The business about an old Italian racing circuit reminded me of this image that I scanned a while back from Piero Taruffi's The Technique of Motor Racing illustrating heel-and-toe technique with both typical road (left) and proper racing (right) pedal placements.
You can tell that it was drawn by an Italian. Note the shoes!
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While I've seen references to this pedal arrangement, I've never associated it with any particular vehicles. The right brake/center throttle certainly works better with the ergonomics of the human foot/ankle.
Here's an excerpt typical of those that led to my thinking that clutch-throttle-brake was the usual racing setup prior to a gradual change-over, which took place roughly in the second half of the 1950s. Tis is from a chassis registry page on the Maserati 250F:
2508 – A 1954 customer car for built for Alfred (A.E.) Moss, Stirling's father, and actually ordered through Shell-BP in Italy. 2508 was delivered in May 1954. It was also raced by Stirling Moss even after he joined the works team at the end of the 1954 season. Chassis 2508 had a unique pedal arrangement: rather than the typical clutch-throttle-brakes setup used in Italian monopostos, 2508 had its pedals in the order of clutch-brakes-throttle.
I gather that drivers such as Stirl, who switched back and forth between production cars and purpose-built racers regularly, even within the same weekend, were the motivation for the transition. You really don't want to be getting your feet mixed up there.
Save for my venerable 1969 F-100, I think that the left image shows a bit of an exaggeration. In my experience, save for said Ford, the right foot remains basically straight, with the left ball of the foot on the brake and the right edge on the throttle. On the other hand, I don't wear guinea shoes!
But regarding the evolution of the pedal placement. Wasn't the early 1950's also about the time that racing cars phased out the pre-selector gearbox? I wonder if that changeover caused the evolution of the pedal placement?
LJK Setright really liked preselector 'boxes, didn't he? Or mentioned them fairly often anyway...
I don't know that much about them myself but there are some discussions on the web naturally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preselector_gearbox
http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/lane/xvo73/ht/presel.htm
http://www.geocities.com/registen/regis04.html
Word is that they worked nicely indeed when they worked, but that they're heavy and not so efficient, and were more typically used on passenger cars. (They were designed by Walter Wilson for use in tanks in The Great War, so different priorities there.)
Also, they're based around a planetary gearset which is always in mesh so I think there'd be less (none, actually) reason to care about heel-and-toe-ability with one.
In my cars, I've wound up braking with the arch of my foot and tapping the top of the gas pedal with my toe as often as anything.
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