The 2012 route went through some of the most beautiful cities of Italy.

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La Mille Miglia, or the 1000 Miles, has become an Italian institution on the classic car calendar. Originally a full-on, flat-out race starting in Brescia and heading down to Rome and back in one go, the Mille Miglia was started in 1927 and ended after 24 editions in 1957 when the race was outlawed from being too dangerous after several fatalities. Even though the entire route was closed off, the roads aren’t what they are today and Sir Stirling Moss set the fastest lap in 1955 reaching the finish after 10 hours 7 minutes and 48 seconds with a staggering average speed of 98.53mph.

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Organized by the Automobile Club de Monaco, the 8th Monaco Historics was comprised of seven races, each tailored to provide spectators and participants the opportunity to relive the motorsport event that started on 14th April 1929.

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Report and photos by Dirk de Jager

Monaco and Grand Prix: Two names that have been combined since 1929 when Monte Carlo held the first Grand Prix. Since then this famous track has never missed a single year on the calendar. In 1997 the first Historic Grand Prix was held to honour its legends from the past. Now traditionally held biennially two weeks before the current Formula One stars hit the track, the racing is divided into seven grids containing an average of over 30 cars!

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All of us have lost one of the dominant figures of the post-WWII automotive era, and I have lost a dear friend. After a long illness, Carroll Hall Shelby died on May 10, 2012, at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. He is survived by two sons, Michael and Patrick, his daughter Sharon, a number of grandchildren, a sister Anne, his wife Cleo plus a host of admirers. For a reason that always remained between the two of us, I am eternally in his debt. As I write this, tears are in my eyes.

On January 11, 2012, Carroll Shelby turned 89 years old. He was married a number of times. His first was Jeanne Fields with whom he had the three children. They were married in 1943 and divorced early in 1960. In September of that year, he married actress Jan Harrison, but this one only lasted a few months. In 1997, his fourth wife, Lena Dahl, was killed in a car accident. Afterwards, he said that he was never going to get married again. Nevertheless, four month later, he married Cleo, an English woman considerably his junior. It’s an interesting note regarding his personality that he maintained good relations with all his exes.

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The Quail Motorcycle Gathering 2012 was held Saturday, May 5th on the grounds of the Quail Lodge Golf Club in Carmel, California. More than 1,500 motorcycle enthusiasts and collectors attended the celebration, which showcased 250 motorcycles from the past, present and concepts for the future.

The 4th annual Quail Motorcycle Gathering celebrated the Evolution of the Motorcycle, featuring Indian Motorcycles.

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Carroll Shelby, as he himself would say, has gone horizontal. He died at age 89 on Thursday, May 10, 2012, at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, after pneumonia earlier this year left him weak and vulnerable to what eventually comes to us all. He knew I was writing this story and I was looking forward to telling him it was published here in Sports Car Digest. The article had been scheduled for posting on May 16, but my dearly loved friend for more than half a century did not live that long. With a salute to the memory of Old Shel, I dedicate this narrative and the images that illustrate it to Carroll’s wife, Cleo Shelby. – W.E.

Carroll Shelby was the rising legend I’d not yet met in February 1956, when I was a young guy and in Palm Springs, California. That was six years before he would make his first Cobra, and another half century until today when the Cobra’s golden jubilee is being celebrated with the newest Shelby creation, a supercharged 5.4-liter V8-powered Mustang called the “Shelby 1000” because, well, it has 1000 horses. So much has changed since those pre-Cobra Shelby years of the 1950s, and that’s where this piece is going—back to when he was wearing bib overalls and driving the livin’ hell out of foreign race cars.

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What is the foremost racing series in the world? If you said Formula One, you are in the company of most other enthusiasts. The series consists of a yearly Grand Prix in each participating country (although in a few instances, there was more than one). Even though the Formula One series was started in 1950, the concept of having a country’s premier event began long before that. The first one was held in 1906 near the city of Le Mans in France. The first in the U.S. took place in 1908.

Before that, the premier series in the U.S. was the Vanderbilt Cup. The Cup events were run according to the internationally-recognized regulations of the Association Internationale des Automobiles Clubs Reconnus (AIACR).

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The 2012 running of the California Mille was held April 30th to May 3rd on the twisty and scenic back roads of Northern California and Nevada.

Similar to the previous twenty editions of the rally, the California Mille departed San Francisco on Monday morning from its traditional starting line at the famed Fairmont Hotel, located atop Nob Hill.

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The Speedfest Mitty 2012 was held April 27-30 at the 2.54 mile, 12-turn Road Atlanta in Braselton, Georgia. A field of 336 entrants showed up to participate in the event, which is ably promoted by Classic Motorsports Magazine and sanctioned by HSR.

Triumph was the featured marque at the 2012 Speedfest Classic Motorsports Mitty, with Kas Kastner, a hard charging Triumph racer and the driving force behind Triumph’s early racing program, serving as Grand Marshal.

