was known to his thousands of readers in Motor Sport magazine.
Immediately after the second world war, Denis Jenkinson had lived a nomadic life travelling around Europe and competing in motorcycle Grands Prix on his own Norton. Because of his small physical stature, he made the perfect sidecar passenger and, in 1949, rider Eric Oliver and Jenkinson won the Sidecar World Championship.
After that, Jenkinson became the Grand Prix and general motorsport correspondent for Motor Sport magazine, spending months at a time driving around Europe to all the races, writing his reports and mailing them back to England in time for the next month’s issue. He became the authority on racing, along the way befriending Stirling Moss.
When Moss approached Jenks to suggest he accompany him on the Mille Miglia, Jenks readily agreed, the two finding they had similar ideas on how the race could be won. In short, this involved using the passenger as a form of navigator, informing the driver of what bends, obstacles, tricky bits or parts where he could go flat out were coming next, relieving the driver of having to remember 1,000 miles of route himself and allowing him to concentrate on going as fast as possible. The concept has been used for many years in rallying.
Mercedes Benz did nothing by halves and, for two months before the race, the drivers and navigators thrashed various Mercedes road cars and a test hack 300 SLR around the whole course, subjecting the 300 SLR in particular to every possible stress and strain to see what might break; Mercedes was leaving nothing to chance.
During all this, Jenkinson made copious notes about everything they encountered on the course, grading corners for difficulty and hundreds of other places where time could be gained by knowing what came next on the road, using the milestones that lined Italy’s roads for reference.
Jenks wrote all this information down on a 17-foot strip of paper and had a special case made, in which the roll could be wound from one roller to another, the notes being visible through a perspex window, sealed against the weather with Sellotape.
The cars entered in the Mille Miglia set off at minute intervals, the car’s race number corresponding to the start time. Thus it was that the Moss/Jenkinson car bore the number 733, meaning they left the start ramp in Brescia at 7:33a.m, among the last of hundreds of cars to start, being the fastest.
What followed was one of the most incredible feats of driving ever performed. Aided by Jenkinson’s notes, which he communicated to Moss via series of hand signals – any other form of communication being impossible over the noise of an unsilenced 3-litre straight-eight racing engine – Moss completed the 1,000 miles in 10 hours and seven minutes, at an average speed of just over 97 mph. Don’t forget, this was over ordinary roads, be they flat and – sometimes! – straight along the coastline, through dozens of towns and villages, or winding madly up and over the mountains in the middle of Italy. There were no complicated rules about what work could be done to the car during pit stops, the pits being spaced at intervals around the course; any maintenance work was permitted but, remarkably, the bonnet was never lifted on Moss’ car and it only required new rear tyres twice! (When the car was returned to the factory after the race, the engine was put on the dyno and delivered exactly the same horsepower – 270bhp – as it had when it was brand new!)
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine the stamina required to compete and win in a race such as this. No single corner in 1,000 miles is taken more than once; there is no rhythm to build up. It is all reaction, although Jenks’ notes removed a fair amount of the unknown and unpredictable from the proceedings.
Never mind Moss’ efforts, which were all but super-human; Jenks had a grab handle to hold onto to protect himself from the incessant g-forces but he rarely had time to hold onto it, being busy with his roller map: he simply couldn’t risk to lose concentration for one second as both his and Moss’ lives depended on him giving the right signals at the right time. Luckily for the pair, the one time he did miss a signal, due to a newly topped-up petrol tank spraying petrol from the filler cap behind his head onto his neck, was a corner that Moss recognised. Other than that, he stayed with Moss for the full ten hours, through the boiling heat from the hot sunshine and the bellowing engine in front of his feet, the deafening noise and the nauseating smells from the inboard front drum brakes.
It was an incredible feat of endurance by both driver and navigator, setting a race record that would never be beaten. Moss had actually taken one of Fangio’s special ‘stamina pills’ before the race, generously given by Fangio to his rival. Jenkinson declined to take his; he later had it analysed but the chemists were reluctant to replicate it as it contained some unknown South American herbal compounds…!
Such was its efficacy, Moss attended the prize-giving dinner in the evening and then drove overnight to the Mercedes factory in Stuttgart! After ten hours of flat-out racing! Jenkinson had a hot bath and then wrote an account of the race that remains an unparalleled piece of motor sport journalism, written with more authority than any journalist has ever accomplished: there aren’t too many first-hand reports written from the passenger seat of the winning car.
They really don’t make them like that any more!
