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Road America, 1956 June Sprints

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Jim Kimberly in the OSCA coming down the hill into turn five.

Text by Robert Birmingham
Photos by Glen Glendenning

Road America June Sprints, 23-24, 1956

After an exuberant late 1955, an abbreviated time to sit back and smell the roses was shortened even more when the Chicago Region SCCA received approval to hold two race weekends at Road America, the first on June 23 – 24, 1956 and another on September 8 – 9. If that wasn’t ambitious enough, the National Association for Stock Car Racing’s (NASCAR) Grand National Series secured a race date in August. Clearly all involved, Clif Tufte and his extended team, local merchants and SCCA officials, had their winter hours spoken for to assure competing drivers and their respective teams, area merchants and attending fans from across the Midwest and beyond had safe, enjoyable and profitable summer. [Read more…] about Road America, 1956 June Sprints

Road America 1956 NASCAR and SCCA events

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Paul Goldsmith took the Jag MK VII to victory in the under 3.5 liter race. Photo courtesy of Bernie Silverberg Collection,

Story by Bob Birmingham
Photos by Glen Glendenning unless otherwise noted

NASCAR at Road America

On the weekend of August 11-12, 1956 a NASCAR group of mostly good ‘ol southern boys took to Road America in two events. On Saturday a 100 mile race for European and American cars under 3.5 liters and Sunday the 250 mile feature for American made stock cars. Saturday’s grid had a mixture of small European sedans, an American Studebaker and one Jaguar VII Saloon, the latter driven to victory by NASCAR’s Paul Goldsmith.

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When Allen Met Graham

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Carroll Shelby in John Edgar’s Ferrari 410S leads Dan Gurney in Frank Arciero’s Ferrari 375 Plus at Palm Springs on April 13, 1958. One of the many photos I shared with the Ferrari Archivist.

Story and Photos by Allen R. Kuhn
From the VeloceToday archives, March, 2022

I would like to start this series of short stories – they are not Galleries as before – by telling a true story about Graham Gauld, and how he saved our skin when we were in Italy/France in 2006 for our seven-week tour of the Continent. The story really began in Maranello, so bear with me….

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Mimmo Dei’s Scuderia Centro Sud

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Story by Graham Gauld

If you were a journeyman racing driver or a tyro and lived near Modena, Guglielmo Dei’s Scuderia Centro Sud had many attractions.

First of all, it was a driver’s school, but it was also a club with its own clubhouse in a small villa at 646 via Emilia Ovest. There, you could sit at tables under the trees and talk motor racing or perhaps share stories of how you had driven a racing car on the nearby Modena Autodromo.

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Frank Lance, Lonestar Master Mechanic, Part 3

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Mansfield, March 1961. Based on Jim Hall’s grimy face, a photo taken just after the race. From the left: Frank Lance, Jim, body man Foy Barrett and part-time mechanic Billy Billings, next to Jim’s feature winning Maserati 570S. Harry Heuer’s Meister Brauser Scarab is in the background.

As told by Frank Lance to Willem Oosthoek
All photos by Bob Jackson [Willem Oosthoek Collection], unless stated otherwise.

The 1961 season started well for Jim Hall. During the Polar Prix at Green Valley in February he raced a Porsche RSK to a feature win, beating preliminary winner Delmo Johnson in his Jaguar XK-SS [chassis 701].

Frank: “That was the former Penske RSK. Jim had a new Porsche RS-60 that he raced at Green Valley in August 1960, beating Delmo’s XK-SS for first overall. Roger wanted an RS-60 because Bob Holbert was beating him with his own RS-60. So, Roger made a deal with Jim to swap cars, although not engines. I had to remove the engine from the RS-60 and reinstall it in the tired RSK that Penske sent us. We took it to Green Valley in the new year and again won overall in a race against my old friend, the XK-SS Jaguar, now with Chevy power.

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Frank Lance, Lonestar Master Mechanic

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Dallas, November 1960. Frank Lance welding the cracked tubes on Jim Hall’s Birdcage Maserati, chassis 2463. The tube structure between the shock absorbers needed reinforcing as well.

As told by Frank Lance to Willem Oosthoek.
All photos by Bob Jackson [Willem Oosthoek Collection] unless otherwise stated

I met Frank at the Old Race Drivers Reunion, organized by R. David Jones, a former SCCA top official, at his Soldier Creek Ranch in Fort Worth a few years ago. In addition to Frank, I met Bill Janowski, Delmo Johnson, Bob Schroeder, Jim Hall, Willis Murphy, J.C. Kilburn, Enus Wilson, Toly Arutunoff, John Mecom and many other people associated with motor racing in The Golden Age. Frank stood out with his excellent memory at 90 years of age, and I decided he deserved to have his race history in writing. Frank and I put together his story via email and I used the many photos from my collections. Parts of this series appeared earlier in my book “Sports Car Racing in the South”(Dalton Watson). Most images of Frank’s early years were the work of Dallas Times Herald photographer Bob Jackson, a racing enthusiast. Jackson became a winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his image of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Courthouse.

