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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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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By Kevin Triplett | Photos by Dennis Gray

From his earliest days as car designer and builder, Bruce McLaren understood that success of his designs on the race track lead to opportunities to sell customer cars. Bruce’s interests lie in developing new cars, not running a production operation, so Bruce formed a partnership with Trojan Cars. Trojan first came to prominence in the early 1960’s as builders of the Elva sports racing cars in their South London shops. Trojan and Bruce McLaren began their partnership in 1964 when Trojan built 24 copies of the McLaren M1A sports racing car, with the the production versions known as the McLaren-Elva Mark 1. Over fifty copies of the subsequent M1B and C design improvements were sold as the Elva Mark 2 and Mark 3. The first customer cars sold built by Trojan under the McLaren name were the McLaren M6B Can-Am sports cars.

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A surviving photo shows a late-winter scene with the sports car that was to become famous. Next to it is a Mercedes-Benz 300 S (W 188) – a sporty, luxurious touring car that provided some of the technology for the new sports car.

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One of the oldest open-wheel racing cars competing at the 2011 CSRG Charity Challenge was the unique 1958 Bourgeault Formula Junior owned by Simon Favre of Milpitas, California.

Formula Junior got its start in 1958, when the FIA adopted a rules package suggested by racing driver and journalist Giovanni “Johnny” Lurani, to provide an entry-level class where racers could use inexpensive mechanical components from ordinary automobiles. The FIA eliminated Formula 2 and 3 classes, and Formula Junior took its place.

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Ford’s start in Britain had humble beginnings. In 1903 two Ford Model A cars were shipped to England and a modest trade began. The Ford Model B took to London’s roads in 1905, forming part of the earliest fleet of motor taxi cabs. It was the world debut of the Model T at the 1908 Olympia Motor Exhibition that convinced Ford a British company was needed.

To celebrate the centenary of Ford of Britain in 2011, the company has been digging through its photo archive to reveal rarely seen images. Each week in 2011, Ford released a new picture that best illustrated its relationship with Britain and its society. Here are our Top 20 favorites.

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This 1961 Chevrolet Corvette factory race car, soon to be auctioned at Mecum’s January 24-29, 2012 Kissimmee Florida event, possesses a host of rare options and a provenance worthy of the velvet rope treatment at any of the world’s finest auto museums or vintage races.  Gulf Oil sponsored and driven to an SCCA B-Production national championship by the likes of Dr. Dick “The Flying Dentist” Thompson and Don Yenko, it stands as one the most successful and important production-based Corvette race cars ever constructed.  All the more impressive considering it was never supposed to exist.

Though hard to believe today—with manufacturers spending millions of dollars on motorsports and publicizing their efforts through some of the world’s finest marketing firms—there was a time when the mere mention of auto racing within the walls of an American auto company would spark outbreaks of upper-management indigestion.

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By Edward Lenahan

“The most exciting thing about piloting an old vehicle,” I said to my wife Marguerite, “is the nagging sense it’s going to kill you.”  We had just experienced our own brand of excitement, barely stopping our old tandem bike before a busy intersection, and this comment wasn’t so much a casual observation on my part as it was a way of making our near-death seem innocuous and charming.

To her credit, Marguerite shrugged the whole thing off as if this were normal for her, which, since finalizing a poor choice of men, it is.

Anyways, this particular morning being Sunday and there being considerable amounts of time to drink small oceans of coffee, read auction catalogs, and ponder life’s great philosophical questions from the soft confines of the couch, I concluded for the thousandth time that I don’t like math.  Particularly when applied to bicycles and vintage cars.

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My infatuation with the Ferrari marque goes back to the 1970s, and my ‘formative’ years. As a poorly eleven year-old, stricken by appendicitis and hospital-bound, my dear Mother’s approach to a quick and happy recovery was to arrange for me to sit in a 308 GT4 on a local dealer’s forecourt. A red Ferrari paddock jacket duly followed that Christmas.

