My morning ritual during these social distancing days is to stop by my local coffee spot, where I order a large cappuccino and what one might call a gourmet pop tart. A herd of masked customers are usually milling about outside, so I order online in my car and wait for the text telling me to pick my stuff up. In the meantime, I often read or listen to things on my phone. A couple weeks ago, I read the weird news about the Audi Formula E driver, Daniel Abt, who’d been caught in a bizarre virtual-racing deception. The very next day, I listened to a podcast that was the last extensive interview with motorsport legend Sterling Moss (done by a family friend, Mia Forbes Pirie) in which he talked about his epic gesture of sportsmanship in 1958. When I finally fetched my cappuccino, it was lukewarm. I couldn’t touch the pause button.
After listening to Moss—in 2016 and sounding very much like his 86 years—my writer’s antenna quivered. You’re on constant alert for random story threads that might like being tied together. Like these: Moss and Abt, two actors from the motor racing stage playing opposite roles of human behavior across two different eras. Moss, who was 28 in 1958, came from a nobler age when Formula 1 drivers seemed like knights around King Arthur’s Table. Abt, 27, apparently from a shortcut culture that measures itself by its number of followers. (His? Instagram: 288K, Facebook: 47K, YouTube: 372K.)
It’s such a deliciously easy story to tell, too. Abt, the presumably well-to-do son of the founder of the Abt Sportsline racing team, conspired to have his driving replaced during one of Formula E’s Race at Home Challenge events by 18-year-old Lorenz Hoerzing, a professional sim-racing ringer. There’d be a camera on Abt, apparently driving in Germany, while Hoerzing would actually be remote-driving from Austria. Abt, er, Hoerzing, wound up finishing third (at one point, even leading). Given that Abt had never done nearly so well before, everybody sensed that something was up. The scam quickly unraveled, and after being levied a $11,000 fine, he was fired by his Audi Formula E team. In a rub-it-in twist, when actual Formula E racing eventually resumes … he’ll be able to watch it on a TV screen. Nice.
And then there’s Moss, who was rightfully celebrated upon his death on April 12 for a nine-decade life of charm, style, sportsmanship, and epic courage.
Moss is best known for his epic 1955 Mille Miglia victory in a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, covering 992 miles on closed public roads at an average speed of 99 mph. His face, photographed immediately afterwards, was a gladiator’s after battle. The negative of a raccoon’s—completely black with grime except for two white ovals where his goggles had sat. His eyes carried the remoteness of staring at 10 hours of nearly non-stop streaming speed.
He was the first Englishman to win the British Grand Prix in a British-built car, a driving Don Quixote in the fast but fragile Vanwall. He probably would have won the 1955 and ’56 World Driving Championships in the Mercedes-Benz W196 Silver Arrow Grand Prix cars had his teammate not been the man who many consider to be the greatest driver in history, Juan Manual Fangio. But even after Fangio retired, Moss could never nab the Championship himself. Ridiculous, when you think of Brits who have, like Jenson Button, Nigel Mansell, or Damon Hill. The definitely great Lewis Hamilton has won it six times. Which is a lot of times.
So, Moss wound up as racing’s king without a crown. The closest he came was in 1958 at the Portuguese Grand Prix when his only rival for the title, Mike Hawthorne in a Ferrari, spun on the last lap. When it was reported that Hawthorne had restarted his car going in the wrong direction, he was disqualified for breaking the rules. Moss won that race, and given Hawthorne’s disqualification, he finally had a lucky break in the points battle, too.
But actually, Moss had seen exactly what had happened with Hawthorne. After taking the checkered flag, Moss was slowing down when he came upon Hawthorne’s spun-out, stalled car. Along with Hawthorne, he shouted at the stewards not to push it, as that would disqualify him. And then Moss saw how Hawthorne went about restarting it.
When the stewards announced the disqualification, Moss went to them and explained that they were mistaken. Hawthorne never went the wrong direction on the track, he’d pushed it and bump-started it down an adjacent footpath, which doesn’t count. By 11 p.m., the stewards finally awarded Hawthorne six points for second place; he wound up winning the championship by one.
In the podcast, Forbes Pirie asked, “Would you do that again?” He answered the same way he had for 62 years.
“Yes, because I think it’s right.”
