When a box-office F1 star wound back the years in tin-tops

Sometimes I tell people I've raced at Crystal Palace. And sometimes I casually offer up that I've witnessed a majestic wet-weather performance from Stirling Moss at the wheel of a contemporary racing car. Anyone who cares to listen to my boasts usually retorts that I'm far too young for either.

But I have competed at Crystal Palace, in a four-lap race as a matter of fact. Plus an extra nine metres. That made it a nice round mile when you consider that those laps were around the National Sport Centre's 400-metre running track, not the parkland racing circuit that closed in the early 1970s.

I have to come clean and tell you that I was barely in my teens at the time and had a pair of Reebok trainers under me rather than something with an internal combustion engine. So I'm trying to mislead when I say I've raced at the Palace.

Yet I categorically did see Moss show at least a flash of the class that made him one of the greatest drivers of any era. It was at Brands Hatch in May 1981 and was one of a number of times I witnessed him race that year and the previous season.

Moss, who passed away last month, made a largely-forgotten comeback at the age of 50 in the British Saloon Car Championship with Audi in 1980. His two-year stint in what we now call the British Touring Car Championship was overlooked in the recent obituaries of the great man, and understandably so.

"The biggest regret of my life" was how Moss once described his touring car sojourn, claiming that he was "an absolute twit to agree to it".

Moss never got to grips with a front-wheel-drive touring car, or more pertinently a front-driven tin-top on slick racing tyres. But one rainy day in Kent, he reminded of us of his immense talents.

The wet weather was the key. Moss had qualified only 11th for the race contested only by the BTCC's up-to-1600cc class cars such as his TWR-run Audi 80 GLE and the Minis and Ford Fiestas in the baby category. (The Rovers, Capris and Mazdas in the top two divisions had their own race that day on the Brands Indy circuit.)

"His style was to drift the car. You weren't going to be drifting one of those things with the level of power we had going through the front wheels" Martin Brundle on Moss

Six laps in, and he was up to second position and catching race leader Barrie Williams in a Mitsubishi Lancer when, not for the first time, throttle problems forced him to call it a day.

Martin Brundle was Moss's team-mate in '81 and remembers a "serene" performance from the driver of the sister car as he watched on from the sidelines, having gone out with gear selection issues at the start.

"It was incredibly slippery," he recalls. "What I realised was that for once he was driving with the grip levels that he had been used to back in the day."

Brundle concedes that Moss failed to get his head around the Audi.

"His style was to drift the car," he says. "You weren't going to be drifting one of those things with the level of power we had going through the front wheels."

Brundle points out that, then as now, front-wheel-drive touring car racing is the domain of specialists. Future McLaren F1 stylist Peter Stevens, who helped out on the Audi programme in 1980 when it was in the hands of Richard Lloyd's GTi Engineering squad, suggests that the techniques required were anathema to Moss.

"I think Stirling hated it because you had to muscle the car," reckons Stevens. "He was much too tidy; he was always immaculate in his driving.

"He also didn't like the idea that you had had to lump it over the kerbs and the fact that there was a bit of bumping and banging. Motor racing wasn't a contact sport as far as he was concerned."

Moss was a left-field choice for a touring car drive 17 years on from his official retirement. The catalyst for his comeback was, bizarrely, two-time 500c motorcycle world champion Barry Sheene.

Lloyd had put the darling of the British tabloids in one of his Volkswagen Golf GTis for the Tourist Trophy at Silverstone in 1979. Sheene's four-wheel racing debut garnered more column inches than all of the team's exploits put together since it had got its hands on the hot Golf in 1977. And that included a hat-trick of BTCC class titles for Lloyd in '77 through '79.

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The UK Volkswagen Audi Group had taken an increasing interest in what had initially been a low-key privateer affair and decided that the BTCC was the right place to promote the latest-generation Audi 80 saloon that had gone on sale the previous year. Somehow Moss's name was thrown into the hat when a team-mate for Lloyd was being discussed.

