March 11, 2011
Italian Flair and American Muscle
By TOM COTTER NY Times
Palm Beach, Fla.
THIRTY years ago, a 1952 Cunningham C-3 sports car sat forlorn in a Queens junkyard, many of its original parts — transmission, dashboard, instruments and windshield — cannibalized for who knows what.
The coupe, designated chassis No. 5232 and one of only about two dozen C-3s produced, was rescued from the shredder and destined for restoration. But as happens with many well-intended collector-car projects, it bounced from owner to owner until Lou Natenshon, an architect in Highland Park, Ill., found it on eBay about 10 years ago.
In January, after years of chasing replacement parts and investing what he said was a significant amount of money, Mr. Natenshon displayed his coupe at a concours d’élégance here on the grounds of the Mar-a-Lago resort, a Donald Trump property. Though the restoration was not complete — the body gleamed in its fresh blue-and-silver paint job, but interior work remained to be done — he was not going to miss this gathering, which promoters had promised would be the largest gathering ever of cars built by the B. S. Cunningham Company.
“As a kid, I remember reading about Briggs Cunningham in my father’s Esquire magazine,” said Mr. Natenshon, 70. “I always liked his idea of a custom coachwork body powered by an American engine. What could be better than an American hot rod with Italian bodywork?”
The cars were the creation of Briggs Swift Cunningham II, born in 1907 to a wealthy Cincinnati family of Scottish heritage. Mr. C, as he was known, had a strong competitive drive, evident even as a young man. Whether it was golf, football or sailing, he had to win.
Cunningham’s early exposure to racing made a lasting impression on him. An uncle who had installed a surplus Hispano-Suiza airplane engine in a Dodge touring car after World War I let young Briggs accompany him on Sunday afternoon rides. They challenged all comers in stoplight races.
“I can’t remember anybody ever beating us,” Cunningham, who died in 2003, told Dean Batchelor and Albert R. Bochroch, the authors of “Cunningham, the Life and Cars of Briggs Swift Cunningham” (Motorbooks International, Osceola, Wis., 1993).
Cunningham got serious about racing after World War II, with a particular interest in endurance events. Even though few Americans had entered the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France, Cunningham was determined to win it with American cars and drivers.
In 1950, he entered two Cadillac Coupe DeVilles in the race, a competition famous for its brutal demands on cars. One car remained close to showroom form while the other was modified by a group of engineers and workers moonlighting from their day jobs at Grumman, the aircraft maker in Bethpage, Long Island. That car, an open-cockpit design dressed in boxy body panels the team had fabricated, was so ungainly that French racing fans nicknamed it Le Monstre. Incredibly, the two Cadillacs finished 10th and 11th against a field of Ferraris, Aston Martins and Jaguars. The challenge was on.
Cunningham quickly hatched plans to win Le Mans outright in cars of his own design, painted in the traditional racing colors of the country they represented. Italian entries were painted red, French racing cars were blue and the English painted their cars British racing green.
Trouble was, in 1950 the United States did not have an established national racing color. But Germany’s switch to silver for the team livery, from white, created an opening. So Cunningham invented a color scheme that would represent America for decades: white with two wide blue stripes — called Cunningham stripes at the time — that stretched front to back.
That paint job became known well beyond the racetrack. In 1954, an illustration of Cunningham and three of his Le Mans racecars appeared on the cover of Time magazine, helping to solidify his growing reputation as a versatile all-American sportsman.
In 1951, Cunningham relocated his racing operation from Connecticut to West Palm Beach, Fla., and over the next five years built and raced his own cars. Under the rules of the era, competitors were required to manufacture small runs of road cars to qualify for some international events.
To comply, Cunningham had to produce at least 25 roadworthy examples of the same model as the racecars, so in 1952, the Continental C-3 was introduced. An ambitious team of hot rodders at the West Palm Beach plant installed 331-cubic-inch Chrysler hemi V-8s in racing chassis, which were then shipped to Turin, Italy, where a coachbuilder, Vignale, fabricated bodywork of aluminum and steel.
With the body panels in place, the cars returned to Florida, where assembly was completed. Cunningham built 20 coupes and five convertibles with the Vignale bodywork, according to Larry Berman, who chronicles the company’s history at briggscunningham.com. There were also two early cars built with Cunningham-made body panels.
“Until recently we could only locate 23 of the C-3 cars,” Mr. Berman, who has been tracking the cars for years, said of the Vignale-bodied Cunninghams. “But just a few weeks ago, we located the fifth Cunningham convertible in New Jersey, where it has been owned by the same family for almost 50 years.”
The C-3 was breathtakingly expensive for its time, priced from $8,000 to $12,000, depending on the model and options — approaching $100,000 in today’s dollars. Nelson Rockefeller bought one. So did the du Ponts.
Given the price, it was no surprise that sales were slow. In the early 1950s, it was equivalent to the cost of three new Cadillacs, partly a result of the trans-Atlantic assembly line. Price guides cite C-3 values of $400,000 to $900,000, depending on condition.
The notion of marrying a shapely European body to a lusty American V-8 was not entirely new. Allard had combined British chassis with Ford and Cadillac engines; in later years the Iso Grifo tucked Corvette engines into Italian bodies. When Cadillac created the Allanté two-seat roadster in the 1980s, it resurrected the Cunningham business plan, linking an American powertrain with bodies made in Italy — in this case, by Pininfarina.
Cunningham never achieved his goal of winning Le Mans, but his cars finished as high as third, fourth and fifth before he shut the manufacturing operation in 1955. There were significant wins in the United States, though, including races at Watkins Glen, N.Y.; Elkhart Lake, Wis.; and at the 12 Hours of Sebring in Florida. In addition, Cunningham, a member of the New York Yacht Club, skippered the winning boat, Columbia, in the 1958 America’s Cup.
Ten years ago, there was an effort to revive the Cunningham brand led by Robert A. Lutz, who later became the vice chairman of General Motors, and Briggs Cunningham III. Formed to produce a modern Cunningham grand touring car reminiscent of the original, the venture failed and its plans were dashed amid investor squabbling.
Considering the rarity of his car, it’s no wonder Mr. Natenshon was eager to participate in the Mar-a-Lago reunion, where nearly half of the total C-3 production gathered. The owners and their cars visited the vacant industrial building at 1402 Elizabeth Street in West Palm Beach, once the Cunningham factory, and posed for a group portrait.
Cunningham owners were also invited to tour the private Collier Collection in Naples, Fla. The owner, Miles Collier, whose father and uncle both raced for the Cunningham team in the 1950s, purchased the contents of a museum Briggs Cunningham established in Costa Mesa, Calif., in 1966 after he retired from racing. Mr. Collier moved the collection, which included a number of Cunningham racecars, to Florida in 1987. The Collier Collection is considered the keeper of the Cunningham flame.
The commitment to joining the Florida gathering was apparent in Mr. Natenshon’s C-3. He had a new dashboard made for the car, a Toyota Camry windshield was modified to fit and he is having new instruments fabricated.
“This event has never happened before, and may not happen again in my lifetime,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let the fact that my car wasn’t quite finished keep me from attending.”
