Stirling Moss's 1958 Argentine GP win marked the first Formula 1 victory for a rear-mid-engined car and a privately entered team.
Key Facts
- Race date
- 19 January 1958
- Circuit
- Autodromo Municipal Ciudad de Buenos Aires (#2 layout)
- Race distance
- 313 km over 80 laps
- Winning margin
- 2.7 seconds over Luigi Musso
- Winner's car
- Cooper T43-Climax (Rob Walker privateer entry)
- Moss Grand Prix wins
- 7th career Grand Prix victory
By the Numbers
Location
Cause → Event → Consequence
With his Vanwall team absent from the season opener, Stirling Moss arranged to drive a privately entered Cooper T43-Climax owned by Rob Walker. The car used a rear-mid-mounted Climax engine, a configuration largely unseen in top-level racing since the Auto Union cars of the 1930s, and ran in a non-traditional blue livery rather than British racing green.
On 19 January 1958, Moss won the Argentine Grand Prix at Buenos Aires over 80 laps in a field of just ten cars. He crossed the line 2.7 seconds ahead of Ferrari's Luigi Musso, with Ferrari's Mike Hawthorn in third. The race was the opening round of both the 1958 World Championship of Drivers and the newly established International Cup for Formula One Manufacturers.
The victory established multiple firsts simultaneously: the first World Drivers' Championship win for Cooper as a constructor, the first F1 win for a rear-mid-engined car, the first for a privateer entrant, the first for a car using an engine from a separate manufacturer, and the first for a British car in blue livery. These outcomes accelerated the industry-wide shift toward rear-engined Formula 1 car design that defined the following era.
Result
at Autodromo Municipal Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina