The Racers that Stopped the World (Stirling Moss Documentary)

Hey, the C-Type completely changed motorsports. This was something that was ahead of its time. Every time you get into a race car, you're inside a living prototype. It's in an extreme environment, which is the right place to develop anything you know in any way. Unbreakable Jaguar so on June 29, 1952 Sterling Moss was in France winning the Reims Grand Prix in a Jaguar C-Type. This Jaguar C-Type on paper resembled many of the winds the 22-year-old already knew as the boy wonder. He had already averaged nearly 100 miles per hour for more than two hours when he finally took the checkered flag. , had covered the entire field, but that race was different because it was won by a car, this car used disc brakes and something that had never been done before.

Sterling believed passionately in disc rupture, so much so that the previous month he and legendary Jaguar test driver Norman Dewis had taken part in the

world

's most dangerous race, the Millimelia, from Bressia in northern Italy. Italy, to Rome and vice versa. They tested the concept and came close to winning it 60 years later and now, with the only surviving team from the original Millimelia, we took Sterling and Norman back to Brescia to celebrate that achievement and this is their extraordinary story as motor racing resumed sports after World War II. The car designer turned to using fully wraparound bodies to reduce drag and smaller wheels to reduce unsprung weight.

He reached an embarrassing situation where air could no longer reach the brakes to cool them, while the smaller wheels imposed a limit on the size of the brakes. With a consequent reduction in efficiency, greater braking efficiency was vital if the full potential of the performance and suspension improvement was to be realized. See what I mean, I'm really proud of the fact that for many years of my working life I was at Dunlop, which at the time was a big British company and the aeronautical division was at the forefront of technical development, it was the aeronautical division. the one that developed the disc brake and that was why Jaguar became aware of this new and advanced way of stopping a car.

When the brake pedal was applied, the hydraulic pressure caused the laterally opposed friction pads to move toward each other and press against the faces of the rotating disc. Disc brakes were a classic example of I wonder why they didn't think of that sooner. quite Star Wars, but it was simple, it was simple to look at, it was so logical, you know you had this disk and it spun and then the calipers came in and slowed the disk down. 1951 around October I said we would like to offer them a job, would you be interested? I said no, I actually said I'm very happy with Lee Francis, so I thought, well, I'll go, I'll go and see what it's all about, so I went, I went there, on Swallow Road, then. the old factory I went there and met Haynes he took me around the experimental store and I thought this is a horrible store I mean it was a wooden floor and it wasn't laid properly and he said his office would be there he said and I I looked and there was just metal sheeting and some plastic on top for the window and I looked inside there was a table and just a couple of chairs and I thought this is terrible and he said well what do you think?

I told him no. I'm not really interested I said I'm very happy where I am he said well what would induce you to join? I said two pounds a month because it was a full monthly job, I mean two pounds now you just laughed, but two. Libra then in the '50s was a pretty good rise, I thought, well, he's going to say no, that would give me the opportunity now to come back and he just looked up at the ceiling, looked at the floor and said, "Come on, let's go." play". I know Norman quite well.

He's even older than me, which is quite an achievement. And it was Norman who was Jaguar's test driver and was therefore responsible for the development of most of his cars in those days. The legendary Norman. he's full of energy today even in his 90s and he's one of those characters, you know, we already created them, I think not really because he, you know he's been there, they've seen him do it, the Norman Jews, responsible for so many things in Jagger , the development. of the cars, the testing of talented drivers in addition to being a very good engineer and it was more than being an engineer is the evaluation of the dynamic movement that a really good test driver has the qualities that an engineer simply does not have and interpreting the behavior of the vehicle to create a user-friendly, user-friendly car that could make the driver look good or feel good in the car, that's what Norman Jewish was all about when I came to Jaguar, the first work project Haynes gave me, He said he went to his office and took out the drones, he said we are in the middle of looking for a new type of break, he said in relation to Dunlop and we have it on an xk 120, they have started working, they think it's good, you know, and it came out fine I said so you finished it he said I almost went out and put it through my test and it just failed completely I lost the brake and everything so I got the car back and when I saw Haynes I said how can you close this?

