When Moss raced touring cars

But he’s not the first F1 star to come out retirement at that age and have a terrible time driving an Audi in the BTCC. Forty years ago Stirling Moss did exactly the same (when the series was still called the British Saloon Car Championship). As he was good enough to concede to me many years later, ‘I must have been nuts even to consider it.’ And I have left an adjective out of that sentence. In retrospect he’d have actually paid quite a lot of money not to have done it.

You can see why. Not only was he in a front-drive car with very little power, but it was on slicks which he’d never used before. Worse, his team-mate was a 21-year-old hotshot called Martin Brundle. And save for a few recreational historic races, Stirling had not raced since his near-fatal accident at Goodwood 18 years previously. He figured out front-drive, but never really got to grips with slicks.

There were other issues: his Audi 80 was tricky to drive and frequently broke. He compounded the problems by driving it like a Fifties racer, sliding it but keeping off the kerbs, which in the world of touring cars is wrong and wronger. He was appalled too by the driving standards he witnessed, or lack thereof. So had the master lost it, or had he just been given the wrong equipment?

The answer came at Brands Hatch in 1981, his second and final season. Moss qualified 11th, but the race was wet so the hated slicks stayed in the truck. By the time the car broke (again), he was second and closing on the leader fast. But Moss would no more likely have done well in the BTCC than would Usain Bolt in the London Marathon. Truth is it just wasn’t his sport, and there is no shame in that.