Is there something about knowing that you’ve won fairly and squarely? “If I were to win a race because of someone else’s misfortunes then that would be unfortunate,” he said. “One has one’s own principles, and you know when you’re right and when you’re wrong.”
He didn’t win the championship. But he earned a better title, though it took four decades to finally become Sir Sterling Moss.
So there we are. The schmuck and the sportsman. I could stop right here. But the problem with tidy stories can be their tidiness.
In this quick telling, Moss doesn’t think twice in nobly handing his crown to Hawthorne out of a sense of fair play, while Abt devised a self-serving deception to advance his career. Each deserves their obvious fates—fame and infamy, respect and revulsion. It’s black and white.
That last paragraph is the character count of the tweets that now compress the world’s events into chicken-nugget sizes with a little left for the dipping sauce to add good guy or bad guy flavoring. Let’s finish the Moss and Abt stories.
Moss did all those things I described earlier, and our bow to his sportsmanship is no less deep.
But the Portuguese Grand Prix was by no means the end of the season. There were two more to go over 56 more days. The next race, at Monza, Moss took the pole but retired, letting Hawthorne gain another six points from another second-place finish. At the finale, the Moroccan Grand Prix in Casablanca, Hawthorne started on the pole with Moss next to him, but he bobbled his way back to third. Near the end, Phil Hill, another Scuderia Ferrari driver, was in second with no hope of catching Moss. The team ordered him to drop back, allowing Hawthorne to pass and seize the Championship—by that single point. Hawthorne immediately retired from racing. He enjoyed his glory for just 83 more days before dying in a car crash in England at the wheel of a Jaguar sedan. Moss, who had sacrificed a points advantage in Portugal, lost the championship due to Ferrari’s team orders in Morocco.
Daniel Abt? He posted a video on his YouTube channel after his Audi dismissal. I’m truncating and editing it a lot because it’s quite long and translated from German (click here to see it in its subtitled entirety).
Staring straight into the camera, he says: “I’m approaching you with a very important, very serious, and very personal video today because I think that there is a lot to say about the incidents last weekend. I’ll start at the beginning.
“This Race at Home Challenge had seen five races by last Saturday. Everyone is driving from home with the simulator. These are not about the real Formula E championship, not about prize money—only about entertaining you, and to simultaneously collect donations for UNICEF, a good cause for children. We had a live stream on Twitch with more viewers in our first stream than the official Formula E broadcast—they liked the interaction of me talking to fans during the race. There were drivers taking it seriously, and there were drivers—and I am one of them—who focused on the stream.
“When we were practicing for this Race at Home Challenge, we were talking to other sim racers and the idea came up that it would be funny if a sim racer basically drove for me to show the real drivers what he is capable of. We wanted to document it and create a funny story.
“On Saturday, I wanted to act as if I was actually driving, to unwind it (the joke) afterwards. We were openly communicating this live on the stream; there were 1,000 people watching us talk about it, and we even texted in WhatsApp groups and I gave some hints.
“After the race, it went in a direction which I had not been able to imagine. I was advised to do a €10,000 donation to a good cause, which I did immediately. Then it got to the media. They immediately displayed me as a cheater without giving me the chance to talk about it. I am glad that the sim racing guys weren’t drawn into this and were relatively left alone in comparison to me.
“I can understand that we went too far. There only is to say: I made a huge mistake. I hope you can forgive me. I feel like I couldn’t fall any deeper.
“Thank you.”
The video has now been watched 904,020 times. Abt could have slinked away into the shadows as so many with similar stories do. Instead, he faced his followers, explained it, and took responsibility. He’s not a schmuck; I think he’s just a tone-deaf, little-too-smart practical joker. His prank flashed across our social media nervous system in its chicken-nugget size—already dipped in bad guy sauce—and onto my phone in a California coffee shop parking lot.
We’re left with questions: Are we supposed to take this interim sim racing seriously? Do we understand the world better by streamlining stories beyond recognition?
During her interview, Forbes Pirie pressed Moss about Portugal in 1958.
“Those principles (of yours) are more important than winning?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied in a tired, quiet voice “because you’ve got to live with them.”
Moss would live with his for another four years. Abt is still a young man.
The post The Schmuck and the Sterling Moss: A Lesson on Sportsmanship From the Late Racing Legend appeared first on MotorTrend.
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