In the classic June Sprints that’s still run today some seventy years later, Carroll Shelby drove Luigi Chinetti’s 4412CC, 330HP in-line, six-cylinder 121 LM (0558LM) in this SCCA National event on the 4.0-mile road racing course near Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin. Shelby survived the challenges of a host of Ferraris and the three D-Type Jaguars of the Briggs Cunningham racing team. He led all 38 laps of the 152-mile race, setting the fastest race lap, and beating Lou Brero’s D-type across the line by six seconds. 0558LM was raced by the factory with Umberto Maglioli, Phil Hill, and Eugenio Castellotti in 1955 before going to Luigi Chinetti, who provided it to Hill and Shelby to race in 1956. (Caption by Jeff Allison)

Photos by Glen Glendenning
Captions by Jeff Allison and Pete Vack

Bob Birmingham and Glen Glendenning have previously featured the cars at the 1956 June Sprints at Road America, but we purposely left out the large contingent of Ferraris that entered the Sprints that year. We present them herein.

While gathering up the photos for this piece, three points of interest came to our attention:

By the Editor

Here it is, two weeks after we published the above photo with a plea for help as in Who, What, Where and When? There were no fully correct answers, though some responded that it looked like a Ferrari. This has never happened before in the long 25 years of VeloceToday and many mystery contests!

Or, maybe, just maybe, we have actually found a photo of a Ferrari race car that no one can easily identify. In this day of Google and AI, Barchetta and Ferrarichat, that is hard to believe. Just when you thought we knew it all up pops this strangely painted Ferrari.

By Peter Darnall
From the Archives, February 2021

Déjà vu: a feeling that one has seen or heard something before . . .

I came across an old friend at Thunderhill recently. I had not seen her in more than fifty years—and she had not changed a bit. She was drawing quite a bit of attention in the paddock, which was just the way I remembered our last meeting in the Del Monte Forest in the spring of 1956.