Features

At precisely 7.22 on the sunny morning of May 1, 1955, Stirling Moss screamed away from Brescia in a 3.0-litre, straight-eight Mercedes-Benz 300SLR open sports car.

To all intents and purposes it was a Grand Prix machine adapted to have two seats, the passenger being Motor Sport journalist Denis Jenkinson. The race was the Mille Miglia, and for every entrant their start time was their race number: hence, 722.

Ten hours, seven minutes and 48 seconds later, they returned. The car was filthy and battered in the bodywork but running like clockwork. The occupants were coated in black brake dust, oil and road grime and caked in the sweat of their labours in that race-car cockpit for the whole of that broiling Italian day.

Between leaving and returning, they had covered 1,000 miles, across the northern plain, down the Adriatic coast to Pescara, over the mountains to Rome, northwards through the hills to Bologna, then back up the straights to Brescia.

Oh, sure, the roads were closed for the event, but they were still Fifties' Italian roads, single-carriageway, hardly improved since the war, rough, gravelly and treacherous through the hills.

Towns and villages had no bypasses as the route wound around the Piazza Maggiores, the Via Cavours and the Corso Garibaldis, streets lined the whole way with ill-controlled spectators. At potential collision points a few straw bales were placed cursorily about, though whether to protect the drivers or Italy's architectural heritage isn't entirely clear.

Now do the sums. Moss drove those 1,000 miles at an average speed, all stops included, of nearly 98mph. The car was geared for 170mph on the straights, so that's what he did, for miles on end, arrowing along narrow roads with nothing but trees, rocks and buildings at the sides, and if the road went straight through a village then so did he. At 170mph.

And he took pretty well every one of the corners, whether 120mph sweepers, town junctions or tail-out mountain hairpins (of which there were thousands) somewhere beyond the limit.

He made these unimaginable speeds in a car on drum brakes and crossply tyres, innocent of any kind of power assistance, driver aids or safety feature. Seat belts? They preferred to be thrown clear.

And sorry to labour this point, but he kept up this heroic pace for 10 solid hours. And he beat the deity of the day, Fangio, in an identical car, into second, by a clear 30 minutes.

Was it the greatest single drive in the history of motorsport? You come up with a better one, then, because if you thought Sir Stirling Moss OBE was just the amiable face of those public-information ads on erectile dysfunction, let the Mille Miglia put you straight. And the four straight times he was runner-up in the Formula One World championship. And the fact that a generation of British policemen, on stopping any male driver for speeding, were contractually obliged to ask, 'And who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?'

But, of course, Moss had a team behind him. He and Jenkinson had recced the route many times, and Jenkinson had graded every bend. Because this was the 1950s, old chap, there were 'saucy ones', 'dodgy ones', and 'very dangerous ones'.

He'd marked every hazard, and noted each blind brow with the potential for taking it flat. He'd transcribed this all onto a roll of paper, winding it as the race progressed past the window of a rainproof box, and communicated the knowledge to moss with a set of 15 well-rehearsed hand signals.

This was effectively the first use of pace notes in the sport, and Moss and Jenkinson knew it would be the only way to beat the Italians in their Maseratis and Ferraris with their local knowledge. Afterwards Jenkinson wrote it all up in Motor Sport, and there are people who still call that the greatest piece of motoring journalism ever.