He said, well, it's not working, I said I've had a total failure, he said, well, how did you fail, I said, well, how many stops did you make at 100 miles an hour, oh oh, we didn't? 100 more now I said, damn, you got it. The disc brake was a lovely idea that had been tried on airplanes. It was actually used very successfully on airplanes and it was an incredibly difficult process because an airplane is actually a very simple device when As for the brakes, all you have to do is stop once and it doesn't corner when you're on. on the ground, but the cars have to use the brakes all the time and they have to take corners and all these problems, so that ruined the gap in it, they realized that it was very far from development, so they What I suggested was I said look at the C type, it's the fastest car you have, it's the racer, why not transfer it to that, let's develop it on that because if I can get it to work properly on that then it will cover any card in all the areas good idea the jaguar was built on excellence it was built on innovation when disc brakes came along they must have transformed the cars they were in they gained speed very quickly and therefore needed to get rid of that speed.

They had no barriers. They had trees and houses to slow them down if they crashed, so I imagine it was quite a revelation to come out of the hole with a set of brakes that actually look like they actually wanted to do the job instead of a place to rest your foot while you have an accident. , but I mean they almost abandoned it because it was so difficult to develop and make the concept work. It was actually tested on a couple of other road cars in America before the Jaguar and they just gave up because it was too difficult.

The wear rate of the pad material was high. The discs used to get hot because they were basically cast iron after a few years of research. In 1952 they developed the first disc brake for use in sports racing cars in which a metal disc attached to the wheel hub replaced the metal ring on the brake plate. The disc was moved by a caliper attached to the shaft. The clamp had three pairs. of hydraulic cylinders, each of which contains a piston and a pad of friction material when you are doing the core with a little bit of deflection, I used to hit the pads back, so when you first applied the pedal you just move the pad towards the disc so you had to pump twice to get the pressure and then apply it to the disc, so it was difficult to tow it the whole time during the test, but eventually I will say that we got to the point where we were now happy.

Dunlops was happy. I was happy. with the car and the brake, but that's under test conditions now, what do we do to get it into racing condition or what should I do? The lions didn't want me to go to Lymon 52 Lemon. He said there's no way we're going to risk it because if you complete the flaws that the race presents, then we looked at the calendar and said, right, Millie Emilia, thousand mile road race in the mountains, hard brakes all the time, brakes. , brakes, brake performance, so that's it. He said well, let's go for the millimeter, who can we lead?

Hi, I'm Sterling Moss. Sterling Moss was the epitome of what a racing driver should look like. He walked like a racing driver should walk. He would talk like a racing driver. Look, racing rarely cares about kills, never mind a mine, there are two types of racing drivers, the fastest and the dead, and they are generally the same. He introduced himself in the right way. He was always immaculate. He always seemed to have a pretty girl. his arm and also, by the way, he could also drive quite well, he is without a doubt one of the three best drivers of all time, he is my hero, he transcended being a racing driver, he became a

world

icon, who do you think you are? stealing

moss

?

If you look at motorsport as a whole there is no one who has done it like Sterling and you know he is the man but he was very versatile and would do a sports car race to do a sedan car race, they do the formula race one. Same weekend, four different races at the same meeting, but somewhere like Goodwood or Silverstone, and he'd win them all, but at the same time he also had that wonderfully human side to him, I mean, he'd still be waving at the girls in the car. crowd and go out and have fun with his teammates, but when race day came, I mean, the man was completely focused and that's why other people saw Sterling show up in the pits and they know that they had been beaten before they got there. in his car no, he hadn't, he had no idea what the media could be like because it could only happen in Italy anyway, I mean Italians are so interested in racing and stuff and they They are on the side of the road.

And you know, I've never seen anything like this talking about going all over Italy with 5 or 10 million spectators along the roads and so on and realizing that we have this huge potential benefit. It means being able to put your foot on the brake and then not fade out uh it was an incredible thing, particularly in the sprint car, if you like the jag, in the racing world people are always looking for what they call the unfair advantage what you have is no one else has brake fade it was the best thing in those days suddenly the disc brake came along and no one had brake fade the most important advantage of the disc brake is that the exposed disc is cooled directly by the current of air even during actual braking thus eliminating any possibility of failure in the drum brakes the braking surface is covered and cooling can only take place by heat transfer through the drum walls the small friction area of ​​the drum brake disc compared to that of the drum brake allows a more uniform pressure load between the pads and the disc.

