Chuck Schoendorf: The Patron Saint of Cunninghams

Briggs Swift Cunningham was born to privilege and grew up with the best of everything. He was not one to sit still and count his money, however, and was an avid athlete and sportsman—a skier, bobsledder, aviator, and sailor who won the America’s Cup in 1958. He also loved cars and loved to race them, and after some success with various marques both foreign and domestic, he set his mind on competing on the world’s racing stage with cars bearing his own name.  

The first true Cunningham competition car was the C-2R he ran at Le Mans in 1951. Driven by John Fitch and Phil Walters, it ran as high as second place when it lost a bearing and fell down the order to finish 18^th. Cunningham’s other two entries crashed during the rainy night and failed to finish.

Cunningham announced the C-3 in 1952 as the road-going customer version of the C-2, and he soon discovered that building the cars in the U.S. was an extremely expensive endeavor. The prototype’s build price was close to $15,000. A Ferrari at the time was maybe $10,000, a new Cadillac around $3000. 

So Cunningham cut a deal with Carrozzeria Vignale in Turin, Italy. The chassis, engine, and drivetrain would be produced in the U.S. and shipped across the Atlantic to be bodied, painted, then fitted with chrome and interiors. In the end, Cunningham produced a sports roadster for $8000 and a coupe for $9000, with extensive modifications offered as extras. The company went on to build 36 cars for road and track; 34 of them had Chrysler Hemi engines, and 25 had Italian coachwork.

These were gentlemen’s GTs.

As a kid, Chuck Schoendorf was nuts about cars. One thing he really dug was the Chrysler Hemi. “How could you not love something that said Chrysler FirePower on the valve covers?” Schoendorf remembers. It was the gold standard of motors. Whether it be drag racing, stock car racing, or power boat racing, it was an iconic piece of equipment. Schoendorf’s dad had a Chrysler sedan, and it had a Hemi, so the devotion just kept getting stronger. Over the decades, with more exposure to the world of the automobile, Schoendorf’s tastes grew to encompass Italian coachbuilt cars as well.

He was only a few years old when Briggs Cunningham and his race cars were battling it out with the likes of Ferrari and Jaguar at Le Mans and on tracks around America, so he had no direct or intimate knowledge of the cars bearing their creator’s name. But by the late 1990s, all that would change. A visit to Lime Rock Park put a Cunningham dead center on Schoendorf’s radar.

The late Larry Black had resurrected the Cunningham name, and with the family was building a series of “Continuation” C4-Rs. One of the beasts was sitting at the start finish line after a photo shoot and naturally, it caught his attention.

“Italian coachwork with a Chrysler Hemi under the hood? This car was tailor-made for me!”

Schoendorf began to learn everything he could about Briggs Cunningham’s cars, and in 2006, when a pile of parts resembling chassis no. 5214 became available at a restoration shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut, he got his first C-3. At the same time, a C-3 from the Cunningham family was being worked on at another shop, so Schoendorf moved his new acquisition over there, using the family’s car as a model to create any missing pieces. That ultimately became a five-year project, but it was finished in time for the Cunningham reunion in Palm Beach in 2011.

During the restoration, Schoendorf traveled to see other cars, meet the owners, take photographs, and learn all he could about Cunningham’s creations. He also explored the race cars with visits to the Simeone Collection in Philadelphia and the REVS Institute in Naples, Florida. “The more I discovered, the better the story got.”

In getting to know the other owners at the Palm Beach reunion, he came to realize there was a small group of people who were abnormally interested in Cunninghams, who would sit around and discuss what happened to this car, what happened to that car, and who owned what. Schoendorf left Palm Beach revved up and wanting to see more cars.

This is how a second C-3 came into his life. “That car was sitting in New Jersey and had been in one family for several generations,” he says. “None of the other Cunningham geeks had ever seen the car.” Schoendorf called the owner, John Paolantonio, out of the blue, introduced himself as a fellow C-3 owner, and asked if he could come see it. He was immediately invited down. 

Chassis no. 5231 was also sitting in a restoration shop. The project had stopped; Paolantonio had been given the estimates for the restoration and halted the build. “It was partially dismantled, with a coat of primer, but otherwise dead in the water,” Schoendorf says.

Schoendorf tried to convince Paolantonio to at least get it running—not a complete restoration, but just to get it back on the road. But Paolantonio had had enough; he didn’t want to do any more, so the car became Schoendorf’s second Cunningham project. He immediately handed the car over to restorer and race car builder Don Breslauer, who took on the resurrection.

If owning one of 36 Cunninghams makes you an enthusiast, owning two of them surely makes you an aficionado. So then what’s the term for the guy who owns three? 

Chassis no. 5212 had belonged to California collector Jay Oppenheimer since 1978. Like 5231, it was disassembled for restoration, but the project never got off the ground and the car didn’t run. 

