If I put them all together I could make a little flipbook and have a movie of me driving around the track.

One thing you probably don’t want to do in life is meet your heroes. When I was a kid my older brother was a huge fan of 1950s folk group the Kingston Trio. When I first got started in show business I opened for them, so I told my brother and he said, ‘Woah, get me an autograph.’ As soon as I got to the hotel, I went to the Kingston Trio’s dressing room. I said, ‘Hi, I’m Jay Leno and I’m your opening act.’ They said, ‘Great – you got any coke?’

My other sort of hero was John DeLorean – and we all know how that ended up.

But when someone said, ‘How would you like to meet Stirling Moss at Pebble Beach?’ I still had faith. And he’s one hero who turned out exactly as I thought he’d be. As you go through life there are just so many disappointments… you know, Elvis Presley died of an overdose; people get bloated or lose their enthusiasm. But Stirling has that sparkle in his eye and talks about races as if they were yesterday.
Someone wrote recently that Moss is the greatest living Englishman. It was a wonderful title and it certainly seems to be true, because for him it was always about the racing, national pride, his country, and he did things for the right reasons.

He was always shocked by the lack of sportsmanship sometimes shown by others, and I have no idea whether Stirling is a multi-millionaire or penniless but it never seemed to be about that for him. Even at 80 at Pebble Beach, when he was swamped by people, at no point was he not gracious.

You know, he sensed my enthusiasm one day at Pebble Beach and said, ‘How would you like to take a ride around? We’re going to do a lap of Laguna Seca. Would you like to come?’ I thought, ‘Well, this is like riding on Superman’s cape.’ He showed me all the switches, everything, as if he was a Mercedes salesman and I was a customer. He explained to me how the car behaved, its speed and whatnot. We were going through The Corkscrew at Laguna Seca with Stirling Moss at the wheel, sliding sideways, saying, ‘Be careful when you do this, be careful when you do that,’ as if somehow he was going to turn the car over to me.

The funny thing was that for weeks afterwards I would get photos in the mail from people who’d taken my picture with Stirling. I got hundreds of different versions of the same image, from every angle. If I put them all together I could make a little flipbook and have a movie of me driving around the track.

And you never got the feeling he was looking down on you, or thought he was better than you. He looked at you as an equal and expected you to treat him as an equal. I was sitting with him at dinner at Pebble Beach once, and another driver was talking about a race that happened in 1952 and Stirling went, ‘Yes, I remember that car, that bastard cut me off.’ It just made me laugh.

In 1956/’57, my brother would go into Boston and bring back one of the European magazines like MotorSport. And there would be Stirling’s picture and all his exploits. These days, when you can get whatever image you want off the internet, it’s hard to imagine the impact those photos had on kids back in the day, because that was all you saw. So I have these iconic memories of a black-faced Moss, goggles up on his head. The first time I saw Stirling in person it was like meeting Santa Claus. There was that initial thing of, ‘Uh-oh, is this going to be disappointing?’ and of course it wasn’t.

The fun thing about Moss is whenever I see him I always have some sort of blue joke ready because, gentleman though he is, he still enjoys a good rude joke. So Stirling, although I didn’t get to give you a rude joke on your birthday, here’s one for you now.

‘This woman’s dying of cancer and she says to her husband, “Look, we’ve been together 20 years but you’ve never gone down on me. I’ve always wanted to know what that would be like.”

‘He says, “OK, I’ll do it.” So he does it and she feels better, and he does it the next day, and the next, and so on. Finally, after six weeks she’s fully recovered, her hair’s grown back. So she comes back from the hospital, she’s all excited, but the man’s sitting on the couch crying. His wife goes, “Honey, why are you crying? I’m in full remission.” He says, “I know, but I could have saved mum!”’