Tony Hill, then PR director for VAG, remembers that it was suggested only half in jest on the Sheene-inspired assumption that "if you put a celebrity in the car you get loads of publicity whether you win or not". The hunch turned out to be correct: Stirling Moss was still box-office.

Recognition for his achievements in the form of a knighthood was still 20 years away, but they hadn't been forgotten by the British public. Mallory Park was heaving for his comeback race in March 1980, the attendance put at 30,000. The Leicestershire venue hadn't seen anything like it since 1975 and the time the Bay City Rollers played at a Radio One Fun Day on a pontoon in the middle of the lake.

The idea of putting a long-retired great into a mundane tin-top had quickly gained traction because London-based PR company CSS Promotions looked after Moss, as well as Sheene, and the UK arm of the Akai hi-fi company, the primary sponsor of the GTi squad since the previous season.

It helped that Akai's boss in Britain, Richard Wadsworth, liked to surround himself with stars and saw their value to his brand. Akai had a personal sponsorship deal with Williams Formula 1 driver Alan Jones and backed Sheene's Yamaha 500cc bike squad in 1980. It even sponsored concert performances by the jazz vocal group Manhattan Transfer!

Andrew Marriott, co-founder of CSS, remembers the meeting at which the offer was put to Moss. His answer was an unhesitant 'yes'.

"I now knew that I could still put up a reasonable show on a race track in a modern, if ordinary, kind of car. I resolved straightaway to try to fix myself a regular drive" Stirling Moss in Racing and all that

"I was staggered," recalls Marriott. "I really didn't think he'd be up for it, and I still don't know why he said yes. I can't remember how much money it was, but it really wasn't a lot."

The offer came at a time when Moss was increasingly active in historic racing circles, at the wheel of machinery as diverse as a Maserati 250F and a pre-war Delahaye 135S owned by his old team boss Rob Walker. There'd also been a one-off in a contemporary machine at the 1976 Bathurst 1000: Moss had shared a Holden Torana with another future knight of the realm in Jack Brabham.

In 1979, he joined up in a VW Golf with another former world champion, Denny Hulme, at Pukekohe in New Zealand. They missed victory in the grandly-titled Benson & Hedges Production Saloon Car Classic by a scant 50 yards or so according to reports. This drive whet Moss's appetite for more tin-top racing.

Moss was ready for some kind of comeback, as he revealed in Racing and all that, a ghosted autobiographical work with Mike 'The Bike' Hailwood published midway through 1980.

"I throughly enjoyed the experience and learnt some useful lessons," he said in Racing and all that. "I now knew that I could still put up a reasonable show on a race track in a modern, if ordinary, kind of car. I resolved straightaway to try to fix myself a regular drive in a saloon during 1980."

His return to racing proper didn't work out. It didn't help that both GTi and TWR, which took over the programme for '81, struggled to make the Audi 80 a reliable racing machine. Both Stevens and Brundle remember a strange issue with the throttle system, which meant that it would somehow shake itself to pieces.

The Moss comeback wasn't entirely without success, or at least silverware. He made it onto the class podium on a number of occasions across the two seasons.

At Mallory in August 1980, he finished second to national racing star Tony Lanfranchi, who contested a run of end-of-season races in a third Audi fielded by GTi. They repeated the result next time out on the Brands Hatch Grand Prix track. A couple of weeks later, Moss was second again, this time to Lloyd. There were three more podiums for Moss in 1981, though a victory eluded him.

He'd talked in Racing and all that about trying to move up to the top class of the BTCC, but results tailed off over the second half of the season and Moss hung up his cork helmet for good, at least as contemporary racing went.

Brundle has good memories of his time racing together with Moss, but like me, he gets questioned about his Stirling Moss claims.

"No one believes me when I tell them I was his team-mate," says Brundle. "We got on well and I became privileged to be able to call him a friend, but I still wanted to blow his doors off.

"He was my team-mate and the first person you want to beat is always your team-mate, but he was also Stirling Moss."