Schoendorf had originally met Oppenheimer during his grand tour of Cunningham owners. He connected again when Oppenheimer and the owner of the shop that had his car came to another Cunningham reunion, this time at Lime Rock—without the car, of course. A few years later, on a trip to Pebble Beach in 2016, Schoendorf ran into the shop owner and was told Oppenheimer, who was getting on in years and had accepted the restoration would never happen, was ready to sell his C-3. Schoendorf was in the right place at the right time. He snapped up the car and started his third restoration. This time, the resurrection took place in his own shop, and another deadline was looming—the 2018 Cunningham Reunion at the Greenwich Concours. In just 20 months, Schoendorf had the car show-worthy.

Factory records for s/n 5214 say a heavy-duty stabilizer was installed, along with a windshield washer, hood straps, and air scoops on the brakes for cooling. A 40-gallon fuel tank is mentioned in several places. The car was ordered new by Antonio Chopitea of Lima, Peru, but the deal did not go through, and he never took delivery. The car instead was shipped to Olle Nicano of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The car spent most of its life in South America before landing in that Bridgeport shop in 2005, where Schoendorf encountered it. It was the only C-3 built to be a competition car, hence the leather hood straps, larger fuel tank, and brake-cooling scoops.

In those early years of ownership, Schoendorf’s quest to absorb as much Cunningham lore as he could led him to the Kentucky home of Brian Cunningham, Briggs’ grandson, as he owned a C-3 at the time. He also had some spare parts from the continuation cars built in the 1990s, including a Weber carburetor setup and aluminum Halibrand wheels. “The wheels just looked right,” Schoendorf says, “and the carb setup was what the continuation race cars used, so there was a Cunningham family blessing in that. They just looked so good and worked even better. And if need be, I could easily go back to the original setup.”

As his car was originally specced for racing, Schoendorf felt he had the latitude to swap out the Fluid Drive transmission for a Muncie four-speed, retaining the original column shift. “Maybe it’s just knowing that 5214 was set up for competition that makes it feel a bit different. When I turn the key and that Chrysler V-8 wakes up and the Webers start to suck in air, you know this car means business.” He adds that shifting on the column doesn’t take away from the sporting feel of the C-3. And even though the C-3 was smaller than many cars of the time, this is still more of a grand tourer than a sports car, yet you can still chuck it about. What it lacks in nimbleness, it makes up for in cubic-inch grunt.

According to Cunningham records, s/n 5231 was originally owned by a fellow in Indiana named Ben Johnson. He fitted his convertible with Dayton wire wheels and switched out the Fluid Drive transmission for a BorgWarner T85 three-speed manual with overdrive. Johnson also made substantial engine modifications, including milling the heads, adding a racing cam, and fitting an Edmunds aluminum intake for two four-barrel carburetors. Unique to this car is a crossed-flags badge, mounted on the trunk lid above the Cunningham script. The left flag features a block “C” on a checkered flag, the right a stylized “V” badge on blue and yellow quarters, presumably the Vignale colors.

“The convertible is the most original of the three cars,” says Schoendorf. “It hadn’t been as blown apart as the other two, so I didn’t feel the need for a full cosmetic restoration. All the custom work that had been done was done in-period, so I felt it was worth keeping.” It’s also the car Schoendorf uses as a touchstone to ensure details on other cars are correct. “Maybe because it’s never been all apart, it’s a very supple car to drive. It’s like a comfortable old shoe in all the right ways.” Schoendorf smiles at the thought.

Finally, s/n 5212 was purchased new by amateur sports car racer Henry Dingley of Maine. Like other owners, he modified the car to fit his tastes but by 1957 had put the car up for sale. In 1960, the car’s then-owner left it in a body shop while he was out of the country. The owner of the shop died and the car went missing, reported as stolen. The C-3 reappeared and went through several other hands, until Esberg heard of it and reclaimed it. In 1978, he sold it to Jay Oppenheimer. 

Dingley kept it as delivered for a few years, then sent the car to master car builder Bill Frick for the installation of a new 340-hp 300B Chrysler Hemi with a McCulloch supercharger that featured a hand-built aluminum pressure box enclosing two four-barrel carburetors with external adjustments.

The car came to Schoendorf with a  BorgWarner T-10 four on the floor, along with a letter from Briggs Cunningham to Oppenheimer recommending the use of this type of four-speed over the three-speed with overdrive. This was another Cunningham legacy blessing; Chuck went with it.

The car’s black-and-brown color combination, muted gold Halibrand wheels, and the combined supercharger whine and V-8 rumble make this one the most sinister of the three. It has a dangerous and purposeful aura about it. And because it will chirp the tires in all the gears, it backs up its looks with action.

Each of Chuck Schoendorf’s Cunninghams has a distinct personality, from elegant open tourer to purposeful sports car to sexy beast. The thing they all have in common is that they’re imbued with the spirit of one of America’s great sportsmen. Schoendorf, with great passion and boundless energy, has brought these cars back to life and put them on the road once again to do what they were meant to do: Eat up the miles with style.