Why POB loved motor-racing

In someone else’s words, and in an autobiography POB never read, as far as I know:

"Through Berenice Krickler I got to know Stirling Moss in 1962, soon after the terrible accident at Goodwood which put him out of Grand Prix racing. Berenice was working at the hospital he had been sent to and she gave him psychological tests to check for brain damage. (There was none. The doctors also expected him to be crippled for life but he was walking normally after six weeks.) She introduced us because I had a passion for fast cars and she knew that he was a hero of mine; Stirling and I have been friends ever since. Occasionally he took me with him when he tested cars. I had done some rallying when I was at Oxford – in someone  else’s car – and fancied myself as a driver,  but being driven by Stirling, like climbing with Mo or Joe Brown or playing poker with Eric Drache, made me realise that there are ranges of skill I never knew about – ranges beyond ranges, and I was still in the foothills.

"When the motoring journalist Denis Jenkinson went as his map-reader in the Mille Miglia race around Italy, he wrote that Moss drove for 10 hours on that fine edge on which the rest of us drive for 90 seconds before we crash. That was how it was, on a smaller scale, when he tested a car. He’d go through the routine checks, muttering into a tape-recorder, then he’d say, ‘Let’s see what she can do.’ And we were off, always on the limit, always in control. On corners where I, driving flat out, would have left a margin of six inches, he left less than one – but smoothly, without hasty corrections, without panic, a single effortless progression. He seemed to sense the balance of the machine in the same way as he sensed the balanced of his own body. When we stopped after a long, fast run, the interior of even the most expensive cars smelled pleasantly of hot oil and sometimes the brake-discs glowed red. Stirling would nod and say, ‘Nice piece of machinery.’ It was a professional judgement and also a professional courtesy, the matador saluting a brave bull.

 

"Driving of this order is a high art, as thrilling and controlled as any poem or painting – thrilling because it is so controlled. Stirling is brisk and practical, he likes gadgets and fixing things and is not at all interested in the arts. But behind the wheel of a car he is as sensitive as any artist I have ever met." 

Source:  Where Did It All Go Right? by Alvarez, A. Published by Richard Cohen Books, London, 1999,, 1999

ISBN 10: 1860661734ISBN 13: 9781860661730.