Mike Hawthorn Print, Vintage Motorsport Poster, UK Retro Wall Art, Sports Gift, Black and White Sports Print

MIKE HAWTHORN — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Mike Hawthorn, 1953-1958.

Mike Hawthorn drove in a bow tie. It was not a costume choice made by a stylist: he wore it because he wanted to look like he had turned up to a party rather than a job.

In 1958 he became the first British Formula 1 world champion, and he won it by one point from Stirling Moss, having won a single race all season to Moss's four.

The way he won it is the part that has lasted. At the Portuguese Grand Prix, Moss saw officials preparing to disqualify Hawthorn for pushing his car against the direction of the track, and went to the stewards to say the car had been off the racing surface and the penalty was wrong. Hawthorn kept his second place and six points.

Without Moss's intervention, Moss would have been champion.

But the season is not really about the points. In August, at the Nurburgring, Peter Collins went off at Pflanzgarten while chasing Tony Brooks and was killed. Collins was Hawthorn's closest friend; they had shared everything, including a reputation for treating grand prix racing as an extended holiday.

Italy's press had already turned on the Ferrari drivers, and Hawthorn had been through the aftermath of Le Mans in 1955, where he had won the race in which more than eighty spectators died after a car launched into the crowd following his braking. He was cleared by the official inquiry. He never entirely escaped the accusation.

There is a detail from that summer that the record keeps. Hawthorn and Collins had lived together on a boat moored at Modena, and the Ferrari mechanics called them the mon ami mates because of how they addressed each other. It was not a professional partnership so much as a friendship that happened to be conducted at two hundred kilometres an hour.

He announced his retirement within weeks of winning the title. He was twenty-nine and he had had enough.

On 22 January 1959, on the Guildford bypass in Surrey, driving his own Jaguar, he lost control in the wet and hit a tree. He was killed instantly.

He had been world champion for eighty-nine days.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.