1953 Cunningham C3 - Jay Leno's Garage

When you open it, it catches you again, so you have to do it like this, then, and then close it and then here you go, then you put it back in, but yeah, very stupid, very stupid, very fun, although yes, there is no air conditioning , obviously 6vt radio, like I said, the most beautiful dashboard, huge gauges. I don't know how blind you are, can you read these gauges when you're going down the road, well let's see where it is, let's get in here, they did the paint and the body, how's it going Jay, nice pair, good job, thank you, thank you, Uh, this is hard, huh?

It was a little bit harder than in the US, yeah, because, but you're a Chrysler guy, I'm a Chrysler guy, yeah, yeah, but here we have steel and aluminum, so it's a little bit stronger, but it's going well. Well and it's hard to hang the doors and stuff because everything is welded, welded it. Yeah, the good thing about that is the car is incredibly rigid, yeah, and incredibly strong, it's strong, yeah, and I think it's a really nice car. , let's go back and see here too, these are the original colors, yeah, and you have some of the original color when we sanded it, uh, yeah, yeah, we had, yeah, it was white when I bought it, it was white, but I could see the color below.

Yes, actually, if you look at one of the first restoration blogs we did back in 2015. I'll look at the car, it looked pretty complete and it was complete, it was in very good condition, it just hadn't been touched in 30 40 years so it needed a little bit of everything, we lost the bumpers from the big, giant, clunky bumpers I have. I have them, I don't want to wear them, no, they're ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly and, uh, let's open the trunk and show them the trunk. I opened the trunk from behind the sea before opening it. I want to give you a special thank you.

For Bernard, you know Bernard is our shop foreman and he's racing this week so he can't contribute to the video here, but he did a great job and so did Jim Haller's fabricator. Let me show you the trunk, he remembers. This is a competition car, so you had to carry a spare tire, which means you have almost no space in the trunk, and since the gas filler tank is inside, there is the dual exhaust from the gas tank and that holds the tire pretty well, yeah, that's one. from the original, yes, yes, with the magnesium rim, one, the original wheel, yes, we kept that part, wow, we closed it too, yes, there you close it, too, as you can see, it's a great looking car and, uh, let's take this thing for a ride and we.

We'll talk more while we drive, okay, before we take him for a spin. I want to put it in our stereo. Cony get up here. The guys sure did a good job underneath. I have a few hundred miles on it, but whatever. Look, it stays pretty clean, there don't seem to be any leaks, uh, we went through a couple sets of coil springs before we found the ones that work best, we put some modern hose in here, but everything else is pretty much as is, uh, I mean, look how huge. This frame is look at all the reinforcements in it, look at this, look at these, look at how thick they are very good as you can see our transmission bolts thanks to the hotheads that gave us that bellhousing, a pretty simple exhaust system, This is the original, uh, it's a vent pipe there George, yeah, yeah, it's the original vent pipe that came with the car.

Keep a little touch here, uh, but as you can see pretty clearly, nothing's leaking, everything's fine. Georgia gets very nervous on camera when she said that she had capos. This has no capos, I was thinking of one of the other cars, I think it was the Chry leader thinking of George, the other one because this is all a Chrysler thing, except this is Mercury, so a little bit of all of that is what What did Briggs do, but uh. It really is a quality car. I mean, there wasn't much in America in

1953

that was faster or more attractive than this.

That's great, come on, let's go for a walk. Think about how awesome this car must have been in

1953

. between $9 and $12,000 uh, a 2-speed semi-automatic transmission. I mean, now we all like, you know the 5-speed manual, the six-speed, but in the past an automatic was considered a luxury and when the car had so much power it didn't seem like you were losing much because of the automatic , it simply had so much torque that it could outrun it, making it a wonderful Gran Turismo with a unique Italian body, that is, for a 60-something car. He actually drives. and it handles pretty well, like I always say, this is a car that you want to drive fast, not drive fast because you'll master the brakes, the brakes are good, but you know they're not like that, they're not modern and you might get uh, one or two panic stops in a row before your UH starts to fade, but if you drive it sensibly, oh it's a lot of fun, you just get a lot of feedback and this trimic transmission.

