Friday, February 01, 2019

Miles C. Collier, director of the Revs Institute, speaking of Briggs Cunningham

“Here’s a single guy up against all the factories, operating 5000 miles away, having to do it all out of his wallet. And his motivations were the purest. There was nothing in it for Briggs, nobody was giving him any money, there were no endorsements, no contracts. If he did it, he did it purely for the sport and for the prestige of America, like defending the America’s Cup. He was really the last of the Corinthian sportsmen.”

As Time magazine reported in April 1954, that year’s Le Mans effort involved six drivers, 20 crewmen, two racing cars, and a mobile machine-shop trailer. The whole lot was loaded on the R.M.S. Mauretania for the transAtlantic journey, except for Cunningham himself, who flew over in time to meet the ship at the French port of Le Havre. The team then convoyed in the cars and the tractor-trailer over the roads to Le Mans, there to stay for several weeks. When asked what it all cost, Briggs’s standard answer was, “I have no idea.”

Briggs Swift Cunningham, Jr., was the yacht-racing heir of a huge “soap and suds” fortune. In 1950, he became the first American since the ’20s to field cars at Le Mans, entering a box-stock Cadillac coupe and a Cadillac-powered wedge that looked like a parade float. It was so hideous that the French dubbed it “le Monstre.” Cunningham got thoroughly drubbed—and also completely hooked. The next year he built a couple of Hemi-powered specials to run in France as well as in some of the new road races around America. Then, yielding to European racing rules, he built 25 expensive Italian-bodied road cars in a factory in Florida just so he could compete at Le Mans as a manufacturer.

https://www.hagerty.com/articles-videos/articles/2019/01/31/briggs-cunningham-battled-europe#

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