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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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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Andy Porterfield (Photo: William Edgar)

On the morning of April 18, 2012, I received a call that Andy Porterfield had died the night before. I knew he had been ill and in the hospital; I had been expecting a call telling me it would be ok for me to visit. His is survived by his wife Judy, daughters Pamela and Melanie, plus a son, Tracy. Andy and I were best friends and Judy recently told me that I was also his oldest friend.

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By Louis Scalzo | Photos by Tom Morgan

Renngruppe Motorsports is located in Lexington, North Carolina in a industrial park area looking like a very ordinary brick fronted metal building, blending in with all the others in the area. When you enter the spacious facility, formerly home of a NASCAR team, you quickly realize that this place is anything but ordinary! It can only be described as a Porsche Mecca, or Holy Land of sorts. As you enter the large shop area, instantly you see magnificent, historic Porsche race cars of all eras that you would only see normally in a book or on a computer screen. It’s visually stunning for sure. The bright white walls are adorned with pictures of racing Porsches and posters from events from all over the world and the floors are painted a sterile gray. There are two engine rooms off to the right of the main gallery, and I can only describe this place as hospital clean and very professional.

RennGruppe Motorsports owner Dave Brown insists on keeping this shop this way and instructs his crew to do so as well, “I look at it as a honor to have these cars here to work on, and I insist on cleanliness here.”

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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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Ferdinand Alexander Porsche with Porsche Type 901

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, designer of the iconic Porsche 911, died on 5 April 2012 in Salzburg, aged 76.

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche was born in Stuttgart on 11 December 1935, the oldest son of Dorothea and Ferry Porsche. Even his childhood was shaped by cars, and he spent much of his time in the engineering offices and development workshops of his grandfather Ferdinand Porsche.

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Saving the Sebring race from the trash heap of history was John Bishop and the newly formed International Motor Sports Association (IMSA).

IMSA and John Bishop brought an informal atmosphere to the Sebring race that year in an attempt to make racing fun again for all participants. One of those participants was a young college student by the name of Phil Currin from Gainesville, Florida who arrived early at Sebring in 1973 with his vintage 1963 Chevrolet Corvette to do some testing prior to the 12 hour race.

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What do you think was the toughest and most difficult race ever? After reading my September 2011 history column, you might say the New York to Paris. Then there was the 1950-54 La Carrera Panamericana. But these were short-lived point-to-point contests. How about a closed circuit race? In the opinion of many who competed there, it was the Targa Florio. The first was in 1906; the last in 1977.

I am fortunate to know quite a few who were there. Three of them—Sitrling Moss, John Fitch and Brian Redman—are friends who have shared their experiences with us.

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Alan Mann was also great team leader for the drivers of the cars he prepared. He is seen here at the 1964 Spa 24 Hours race, in discussion with a group of his drivers. Left to right: Tony Hegbourne, Frank Gardner, Peter Harper in dark glasses, Alan Mann, Sir John Whitmore. Roy Pierpoint is concealed behind Gardner and Hegbourne. (photo: Ford Motor Co.)

Alan Mann, who died on March 21, 2012 at the age of 75, was a highly successful motor racing team owner who played a key role in the Ford Motor Company’s worldwide Total Performance programme of the 1960s.

Alan Mann Racing, based in Byfleet, UK won numerous major championships including the British Saloon Car Championship, the European Touring Car Challenge and the FIA World GT Championship for Manufacturers, all with a variety of specially prepared Ford cars.

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The 60th anniversary Sebring endurance race, the opening round of the 2012 FIA World Endurance Championship, was an event full of tension all the way to the finish. After covering 325 laps at Sebring International Raceway, it was the Audi team of Tom Kristensen (DEN), Allan McNish (GBR) and Rinaldo Capello (ITA) that repeated their 2006 and 2009 victories. The FIA WEC LMP2 class proved surprisingly strong with three entries finishing in the overall top-five. In the GT class, the win was not decided until the last one hundred meters, after Joey Hand (USA) barely steered his BMW past the Ferrari of Olivier Beretta (MCO).

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By Louis Galanos | Photos as credited

During the third week of March 1966 the annual pilgrimage of sports car aficionados was taking place in South Central Florida as fans of the Sebring 12-hour race descended on the aging 5.2 mile road course that was laid out over the runways and access roads of an old World War ll bomber base.

Many of the die-hard fans of America’s premier sports car endurance race had planned for months in anticipation of the event and some were already arriving at the airport facility several days prior to the race to find and secure coveted viewing spots.

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The Tourist Trophy is the oldest motor race in the world still being run. The first was in 1905 on the Isle of Man, organized by the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland. The trophy itself is given by the Royal Automobile Club to the winner.

Over the years, Tourist Trophy races have been part of the World Manufacturers Championship, the World Touring Car Championship, the European Touring Car Championship, the International Sports Racing Series, the FIA GT Championship and the British Touring Car Championship.

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Sebring International Raceway, located on a former Army Air Force base situated among the orange groves of south-central Florida, is celebrating the 60th anniversary of the legendary 12 hour endurance classic in 2012.

Sebring has always been one of my three favorite races to photograph, along with the 24 hour races at Daytona and Le Mans. At all three, the lengths of the races provide a wide range of lighting conditions that change and evolve throughout the races.

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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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It was July 19, 1974 that I really got to know John Young Stewart, even though I’d already met and worked with him several years before that British Grand Prix Friday practice day riding with him in a chauffeured Daimler out to Brands Hatch, a distance of some 25 miles from London’s Savile Row where we’d first made a stop at Jackie’s tailor. In the limousine with us were a cameraman and his sound recordist. Half turned to face Jackie in back, I sat up front with our driver. We were making a documentary for Trans World International, the film branch of International Management Group, better known as IMG, Stewart’s representative agents, then and still now. I was asking Jackie questions about his life in general, and more specifically of his years in racing and what he was presently doing in his then-recent retirement from Formula One, including this particular day of his providing color commentary for the BBC race weekend telecast. My recollection of that day and of how readily we were waved through traffic by Brands Hatch gate marshals, with Britain’s three-time World Champion aboard, remains vivid to the point of obsessing on the past.

Leap forward nearly 38 years to December 2011. Stewart—now Sir Jackie since knighted by Britain’s Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace in November 2001—is again riding in a chauffeured car outside of London, and I’m again about to ask him questions, not from the limo’s front seat this time but by telephone far across the Atlantic and the breadth of America. This is the way my conversation went, in this order, with the first Formula One superstar.

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