Cunningham

By Tim Considine, 1992

They came from near and far to honor him, some of them legends in their own right: race-car drivers, builders, and engineers whose names adorn the pages of America’s automobile racing history – John Fitch, Sherwood Johnston, Dan Gurney, Bill Stroppe, John von Neumann, “Kas” Kastner, Warren Olsen, Bill Devin, and Augie Pabst, just to name a few. The occasion was a surprise party to celebrate the 85th birthday of the patron of American sports car racing, one Briggs Swift (how appropriate!) Cunningham.

As he stood unobtrusively off to one side of the two-story entrance hall to his home, one would never have suspected that the quiet, courteous, silver-haired man with bushy eyebrows shaking hands with one admirer after another was a true American sports hero. In this age of “I’m number-one,” in-your-face superstars, Briggs Cunningham is a throwback to a simpler, nobler time, a time when honor and character meant more than just winning by any means and at any cost.

“He’s the last gentleman sportsman,” says Laura Cunningham, Briggs’s wife of almost 30 years. “Yes, gentleman, a good description of him,” says John Fitch, whose motor racing star rose to ascendancy in Cunningham’s cars in the 1950s, “he’s a gentle man. Always was.” He was also a formidable competitor – at sea as well as on land.

In 1958, of course, Briggs Cunningham secured his place in the annals of his other favorite sport when as skipper of Columbia, he successfully defended the America’s Cup. But extreme modesty is another trait of Cunningham’s. Ask about his victory and he’ll remind you he was just substituting for a much better sailor, Cornelius Shields, who had heart trouble. “I’d never done any match racing,” he explains, “so ‘Corny’ helped me with timing the starts and all that. He was a great coach.” He must’ve been. Cunningham destroyed the British challenger Sceptre, easily winning four straight races.

No surprise, “Mr. C,” as he’s called around his beautiful Rancho Santa Fe home near San Diego, is watching the selection races for this year’s Cup very closely, particularly with the prospect of an America vs. Japan race. “It would be very interesting,” he says, “because the Japanese never had much over there in the way of sailors. But they bought Bond’s whole fleet of 12-meters and took them over to Japan and taught these kids to sail. And then, this fellow Chris Dixon has been teaching them on their new boat. They’ve done a good job and it’s a good boat. They very well could be the challengers. Of course,” he adds, “Dixon isn’t Japanese. You know, you used to have to be a resident to sail for a country, so they’ve had to fiddle that one a bit.”

Always known as an energetic worker, Cunningham spends most of his time these days tending to what is regarded as one of the most comprehensive maritime and motor sports libraries in existence, row upon row of the literary history of both his passions. “I’m the librarian,” he says, pointing to stacks of yet-unclassified books and publications, “and it’s all I can do to keep up with all the new magazines I get – too damn many of them!” He also keeps up with motor racing on television. “I don’t watch the stock cars too much. I don’t care about stock cars, but I try to watch the so-called sports cars when they’re on. And I watch Indianapolis, of course, because it’s Indianapolis. I like to watch that.”

Cunningham has little regard for those who collect cars just to make money. He has always had a real love for and curiosity about automobiles, from the time he convinced his mother to pay for steel wheels for Yale’s chassis dynamometer – and then ran one of the first tests on her Rolls Royce, while the family chauffeur watched – aghast. Does he miss his own priceless collection of 71 cars, sold in 1987 to Miles Collier, Jr., the son and nephew of Cunningham’s old friends and fellow American sports car pioneers, the Collier brothers? “Oh, I do in a way,” he sighs, “some days I do and some days I don’t, now. I just walked around and talked to the people, even talked to the cars. It was fun. But I think Miles is doing a pretty good job with them down in Florida. I wish he’d held on to the Bugatti and a couple others, though.”

So, what were the favorite cars of this man who’s owned, built, driven, and/or raced more exotic automobiles than most of us can even fantasize? “Well,” he says, considering, “I always liked Ferraris, but I think the OSCA was my favorite. I liked smaller cars better because you didn’t have to go as fast as you did with the big cars. With them I was always worried whether the brakes’d work or something would fall off or break, that sort of thing. I felt like I had more control of a small car like the OSCA. Also, it was beautifully finished, you know, nicely made.”