This has a major advantage over drum brakes where loads can vary along the brake shoe. This, combined with temperature variations in the drum, can cause a reduction in contact area which can result in mechanical shaping. of a faded jaguar with these new disc brakes not only could it break later, but it would break for much longer in terms of time and continue to the end of the race even with strong new brakes in those decades, I imagine that each fundamental This step would put them seconds per lap ahead and minutes at the end of the race ahead of their main rivals because that was the evolution curve.

I think it must be really frustrating for the other drivers, I mean racing against, say things like long taobos, which really generated a tremendous amount of steam, but they were a big chunk of metal to stop and you know the C type would come and it would just blow up, you say thank you so much, you get pissed off, so we had another meeting and they said yeah, Stan is driving. norman um you're okay for the co-drivers no way the 1952 millimeter race saw the start of a long association between dunlop and jaguar cars, limited when a jaguar xk-120 equipped with disc brakes was entered and suddenly i thought oh well , the pound sterling is good.

I know him, I have known him for a long time and I gave my consent. I said okay, but no one else. I'm just going to do it with sterling and that's how we got to making the 52 millimeter. The melee mediums were probably what scared me the most. In some races, I would drive it as hard as I could, always trying to push my fear threshold a little further away. The C-Type was a fantastic car, I mean, really, aerodynamically it was good, I mean, it looked good, it was fast. I would stop it but I mean it really was a huge step forward from the xk120 if you like, I can't tell you what Jaguar and Dunlop achieved with that thing, I mean it was absolutely huge and the problems we had. in development were small in comparisonwith what we finally achieved the brakes were perfect the brakes worked so wonderfully we had already caught uh clling we passed clinging to america we passed to karachola we had passed uh biandetti in the ferrari so we realized we were pushing the quad but the reason Why we were in that position was because we were attacking these guys all the time and then heading to Florence.

We had approximately 123 miles to go to the finish line, when we rounded this curve, a wash of water coming out of the side of the hills the mountains there was a big rock there we clouded it and it broke the two brackets that held the rack and pinion sheared them so we we had no direction and that put us out of the race now I have to stop like at that point third I think we were feeling pretty good because we were in third or second place or whatever and it went out and so I'm realizing that What was not a tremendous achievement was turning around and knowing an enormous distance in that. car um I think I would have felt pretty good actually do you remember there was an episode where you came to a checkpoint and you were going pretty fast and there was a competitor's car there and you took the door off oh yeah oh Sterling uh it's practically a voice in the desert these days because Sterling feels the same as I do that there should continue to be an element of danger in motor racing because that is part of the attraction, that is what generates the adrenaline in the drivers, the competitors and the viewers, people think we're crazy, oh, you're crazy. a racing driver, you know you take huge risks, we are actually very calculated.

I believe that most of the horrible accidents that have occurred over the years have not been driver error, they have been something mechanical or external that happened that created the accident. I think we are very calculated in what we do, I mean make me climb a tree to the top, it's not part of my deal to jump out of a plane with the end of a parachute, it's not exactly what I do. I want to do every day I'm not brave I'm not a lunatic I think the end of the second world war had a dramatic impact on the way people got into car racing and I'm sure death was much more, They were much more used to death being a part of life, they had just finished the war because why would you get in a race car without seat belts surrounded by fuel and go 200 miles per hour when there are no guardrails or safety?

There are many times when I have been close or closer to death most likely and I haven't thought about it much. The only thing you have to remember is that one of the reasons I ran was because it was dangerous because danger for me is something exciting, it's something I'm afraid of, of course, I'm getting hurt, but it gives you a tremendous kick. You have to remember that I lived in a time when it was not unusual for four or five drivers to die each year. I know how many friends and acquaintances Sterling would have lost as a result of motorsport deaths, a very, very large number, even in the '70s, if you look around and see that one in seven of them could have died every year and I imagine I translated that later. from when he was a former driver watching the driver briefing and thinking what this would be like if one in seven of us died.

