Mr. C – Briggs Cunningham
By Pete Lyons
Fifty years ago, in 1953, an American-made Cunningham sports racing car won the second-ever Sebring 12 Hour race. Then Briggs Swift Cunningham’s team carried the blue-and-white competition colors of the USA to the 21st 24 Hours of Le Mans, earning 3rd place overall and 1st in class.
“Mr. C” died this July. We don’t have space here for all the things that should be said about him, but I do want to acknowledge his racing achievements and also his manner of going racing. These things were foundation stones for my own enthusiasm.
Though I came to the sport just too late to have personal memories of Cunningham’s bold, burly cars in serious action, my father brought home pictures and stories of them from his racing photo-safaris. These images defined a sort of starting point for my conception of what sports cars ought to be.
Here were all-American interpretations of the exotic European theme. Daring marriages of brute Detroit horsepower with agile chassis. Hot rods with road manners.
And an American team taking on the world’s elite.
Peering through the long lens of history, I think its hard to get Cunningham and his colleagues in proper focus. It is tempting, now, to over-glamorize their quest. In fact, how many of their American contemporaries, nation-wide, would have understood what they were doing, or cared? On the other hand, given half a century of hindsight, today we could easily dismiss their vehicles as primitive.
But I feel genuine value and honor in what they attempted and, given their times and circumstances, I find their effort breathtakingly sophisticated.
Briggs Cunningham was born to enormous wealth, and his ambitions and standards were those of a dedicated sportsman. Apart from his love of automobiles, he was a “Corinthian” yachtsman who once commanded his own sailboat to a successful defense of the America’s Cup. In wartime, having tried to enlist but turned away because he was overage, he served his nation by supplying an amphibious plane for coastal submarine and rescue patrol, complete with himself as pilot.
Cunningham was so placed in life that he would have been perfectly able to consume cars of others. But he chose to create ones of his own.
The roots of the Cunningham cars reach back to the 1930s, when Briggs was active with fellow fans of European sports cars in a group called the Automobile Racing Club of America (ARCA—a forerunner of the postwar SCCA). Young Briggs didn’t race at that time, in deference to his mother’s concern, but he owned numerous cars and let friends race them. In 1936, a Cunningham MG was borrowed for Le Mans, though Briggs didn’t go over himself.
ARCA members were not snobs about their machinery, and several happily built “specials,” European cars stuffed full of American power. In 1939, Briggs, a former Yale engineering student, commissioned a blend of attributes he admired from both sides of the Atlantic. Dubbed the BuMerc, it was a Buick chassis with the straight-8 engine repositioned rearward and hopped up. The body came from a crashed Mercedes SSK. The BuMerc was meant for street driving, but in a 1940 ARCA event called the World’s Fair Grand Prix, one of Briggs’ friends was holding 2nd until he crashed.
In 1948, with his mother gone, Briggs himself drove the BuMerc to 2nd place in the first Watkins Glen race. At age 41, Cunningham launched his racing career in earnest, driving a British-made Healey Silverstone powered by a Cadillac V8. He also drove a Cadillac-engined ’53 Ford— a “Fordillac”—both on the street and in time trials. It clocked 105 mph on Daytona Beach. Briggs got an idea. How about entering this all-American Fordillac in the famous Le Mans race he’d heard so much about?
Pete Lyons
October 1, 2003
Vintage Racecar
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