Sir Patrick Stewart died Wednesday at 86, following a battle with Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia. The world mourned a Shakespearean titan, a starship captain, a voice that could make a phone book sound like poetry. But tucked inside that towering career was something smaller, more personal, and far more relatable: the man loved cars.
Not in the casual, celebrity-with-a-garage way. Stewart was a proper racing fan, the kind forged in childhood worship and carried into old age with the giddiness of a kid pressing his face against a fence at Silverstone.
His object of devotion was Sir Stirling Moss, the driver widely regarded as the best never to win a Formula 1 world championship. Moss, who died in 2020, wasn’t just a name Stewart admired from a distance. He made a documentary about him.
In “Racing Legends: Stirling Moss,” Stewart did something most fans only dream about. At 72, he obtained a racing license, entered the Silverstone Classic Celebrity event, and drove some of the actual cars Moss had piloted to glory. The film runs an hour and weaves archival footage of Moss’ career with intimate conversations between the two men. Murray Walker shows up too, because of course he does.
What makes the documentary worth watching, especially now, is Stewart’s face. The camera catches him in the cockpit and sitting across from Moss, and the expression is unmistakable. Pure, uncomplicated joy. Not performance, not the carefully modulated emotion of an actor hitting his mark. Just a man from Yorkshire who grew up idolizing a racing driver and somehow ended up sharing a room with him, sharing a track with him.
That intersection of celebrity and genuine fandom is rarer than people think. Plenty of famous people collect exotic cars. Fewer build a project around understanding what made a particular driver tick, what the physics of a corner felt like through the wheel, what separated Moss from the rest of a brutally competitive grid.
Stewart’s spokesperson, Kelly Bush Novak, described his final days as filled with “live music, prayer, tears, laughter and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire.” She spoke of “invincible grace,” a phrase that lands differently when you’ve seen him wrestle a vintage race car through Copse Corner with zero pretension and a massive grin.
The tributes pouring in will rightly focus on Jean-Luc Picard, on Professor X, on decades of stage work that put him in conversation with the finest actors of his generation. Those tributes belong to a bigger story than this one.
But there is something worth holding onto in the smaller story. Stewart didn’t just watch racing. He studied it. He got the license, strapped in, and wanted to feel what Moss felt, even if only as a 72-year-old amateur on a celebrity grid.
Most of us who love this stuff never get that close. We watch from grandstands, argue in comment sections, fall asleep with qualifying highlights on the laptop. Stewart had every resource to do it differently, and he did. But the hunger that drove him into that cockpit was the same hunger any of us would recognize.
The documentary is still out there, still streamable. Tonight seems like a good night for it.
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