All but My Life;

by Stirling Moss

An autobiography of Stirling Moss' life reprinted to commemorate his 60th birthday, in which he is noted to have said that he had taken a great deal out of motor racing but that in return he had given it all but his life.

239 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1980

About the author

Sir Stirling Craufurd Moss, OBE was a British former Formula One racing driver. An inductee into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame, he won 212 of the 529 races he entered across several categories of competition and has been described as "the greatest driver never to win the World Championship". In a seven-year span between 1955 and 1961 Moss finished as championship runner-up four times and in third place the other three times.

Reviews

[mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first autobiography of a Grand Prix racer that I've read, so I have little ground for comparison, but it seems to me that Stirling Moss is the coolest, smartest race car driver ever. And this book takes place at a fascinating time in his life, after the awful wreck at Goodwood in 1962 where he's cut out of the car with a boatload of serious injuries, including brain and eye trauma.

Ken W. Purdy starts the book in the hospital and records his impressions of his long-time friend as he recovers. The book then blends into a mix of Ken's thoughts about Stirling and about racing with Stirling's comments, and then is almost all quotes from Stirling. It's a graceful and interesting formula.

Stirling comes across as complex, smart, and funny. Purdy looks at his quirk of preferring to race only British cars, private cars, as the thrill of being the underdog. Moss talks about his mental training. He was greatly affected by the crash of Dick Seaman in 1939, in which Seaman died not of his injuries but of staying in the car and then it burned. So Moss trained his mind to instinctively scramble out of the car after a crash, which is what he did at Naples--with a broken knee--and what he was trying to do, according to witnesses, at Goodwood, even tho he was quite unconscious. There's a great chapter on bravery/courage/skill and his "ten-tenths" philosophy. And another nice part where he admits his part in the breakup of his marriage--lovely for such a guy to have such insight--too bad it was too late.

Ultimately, this book is about his journey from being the best race car driver to not being one. In 1963, he takes a car back out onto the Goodwood track to test himself. His conclusion: "I had to think. I had to give orders to myself: here I'll brake, here I must change down, and so on...and the other thing, I used to look at the rev-counter without taking my eyes off the road, not only that, I could see the rev counter and the road and a friend waving to me, all at the same time...I've lost that, that's gone."

So now I need to know what happened next....

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rather mundane - aside from some interesting references to Wilde and Mansfield...