Stirling Moss Bids Adieu

Motorsports legend Stirling Moss is shutting down his website and retiring from public life, his son Elliot announced over the weekend.

The 88-year-old Moss, who had served as a consultant and racing ambassador in recent years, suffered a serious chest infection at the end of 2016 that hospitalized him for more than four months. Moss also has never fully recovered from a 2010 accident in which he broke both his ankles and chipped four vertebrae from a fall down an elevator shaft at his London home.

Nicknamed “Mr. Motor Racing,” Moss won more than 200 events in his professional racing career that ended in 1962 with a crash that left him in a coma for a month. Moss continued to race on a semi-regular basis through the early 1980s and later became a fixture on the historic circuit, before retiring from racing for good in 2011.

Among his accomplishments are victories at the British and Monaco Grand Prix, the Mille Miglia, 24-Hours of Le Mans, Targa Florio and Tourist Trophy. He also had four second-place finishes in Formula One’s annual drivers’ championship, earning him the title as “the greatest driver never to win a championship.”

His name has been used on several limited-run production cars, including the 2009 Mercedes SLR Stirling Moss and the SLR McLaren 722 in 2007. In mid-2016, Moss partnered with Lister Cars to launch the £1 million Stirling Moss Lister Knobbly, which is based on the magnesium-bodied Lister Jaguar Knobbly that Moss raced in the 1950s.