Memories of meeting Stirling Moss: the Lotus Esprit road test
Shepherd Street is in a quiet part of Mayfair, pleasingly off the beaten track and sandwiched between Green Park and Park Lane. In early April, 1994, I edged the Lotus Esprit S4 alone the road until I reached the end, and number 44 - 46, the home of Stirling Moss.
A pair of garages flanked the home’s front door, removable bollards and double-yellow lines prevented anyone blocking this end of the mews street. And if you tilted your head up you’d see what looked like a window box, across one of the first floor’s mirror-finished windows, carved with a Mercedes 300 SLR - the car Moss and Denis Jenks, his co-driver, danced to victory in the Mille Miglia. In fact, the ‘window box’ illuminated to cast the silhouette of the car onto the road below, at night.
In any other setting, the bright-yellow Esprit might have been dismissed as a poseur’s plaything but here, parked outside the home of one of Britain’s greatest racing drivers, it looked at home. Moss had overseen the design and construction of the five-storey, 2,500sq ft townhouse himself, after picking up a plot in 1961 that had sat decaying since being damaged during World War II. It would be fashioned into one of the most high-tech’ private residences London had ever seen.
Moss came to the door, asked for a tour of the car and then made arrangements with me for the collection of the car, a few days later. “You can leave it there,” he said, gesturing to where the Lotus straddled double-yellow lines, “nobody will give it a ticket outside my place.” He would need to rearrange his garage, complete with his signature scooter on which he whizzed around the Capital, before he could put it away.
In 1960 and ‘61, Moss had raced had raced a Lotus 18, driving for Rob Walker (heir to the Jonny Walker whisky fortune), and won the ‘61 Monaco Grand Prix against formidable competition. But that wasn’t why I ended up at his house. In 1994, Moss was a columnist for Auto Express magazine (you can read the original review of the Esprit, here). The editorial team would speak with Moss about motor sport, matters of motoring, have him drive cars we were reviewing, and invite him to various functions. As the junior road tester, it was my job to handle Moss and the Esprit.
A couple of days later, I was back. Stirling brought the car out and then told me what he thought of the latest, S4 Esprit. He was cross with Lotus because, simply put, being short he didn’t fit terribly well. Lotus didn’t allow for any adjustment of the steering column, so Moss had to have the seat uncomfortably close to the steering wheel so that he could fully depress the clutch. He also found the cabin dreadfully claustrophobic, and criticised the poor visibility which made navigating the streets of London and parking the thing in his garage particularly challenging.
He enjoyed the car’s handling, telling me how its tail would break away in a predictable fashion if provoked, making it smooth and controllable. But in summary, Moss wasn’t able to forgive the car it poor packaging and visibility. That’s hardly surprising. As a racing driver, those are some of the fundamental foundations when creating a car that you could drive in total confidence.
The great man had driven the Esprit for less than five miles. I returned to the Auto Express office and, being young and foolish, shared this information with my colleagues. How, I wondered, could someone assess a car’s on-the-limit handling characteristics in such a short space of time?
But this wasn’t just someone. This was Stirling Moss, a man who won 16 Grand Prix, blitzed the 993 miles of the 1955 Mille Miglia at an average speed of 98mph, in a Mercedes 300 SLR, and scored countless notable victories in sports car races.So taking an Esprit around London in the dead of night, and quickly building up an accurate picture of the car’s good points and bad points, was something he could have done in his sleep. And sure enough, every one of his observations rang true with our findings from a week-long test of the Esprit.
We met again, three or four further times after that first encounter. But it was that first encounter that taught me a valuable lesson about the ignorance of youth.