I can't say enough about how good they are. I've put them on a lot of cars, this car had a clutch pedal originally so it's not like it changed much. You had the clutch with the semi-AIT to put it in first, then you take your foot off the clutch and then. When you're driving, when you're ready to shift, you just shift it into Second and it makes a thud and you shift into Second. I guess that was progress, but with a five-speed and this torque, so realize what Briggs Cunningham would do. build the chassis in West Palm Beach, Florida, ship the chassis to Italy, where I would body them vignali uh and uh, then ship it back to the United States again.

Can you make money doing that? You really don't know. From 9 to $1,000 for a car that was a In 1953, there weren't many GIS that came back with that kind of money in their pocket and Briggs did it for about 5 years. There was a rule back then that if you ran a business for 5 years and you weren't making money anymore, it wasn't a business anymore, it was a hobby and they would know to declassify it and all that kind of stuff, whatever it was. So he just stopped building the cars, but he built 25 great cars and they. All the original horsepower accounted for with this engine was 220 cubic horsepower with the modern aluminum heads and you know, portability and polish and all that stuff we got 360 on the dyno, which is two huge four-wheel carburetors. cylinders, this really is the perfect California car for traveling with Italian style and American horsepower it doesn't get any better than this.

I'm surprised they didn't sell more than 25 cars, but hey, no one had that kind of money in 1953, but each one of these was hand made, the first thing is that this is the original steering wheel that came with the car originally it was wrapped with a rope and the rope was deteriorating. We remove the rope from the wood. It was pretty good, so PE and the guys renovated it as you can see. turned out beautiful the original emblem that we didn't even touch I like the giant pie plate gauges this is your main gauge here you have a clock you have the oil temperature there oil pressure there water temperature and fuel pressure up here you have a tachometer that It appears to be an early '50s Sun tachometer, right, this is the one that's been on the car since the day it was new, you've got a 160 mph speedometer, which is probably a little optimistic, there's your ammeter and that.

It's going to cost you gas right there in that book it talks about how no one knew what this handle was this is the only car I think that had it right this is a battery disconnect switch you just turn it and it disconnects the battery then of course, you had windshield wipers lights, you had a four 6V radio, that was the radio that came with it, you had windshield wipers, choke, cigarette lighter and fan and of course this wonderful trimic gearbox right here, the guys made this one shift knob, uh. This net is all original to the car we wanted to save.

The headliner, of course, is new, but they all came with this kind of grille that you could put. I don't know, sunglasses magazines. Whatever you wanted. I always like these little door handles. here these are cool with that little wood insert there I don't know what kind of wood it's maybe maple I don't know it's some kind of classic cigarette lighter Is it there? Does not come with a GoPro camera. We put it there, obviously, as you can see, it's a spacious car, there's a lot of room inside. The greenhouse is really nice, lots of air flows through the car.

You could drive this to New York City if you wanted. The original interior was red, obviously. The leather has been improved. The original leather is quite dry in the storage area behind the seats. It comes with twin speakers, which was a big deal in 1953, at 60 M hour, you're barely spinning at 2000 RPM, so the torque works great. it just transports you nothing high tech as far as the suspension goes but it's very very comfortable you know it's fast and attractive this has to be one of the best American cars of the era even though most people have never heard talk about him.

I hope you like this unique piece from uh American Automotive. History uh, if you want to learn more about Briggs Cunningham, there are a couple of great websites. L Burman has one on the web. Go to Cunningham's websites. Cunningham car websites and you'll see Tom CER and a bunch of guys, Chuck and there. There are so many guys, well there are 25 guys out there, that's how many cars there are, but, there, he was quite a guy, Briggs, a real American sportsman and a real racing driver, and I only met him once and He is quite old.

That time, but it was fascinating to learn a piece of history and finally own and drive one of his cars, so we'll be doing more and more of my stuff on the website. It just takes a long time to restore, so I'll see you next week.