Word: cunningham
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Night & by Heart. Briggs Cunningham, whose years of yachting, flying and racing have given him piercing eyes and a weather-beaten face of fine, light, top-grain leather, stood close by his speedsters in Palm Beach this week overseeing the work of the Cunningham mechanics. With Le Mans seven weeks away, the cars are in various stages of reassembly. Two of them, veterans of last year's Le Mans, are being rebuilt from the engine blocks up. All their moving parts, and most of their other parts, will be new: pistons, rods, cylinder heads, crankshafts, valves, rings, water pumps...
Essentially, the cars will still be ones that Cunningham and his fellow drivers know well: V-8 Chrysler engines in Cunningham bodies and frames, souped up to 330 h.p., that can accelerate from a dead stop to 110 m.p.h. in eleven seconds, reach top speeds of 160 m.p h. on a straightaway...
...Mans, no matter how much speed a car has, it must also be able to slow down to a crawl for the 90° turns-and do it quickly. Last year Cunningham & Co. saw the British Jaguars snatch victory from them with new disk brakes that withstood the 24-hour pounding without too much "fading," i.e., loss of bite. This week the third racing car in the Cunningham hangar was being fitted with a radical new set of liquid-cooled brakes whose specifications are still secret. This car, a Cunningham-V-12 Ferrari, is entered in the 200-mile President...
There should be no surprises on the 8.6-mile Le Mans course, a crudely rectangular ribbon of asphalt stretched over the gently rolling French countryside. Cunningham, like the rest of the Le Mans drivers, knows it by night & day, and by heart. "Among other things, there's a fog early in the morning. I don't know anything as hair-raising as driving in that fog at 150 m.p.h. It's in patches and moves about the course...
...trees. He knows the delicate little jog at Maison Blanche, almost midway in the long (2.7 mile) northwest straightaway-where the drivers are at flat-out top speed and where British-born Driver Tommy Cole spun out and was killed last year. "I was following right behind him," said Cunningham. "I saw a yellow flag and jammed on the brakes, and saw him lying on the road and his car rammed up against the gully. You have to concentrate like the devil...