Sweet Revenge at Eagle Mountain

Over the years Texas has seen its share of oilmen who were actively involved in sports car racing. One of them was Dallas resident Samuel Allen Guiberson, who was of distant Dutch descent. Already the owner of various big Ferraris in the early ’50s, Guiberson bought a new Ferrari 750 Monza and entered it at Sebring for the 12-hour endurance race in March of 1955. The Scaglietti-bodied car was chassis 0510, and the Dallas wildcatter invited his old friend Carroll Shelby to drive it, with up-and-coming Californian Phil Hill sharing the duties. Both men had raced other Guiberson Ferraris before, although Shelby was not in the best of shape to tackle an endurance race. His right arm was still in a cast after wrecking an Austin-Healey in the 1954 Pan-American road race, and at Sebring it had to be taped to the steering wheel.

Sebring 1955 turned out to be an exciting but controversial event. For 12 hours Guiberson’s 3-liter Ferrari Monza battled a new, factory-loaned 3.4-liter Jaguar D-Type [chassis XKD-406], entered by soon-to-be Jaguar importer Briggs Cunningham and driven by Phil Walters and Mike Hawthorn, for the lead. After a slow start by the Ferrari, the top two cars were never more than a handful of seconds apart. When the checkered flag fell at 10 p.m. on Saturday March 13, public address announcer Hemp Oliver declared Carroll Shelby and Phil Hill the winners. Unfortunately, Oliver had missed a last-hour pit stop by their Ferrari, which had allowed the D-Type back into the lead. Chief timer Joe Lane soon reversed the announced finish positions, with the Cunningham entry now beating the Guiberson car by just 25.4 seconds, each having completed 182 laps. Inevitably, tempers flared, with accusations of a “bought victory.”