RIP, Gentleman Driver

Today’s racing driver isn’t what he used to be. Post-stint massage therapy and victory lanes drenched in Pepsi instead of Taittinger have rendered the true “gentleman racer” a thing of the past. Gone are the 240-mph speeds on the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans. Gone are the coachbuilt Ferraris that were driven from their baronial estates to the Tour de France, raced through the countryside and driven right back home. Gone are men like the Bentley Boys, Wolfgang Graf Berghe von Trips, Lance Reventlow and, most upsetting of all, Briggs Swift Cunningham II.

Cunningham wasn’t a “sportsman” in the way that Jeff Gordon races AND plays in charity golf tournaments. No, Mr. Cunningham was a Yale man and college friend of the Collier Brothers (think Collier Country, FL), with whom he founded the Sports Car Club of America. He not only raced Jaguars, Ferraris, Corvettes and Listers on his own dime and all around the world, but also built his own eponymous series of racing cars in West Palm Beach, in the hopes of taking outright victory at Le Mans.


As if that weren’t sufficient, he also skippered the Columbia to successfully defend the 1958 America’s Cup, patented the “Cunningham” device of the same sport and assembled a world-class collection of motor cars that included a Bugatti Royale – Ettore’s tour de force, the most valuable car in the world, then and perhaps even now.

So the next time you listen to NBC moderators tell you how many G’s Helio Castroneves' poor body is enduring in the turns or how taxing a two-hour Formula 1 race must be, just remember...Giovanni Bracco wasn’t feeling so well in the 1952 Mille Miglia either. The endless cigarettes and brandy his Ferrari co-driver was passing him must have mixed very poorly with the 1,000 miles of switchbacks and elevation changes...

*Courtesy of Aggressively Shabby's MotorSport Correspondant: Arthur Wild