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RM Auctions has assembled more than 90 automobiles for the 2012 Monaco sale, including one of two 1957 Ferrari 625 TRC Spiders ever built; a 1966 Ferrari 206 S Dino Spyder, offered for the first time in 40 years; 1953 Ferrari 375 MM Spider; and the Ferrari-engined Hydroplane racing boat, ARNO XI.

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The Japan Classic Car Association (JCCA) has just had their second gathering of 2012 at a blustery Fuji Speedway. In what is traditionally the first on-track outing of the year for the “minor touring” cars and other classic Japanese tintops, it was a busy paddock in the shadow of the great mountain.

The day comprised a full schedule of on-track action in the form of ‘runs’ and ‘races’ – the former being more of the demonstration type affair in road-going classics; while the latter proved far more entertaining (not to mention quicker), with combatants really pushing their race-prepared machines to the limit. Some of the grids for the 2nd of two heats were therefore noticeably smaller than the first.

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Around 21,500 spectators saw 218 participants divided into eleven different categories during the 2012 Bosch Hockenheim Historic – Jim Clark Revival, from April 13-15th on the Hockenheimring in Germany.

Changing but dry weather conditions over the weekend treated spectators and drivers to some interesting and challenging action. Unique was the “Race History on Track” presentation, featuring former single seaters from no less than six decades of race history. Besides the racing action on the track spectators found their way to special presentations about Jim Clark, Stefan Bellof as well as historic race car transporters.

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The Spirit of Montjuic Classic Revival 2012 took place April 20-22 at the Circuit de Catalunya, outside Barcelona, Spain. This interesting circuit in the hills 30 minutes from downtown Barcelona has hosted the Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix since 1991.

This event sought to resurrect the spirit of the original Montjuic street circuit located on the Montjuic mountain overlooking Barcelona. The challenging 2.35 mile track hosted the Spanish Motorcycle Grand Prix from 1950 to 1968 and the Formula 1 Spanish Grand Prix starting in 1969 and is considered one of the best Formula 1 tracks of all time. A tragic accident during the 1975 race resulting in the death of five spectators meant the end of racing on the ‘Magic Mountain’.

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This year’s event honored the Ferrari 250 GTO as it celebrates its 50th anniversary. The 2012 Tour Auto Rally was a return to the roots for GTO, a race car that won everything during its career: the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the GT World Championship in 1962-1964 and the Tour Automobile de France.

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The 22nd annual Copperstate 1000 vintage and sports car rally was held April 15-19, 2012. Each year, the event sends five or six dozen pre-1974 classics, their drivers and co-drivers on a 1000-mile tour of Arizona’s amazing landscape by way of the state’s smooth but often delightfully serpentine and primarily two-lane byways.

Although there were serious doubts when the Copperstate was launched nearly a quarter-century ago, the event has become an important fund-raiser for the Phoenix Art Museum and draws cars and participants from across the country (and sometimes from overseas as well).

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Sanctioned by Historic Motors Sports Association (HMSA), the LSR Invitational historic races were held at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on Tuesday, April 10th, 2012. The LSR Invitational saw a field historic race cars tackle the 11-turn, 2.238-mile road course in Salinas, California.

Similar to HMSA Club events, the LSR Invitational featured historic production cars built through 1972 and purpose-built Formula, Sports Racing and IMSA and Trans-Am cars built through the mid-’90s.

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Jon Shirley makes good decisions whether finding and buying one-off Ferrari 375MMs or guiding Microsoft through its initial public offering.

The son of Navy man, Shirley was born in 1938 and moved with his family in 1941 to a little known place named Pearl Harbor. After the bombing, with his family thankfully well, they moved across the country according to the needs of the Navy. Jon attended a boarding school in Pennsylvania and later enrolled at MIT. Then he decided to leave college.

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By 1969, with the 917 program still in its early stages, Porsche had already built a special variant of its 12-cylinder race car for the popular North American Can-Am series. Although the original 917 had been designed to meet the demands of 24-hour endurance events, the platform showed tremendous potential for Can-Am’s 200-mile sprint events and Porsche, eager to return to prominence in US road racing, began to develop an even lighter and more powerful race car.

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By Steve Smith | Photographs as credited

Every car guy has the automotive equivalent of the fisherman’s “the one that got away” story (“It was this big! Really!”). The car of a lifetime…loved and lost. Some car guys even have two such tales. Like my friend Brock Yates. He once had the opportunity to buy one of the world-famous D-Type Jaguars (similar to ones that won Le Mans; only a few dozen were ever built). The owner, Bill Sadler, wanted to sell it to raise the money to build his own sports-racing car. He offered it to Brock for a mere $2,000—about a third of its value then—but this was in the mid-1950s, early in Brock’s stellar career, before he was famous…much less rich…so he passed. The car is worth about $4 million today. Another time, Brock, now more affluent (this was in the early 1970s), bought a Ferrari Lusso, possibly the most beautiful Ferrari ever made, for $6,000. Brock was nervous about using such a treasure as a daily driver (a gas station attendant once accidentally broke the $400 gas cap), and sold it for $6,000 a year after he bought it. He hadn’t lost a dime and thought he’d cheated the hang-man, used-car-wise. A Lusso like Brock’s would fetch at least ten times that today.

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