You're interviewing me now here at my home in Buckinghamshire. If you go out there are plenty of lovely benches. wooden benches 25 of them are all acknowledging the death of someone close to me close enough to helen and me to call a friend we counted 57 who had died but 25 of them were either york and rented to francois seba whether denny holm or whether it's bruce mclaren whether it's jim clark or graham hill whether it's mike spence whether it's joe bonnie or bandini or scariote or senna they're all out there that was wrong that had to stop I mean when you're 17 18 I'd like to do something , the bravado of youth, you know, getting into a car and realizing you could be killed made it that much more meaningful.

I know Sterling didn't necessarily approve of it and I agree with Sterling that right now we have too many exit areas where if you make an error in judgment you are not penalized, I don't mean death but time or an obstacle that wouldn't allow you. keep making mistakes by going off the track and still stay ahead of the car behind that is not correct and modern language has created it, so not everything is fine, but the right thing was that we could not continue with the mortality rate that we had and that it had to stop for future prosperity.

The importance of sport to sport seems to be this kind of slightly strange conflict where, on the one hand, you almost seem to be looking for danger, but on the other, you would never get into a car that you knew wasn't safe. Think about when I think I really got into motorsports wanting the danger enjoying the danger because I mean, if you go around the corner and you take the right turn and you just go off the side and you know that with just a few centimeters you have a enormous sense of accomplishment, it's very personal and very, very selfish because you understand it, but if you go to a corner, a meter in front of a boat and you come out two meters in front, you know, you feel like a million dollars is fantastic, fantastic.

What you've done, I really don't believe, I'm afraid we can understand what these guys did. We live in such a comfortable and comfortable closet world. If you think about it, what rule was I referring to even before they arrived at the mill? Amelia Norman drove the car from Coventry there and then they did the event and as we know they didn't finish it, they almost finished it and they did it incredibly better than anyone could imagine and once they fixed it. The car drove it again and all the while using this completely untested concept that could have failed at any time with potentially catastrophic consequences, but they needed to prove a point, it was one of those things that to me was one of the most advanced innovations of automotive engineering.

I was very happy to have been a part of it and as I developed it and tested it and developed it, I don't know why I stayed. They offered me a job at Ferrari. I was offered a job at Aston Martin with the only thing being that we had a very good small team at Jaguar, probably around 14 people and Bob Knight, he was the brilliant suspension man, Malcolm said the shape, the design, the aerodynamics, the brilliant purchase and, uh, Wally Hassell, on the engines, uh, development. and between us we got along well and we produced this we produced all of this and I think that's what kept me there, I mean it wasn't the money that was poor, but I say I could have gone to Ferrari, but I don't.

I know I didn't bother, so I'll stick with Jagger. I spent 36 years with him. Karachola told me later when I saw him uh not after Milly, but I saw him in uh when he was in Germany at the Nurburgring. running there and came up to me and said norman said I can't believe he said in the million million he said when you passed us you passed me he said he was breaking hard for the coroner he said and you just passed still flat he said, I thought so, he'll never turn the corner and it never will, he said and then suddenly the lights came on right at the bend and you were gone, in fact the real meaning isn't here on the track, it's out there.

The wider world, I mean, you'll never be able to quantify how many lives have been saved by cars being

stopped

, and actually all those lives that were saved as a result, which must probably number in the millions over time, can be directly linked. to the work that the very brave Norman Jews and Sterling Moss and the Dunlop and Jaguar boys did in early 1952. And here are some of the memories I have retained in Sterling. You know, there is our original, there is our card that Yes, six, one, nine, Sterling Moss, Norman Dewis, there are all the controls that we have, what are they missing?

These ones don't know, these ones are, yeah, no, those are there, those are, yeah, they're fine, and they are, and that was the last one. one that we passed by, our flight problems, yes, of course, yes, and I think there was a little bit out there, there was an alfa romeo in front and you got up and it wasn't moving, so you got between it, you pushed it and I looked back and he was in the shop window, really yes, very nice of him, but it was after Florence where we had the steering problem, yes, yes, everyone, but that was the handwritten report I made when we got back, You know, saying what a terrible driver he was.

He wouldn't drive with you again and you were taking too much care of the crocodile. What I feel, guys, I've had. I'm very lucky. I've had a fantastic life. I think I meet lovely people. I'm happily married I have kids and you know motorsport is like a drug and when you get hooked it's hard to quit and when you think you're sterling you and I were here 60 years later yeah right 60 years ago when we drove this amazing , it's you.