Fast forward thirty-odd years, and I make my living photographing all manner of classic and exotic cars. I can say with sincerity that I still get the same thrill from being around pulse-quickening vehicles as I did way back in the 70’s as a young man with a shiny red polyester jacket on his back.

However, despite some memorable encounters with the finest examples of my favourite marque (250 SWB, California Spyder, Pontoon-Fendered TR), my personal automotive infatuation had thus far remained elusive: the 250 GTO.

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The first Mercedes compressor racing cars made their debut in 1922 at the Targa Florio in Sicily. They included, besides the 1.5-litre racing cars driven by Paul Scheef and Fernando Minoia, a Mercedes 28/95 PS, whose engine had been fitted with a compressor for this race and had an output of 140 bhp (103kw).

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Ascari also finished second in Mexico’s La Carrera Panamericana in 1951, teamed with Luigi Villoresi in the second of two factory Ferrari 212 Inter Berlinettas. After eight stages totaling 2,096 miles, on road conditions best described as wretched, the pair were only eight minutes behind winners Piero Taruffi and Luigi Chinetti. Ferrari had achieved a one-two finish, ahead of 33 American sedans, with varying degrees of factory support.

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Known in the Chizzola family as the ‘TZ1½’, the car is a development of the original TZ. The un-numbered chassis is a one-of-a-kind tubular design – a modified Ferrari F2 frame according to the late Lodovico Chizzola – but shorter and different to a TZ’s.

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The road-going XK120’s 3.4-litre twin-cam, straight-6 engine produced between 160 and 180 bhp. The version in the C-Type was originally tuned to around 205 bhp. Later C-Types were more powerful, using triple twin-choke Weber carburettors and high-lift camshafts.

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The Aston Martin / Zagato partnership takes inspiration from the past, to create a modern descendent of classics such as the DB4GT Zagato, V8 Vantage Zagato and DB7 Zagato based on Aston Martin’s ultimate performance interpretation of the Vantage range: the V12 Vantage.

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As Chevrolet embarks on its second century, the man with the job of setting Chevrolet on their design path is Ed Welburn, global vice president of design at General Motors. He stepped into the shoes of his “absolute heroes”, GM designers Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell, back in September 2003, but despite the awe-inspiring responsibility of following those who have become legends, he admits that “I’m having more fun now than at any other time during my career at GM.”

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The story of Townsend’s cars originates from Tucson, Arizona in the early 1950s. Frank Townsend was attending high school at the time when he created a wooden model of a potential sports car.

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Ferrari expert and 166 MM owner David Seielstad has called it “the first beautiful Ferrari and fundamental to the brand’s success,” and he continues, “its styling was unlike anything before and has influenced the design of vehicles from the AC Bristol to the latest Ferrari California.”

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Palm Springs on October 28, 1951. Jack McAfee driving John Edgar’s MG Special on the airport course. A burned piston ended the car’s aerodynamic-bodied race debut.

Our MG Mighty Midget, TC for All Times

By William Edgar and photography courtesy of Edgar Motorsport Archive

My first really dramatic recollection of our MG-TC was drifting through Sunset Boulevard’s curves, my father at the wheel. He’d folded the screen flat and the wind-blown tangs of hot engine and rubber were sheer adrenaline. I was 15 then, had already learned to drive the family’s Type 57C Bugatti, and knew that handling the little MG would be cake. All I wanted was a chance, but first I’d have to swipe it.

We were living at a smart hotel in Hollywood at the time that John Edgar got his MG-TC late in 1947, and the cut-doors two-seater fresh from Abingdon-on-Thames was parked in a lot just beyond the Garden of Allah’s kidney-shaped swimming pool and hibiscus shrubs. When my parents walked to dinner at a close-by restaurant (where the mandolin player was a Brazilian who’d come to the States with Carman Miranda) I’d make my move on the idle MG.

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