Race drivers are the ones who receive all the attention and glory in the press. Their mechanics seldom do. Yet, Frank Lance’s career should get our attention as well. Frank served as the racing mechanic for five of the most prominent Texas drivers and team owners of the fifties and sixties: Jim Hall, Ebb Rose, Carroll Shelby, John Mecom and A.J. Foyt. He saw it all, from amateur [SCCA] and professional [USAC] sports car racing in the U.S., international long-distance racing at Daytona, Sebring and Le Mans, Formula One racing at Watkins Glen, Riverside and Mexico City, to the Indianapolis 500, where he was part of the winning team twice. And all that in only a ten-year timeframe.

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Jeff Allison Captions Ferraris by Glendenning

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By Jeff Allison

This article first appeared in Prancing Horse, the quarterly magazine of the Ferrari Club of America.

Before his passing in 2014, Glen Glendenning sent David Rex a box full of loose photo scrapbook pages—you know the kind with the black mounts that you’d slip over the corners of a photo, lick the glue on the back of the mount and position the photo on a page. Remember, they tasted terrible! Rex provided the photos to editor Pete Vack for possible use in VeloceToday.com. Luckily, Glendenning had written brief descriptions under some of the photos, and the pages were in chronological order. Taken with a 35MM single-lens reflex camera, Glendenning obviously had access to the pits, the track, and the people. He owned a public relations firm with a film lab, producing twenty-six films for the Schlitz brewery, so photography probably was natural for him. [Read more…] about Jeff Allison Captions Ferraris by Glendenning

Allen R. Kuhn: Of Gauld and Ferrari

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Carroll Shelby in John Edgar’s Ferrari 410S leads Dan Gurney in Frank Arciero’s Ferrari 375 Plus at Palm Springs on April 13, 1958. One of the many photos I shared with the Ferrari Archivist.

Story and Photos by Allen R. Kuhn

I would like to start this series of short stories – they are not Galleries as before – by telling a true story about Graham Gauld, and how he saved our skin when we were in Italy/France in 2006 for our seven-week tour of the Continent. The story really began in Maranello, so bear with me…. [Read more…] about Allen R. Kuhn: Of Gauld and Ferrari

The Laughlin-Shelby Scaglietti Corvette

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From the Archives, December 2011

By Wallace Wyss

In 1959 Carroll Shelby won the biggest race there was in sports car racing, and that was the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He quit driving shortly after that, and just in time, because a heart condition he had managed to hide from the SCCA medical techs was threatening to take him out if he didn’t quit. He wasn’t worried about what he would do next; he was already was working on a plan to build his own sports car.

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Cobra Daytona Coupes

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By Peter Brock
From the VeloceToday Archives

As soon as the first Daytona Cobra Coupe, CSX 2287, was completed and tested successfully at Riverside Raceway on February 1st 1964, Carroll Shelby decided to

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Peter Brock: Building the Daytona Coupes in Modena

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Fifty years on, Peter Brock poses with Peter Brock and the prototype Daytona,

Fifty years on, Peter Brock poses with a photo of Peter Brock and the prototype Daytona. Our story deals with the first of five Coupes built in Modena. Courtesy Peter Brock collection.

By Peter Brock

As soon as the first Daytona Cobra Coupe, CSX 2287, was completed and tested successfully at Riverside Raceway on February 1st 1964, Carroll Shelby decided to build five more. He felt he had a score to settle with Enzo Ferrari and finally had the weapon to do it. The Daytona’s radical design had been so controversial within the Shelby organization that most of those employed there figured Shelby’s plan to race in Europe against Ferrari would evaporate as soon as the first Coupe was tested and found to be a failure. That resistant attitude changed dramatically as soon as test driver Ken Miles called from Riverside trackside to inform Shelby that he’d shattered the track’s lap record by 3.5 seconds!

Brock on the Grid with the six Coupes. Jonathan Sharp photo.

Brock on the Goodwood grid with five of the six Daytona Cobra Coupes. Jonathan Sharp photo.

[Read more…] about Peter Brock: Building the Daytona Coupes in Modena

Carroll Shelby and the OSCA

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carroll shelby portrait

A Shelby portrait taken in about 1956 by racing photographer Alix Lafontant. It is inscribed “The very best to my good friend Alix. – Carroll Shelby.”

By Carl Goodwin

Photos by Alix Lafontant copyright Carl Goodwin.

1956 was a great year for Carroll Shelby driving the Italian cars he loved. Up until a late-season off-course excursion in the sand at Thompson Raceway, he had notched 19 wins at road courses from coast to coast, driving a Ferrari 4.4, Ferrari Monza, Maserati 300S, and a Maserati 450S.

We were accustomed to seeing Shelby toss around the big Ferraris and Maseratis owned by John Edgar and Tony Parravano, but he was also a great driver in under two liter Italian cars such as the OSCA. One such race was at Road America.

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