Spring is approaching and the transition season is about to begin. If you’re looking for a drop top, put that Sawzall down and admire this sheer beauty. This 1953 Cunningham C-3 Cabriolet was built to meet 24 hours of the match Le Mans rules and one’s dream to race. I can’t stop staring at this charming car.
This amazing vehicle is on sale at RM Sotheby’s. The car was the brainchild of Briggs Cunningham, a man who sounded like he loved gears.
He likes to come in quickly anything that has a motor, whether it’s flying, sailing, or plunging down a black hood. He was born in 1907 in the family of a financier and heir to a packed fortune Swift. And as his website Note, he has loved racing since he was a child. As a teenager after World War I, Cunningham competed in street races with his uncle in a Hispano-Suiza aircraft-engined Dodge. That ignited a need for speed that brought him all the way to his death in 2003.
Cunningham’s biggest obsession is with Le Mans. He raced in the event nine times between 1950 and 1963. And his goal was not just to win the race, but to win an American car driven by a single racer. controlled by the Americans. His cars are pretty wild, from his biography on Cunningham’s site:
When Cunningham’s Fordillac (a 1950 Ford with a Cadillac engine) was rejected by the Automobile Club de l’Oest for racing in France in 1950 because it was considered more of a pairing rod than a model production, he bought and imported two Cadillacs- one with a standard Coupe de Ville body, the other with an ungainly body designed and built after hours by a team of Grumman Aircraft engineers. It was immediately named Le Monstre by the French.
And Cunningham doesn’t just want to win the any American car, but its own. So he opened the BS Cunningham Company to build Le Mans racers. It first built the C-1 to practice Le Mans and the C-2R racers. In 1952, Cunningham had to play by the rules, Hagerty Note, and to compete as a manufacturer, he had to build 25 production cars. That would be extremely taboo for any normal person, but Cunningham is not any ordinary person. Enter the Cunningham C-3 Cabriolet.
The C-3 rides on a tubular chassis similar to the C-2 with a coil spring at the rear with upper and lower swingarms on each side. Suspension components are available from various manufacturers.
Under the hood is a FirePower Hemi 5.4-liter Chrysler V8. In stock, this price is good for 180 HP. But with four Zenith single-barrel carburetors, power has increased to 220 hp and 300 lb-ft of torque.
Those would be solid numbers even for today! You get that for $10,000 to $13,000, or dollars106,093 to $137,921 in today’s currency.
RM Sotheby’s advertisement details history of this car:
This Cunningham C-3 was delivered to Vignale on 3 February 1953, returning to New York a month later. Completed in 1953 and red, it was exhibited in the summer of 1954 at Alfred Momo’s in New York. In August, Northern California racer and racer Irving Robbins bought this car, giving up his race-damaged Cunningham C-2 for the sale. Mr. Robbins would send the car to California and it would be shown in 1956 and 1957 at the then fledgling Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. In 1957, the car was introduced in Sugar & Sugar and in Encyclopedia of American Cars.
Incredibly, it and the 24 other C-3s built were included.
The car has changed hands several times since then and today it is for sale by a private collector. It’s expected to sell for between $900,000 and $1,200,000, so you might want to buy that Sawzall again.
