Pole was duly secured with Ireland no better than seventh in the factory car, but Moss didn’t have the race entirely to himself. He let Jo Bonnier in the new mid-engined BRM head the opening laps, took the lead on lap 16, gave it up to Jack Brabham when it started to rain who duly clouted the wall on lap 41 gifting the lead back to Moss. But then the Lotus’s Climax motor went off and Stirling headed for the pits gloomily presuming his work to be done. Not so: a flailing plug lead was quickly reattached, and he rejoined, re-taking the lead from Bonnier on lap 68 and holding on to the flag.
I never got the sense that Stirling ever really loved the 18 and, given that he’d smash this one to bits when a wheel came off at Spa at 140mph resulting in numerous serious injuries, and that his career-ending accident came in a Lotus 18/21, I’m not surprised at that. He always talked about it being an incredibly quick car, but not one you could hurl around with abandon like the Coopers he enjoyed so much. It was an inherently unforgiving car that required you to be on top of your game which, happily, he always was. And as he said in ‘My Cars, My Career’ written with Doug Nye, it was ‘a curious mixture of simplicity and sophistication which brought me quite a lot of success; when it wasn’t trying to kill me!’
Photography courtesy of Motorsport Images.