Fast, too, he might have added. In 1954, Stirling Moss and Bill Lloyd drove Cunningham’s 1500 c.c. OSCA to a smashing overall victory at Sebring. The following year, Briggs himself won the SCCA F Modified national championship with it. Typically, Cunningham downplays his own driving skill.

“Oh,” he says, “I never went fast enough to scare myself. Not more than once or twice.” This from a man who’s hurtled down the Mulsanne straightaway at 150 mph through blinding rain and fog in the cold blackness of night, trying desperately to keep suddenly-appearing gnat-like small cars from being a hood ornament on his Chrysler-powered screamers! “Oh, I just liked those long drives,” he says. Indeed, in 1952 at Le Mans, Cunningham drove without relief (in every sense of the word) all through the night (over 20 of the 24 hours) to fourth place in a C-4R, his favorite among the cars he manufactured.

“Well, the C-4R was a nice car to drive,” Cunningham remembers, “but it was just a road-going car, really, sort of big and clumsy.” But that was the point. Cunningham always insisted that his cars be real sports cars, cars that could be driven on the road. Sherwood Johnston, another of the talented American amateurs Cunningham tapped to drive for him, agrees. “Briggs’s idea was that the cars needed to be heavy and strong and that’s the way they were built. That’s also why they always finished, or 90% of the time, anyway.” Johnston made his debut for the team co-driving a C-4R with the boss at the 12-hour race at Reims in 1953. They finished 3rd, after Fitch, in the fas, but regrettably airplane-like C-5R, literally flew off the road while running second behind Moss’s winning C-Type Jaguar. The sports car race accompanied that year’s French Grand Prix at Reims – the only Formula One race, as it turns out, that Cunningham would ever see. He remembers little about it, other than that Fangio won, but still has strong feelings about the 12-hour affair.

“That was the silliest race I think I’ve ever been to,” Cunningham says now, “They started the thing at 12:00 at night. How the hell are you going to get any sleep before the start of that race? I never did figure that out. You had to sleep the day before, which I couldn’t do. You couldn’t sleep in the middle of the day. You could lay down, pretend you were asleep, doze, or wrestle around in the bed, but you couldn’t really set down and get a night’s sleep. A really stupid race!”

His most enjoyable drive? Surprisingly, it wasn’t one of his wins with the OSCA in ‘55, or his best finishes at Le Mans (fourth in ‘52 and ‘62), but a solid eighth place there in 1961 with Bill Kimberly in a two-liter “Birdcage” Maserati. “Yes,” he says, “that was a fun car to drive. I think the best drive I ever had at Le Mans was in that little car.” He owns one record that still remains unequaled. For three years in a row, a Cunningham entry won the 12-hours of Sebring: Fitch’s C-4R in ‘53 (an American car and driver scoring the first ever World Sports Car Championship win); the OSCA in ‘54; and a Cunningham D- type Jaguar in 1955, driven by Mike Hawthorn and Phil Walters. Cunningham still laughs at a gag Hawthorn pulled on several of his mates when they were all at Sebring.

“Those guys used to have a ball over here at that time of the year,” Cunningham explains, “because there was nothing doing in Europe. And Mike was a prankster. He went out one time and got a whole bunch of chickens. And he came back to the hotel at about 1:00 in the morning with these chickens and if a guy hadn’t locked his door, he’d open the door and throw a chicken in and shut the door. He had that place in a real uproar. God, no one there got any sleep that night!”

Of course, Cunningham never realized his ultimate goal, to win Le Mans with an American car, but his thundering white and blue racers were anything but a failure. Indeed, without the backing of Ford, Chrysler, or General Motors, his Cunninghams were always a real threat to the best from Ferrari, Jaguar, and Mercedes Benz. But more than that, Briggs Cunningham was an immensely popular good will ambassador for his sport and for America – the quintessential sportsman. Naturally, he dismisses this oft-used description, as well. “I think the only reason they called me a sportsman,” he says, smiling, “is because I didn’t do any work!” Anyone who ever was around him during his racing years knows better. So did the hundred or so luminaries gathered to honor Cunningham on his 85th birthday.

Perhaps another American hero said it best that night. “Briggs,” said Dan Gurney, “was a pioneer who achieved tremendous things for Americans in the world automobile racing scene. What he accomplished has withstood the test of history and of time.”

~ The above article originally appeared in the April 6, 1992 issue of AutoWeek.

 

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