The Revs Institute in Naples, Florida is only 118 miles from the Sebring racetrack in the south-central part of the state. The Cunningham* C4-R in their Collier Collection won the 1953 Sebring 12 Hours and was the first American car to do so. It was built by B.S. Cunningham & Co. only 110 miles from Sebring, in West Palm Beach. This meant that their Sebring effort was more convenient for the Cunningham team to stage than the one for their other target endurance race, the Le Mans 24 Hours.
Briggs Cunningham's C4-R racers, powered by a Weber-carbureted, 300 hp version of Chrysler's 331 hemi V8, were 900 lb. lighter, 6" narrower and 16" shorter than the previous C2, and came closer to his goal of winning at Le Mans than any other cars built by the team. They were handicapped by the lack of disc brakes, but still took 4th place there in 1952, and 3rd as well as 5th place in 1954. The team did even better at home, where the C4 cars won a high percentage of races entered, including at Sebring, where John Fitch and Bill Spear won with this car, one of two alloy-bodied C4-R roadsters and a Kamm-tailed coupe called the C4-RK, also at the Revs, which has the best collection of Cunninghams anywhere.
The surprise winner at the next year's Sebring was another local hero in a way, though it came from Italy. Briggs Cunningham's team had acquired this 1954 OSCA* MT4 1500 from Alfred Momo's operation in NYC, where Momo's shop added the scalloped cutouts to the front fenders for brake cooling. What they didn't need to add to the Maserati Brothers' handiwork was lightness. The alloy-bodied OSCA on an 86" wheelbase weighed just 1,280 lb. compared with the Cunningham C4-R's 2,900. Its 88.6 cu. in. inline four was more efficient at making power than Chrysler's hemi; with dual overhead cams and 8 spark plugs it made 130 hp, almost 1.5 per cubic inch. Many of little car's competitors brought over twice the power to the race, including the C4-R, private Jaguar and Ferrari entries, the Aston Martin factory team, and the Lancia team's D24s, which experts favored to dominate it...
But the Cunningham team's OSCA entry brought more than lightness and mechanical efficiency to the fight...
Cunningham lined up a driver named Stirling Moss and partnered him with Bill Lloyd. It was the English driver's first time racing an Italian car. Moss and Lloyd did well in practice, but their best lap times were over 20 seconds slower than the fastest Ferrari and Lancia, so nobody predicted the occupants of this tight little cockpit would win...
In the race, though, the blistering pace sidelined many of the more powerful competitors, while Moss, Lloyd and OSCA delivered a steady, reliable performance. At the finish, the Moss / Lloyd OSCA was an astonishing 5 laps ahead of the 2nd place Lancia D24. Moss captured the attention of American racers, and also OSCA, because their MT4s finished in 4th and 5th place as well. Overnight, SCCA drivers who could afford the $9K to $10K price wanted an OSCA.
Most of the roughly 6 dozen MT4s built featured OSCA's trademark "cheese grater" grille, and, unlike early Fifties Lancias and Ferraris, usually had left-hand drive. Below we see the winning MT4 with the hood closed...
Ford followed in the tracks of Cunningham's '53 and Chaparral's '65 victory with their own '66 win at Sebring, becoming the 3rd American-engined car to take the checkered flag. Unlike the C4-R and the Chevy-powered Jim Hall / Hap Sharp Chaparral 2A, the Ford GT-40* Mk. II had its chassis built outside the US (in England). The Revs Collier Collection doesn't contain the GT-40 roadster driven to victory by Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby because it no longer exists. But it has this GT-40 Mk. II coupe, which after all won the Reims 12 Hours two weeks after retiring at Le Mans, so we're giving them credit for having a good specimen of the 427-powered beast, which is displayed with a lighter, 289-powered GT-40 Mk. I. Weight is worth mentioning here because the Mk.II weighed at least 500 lb. more than the Mk. I, which Revs lists at 1,835 lb.
Only 5 GT40 roadsters were built, and only X-1, the Miles and Ruby mount shown below at Sebring, had an aluminum chassis. At 1,900 pounds, X-1 was lots lighter than the "standard", steel-chassis, 427-powered GT40 Mk. II. Only one other Mk. II car was built with the aluminum chassis by Abbey Panels in England; it disappeared after being sent to Ford for testing. After its victory at Sebring, X-1 was supposed to be rebuilt by Holman & Moody, but instead Ford allowed it to be destroyed to meet Customs regulations. Too bad; it would've made a great exhibit at, for example, the Revs Institute. A Ford GT Mk. IV with US-made chassis won Sebring in '67, and John Wyer's Gulf team of lightweight GT-40 Mk. I Mirages threw cold water on Henry Ford II's "bigger (and heavier) is better" approach by winning Le Mans in '68 and '69, amazingly, both times with the same individual car. But we digress...
This somehow brings us to the winner of the 1968 Sebring 12 Hours, a Porsche 907K* which happens to sit in the Revs Collier Collection, looking fresh and sleek after a tedious restoration that involved removing a layer of fiberglass added to the car's lightweight (and fragile) form by a former owner who actually wanted to use it as a car. Possibly not a wise idea, as the 907K's 1,320 pounds were moved by a 2.2 liter flat eight based on Porsche's 1.5 liter, 4-cam Formula 1 engine. The 2.2 liter version made 278 hp at 8,700 rpm, but was complex and temperamental for use in a road car. When they won the '68 race at an average of 102.5 mph after taking the pole position, though, Jo Siffert and Hans Herrmann didn't seem too worried about any of that...
The 907 seems to have been a bit neglected by history, partly because it had a short career, first racing at the '67 Le Mans and giving way to the 908 during the '68 racing season. In January of '68, long-tailed 907s finished 1-2-3 in the Daytona 24 hours; this car is a short-tail; thus 907K. If you've wondered why the 907 and 908 came after the 911 and 910, the short answer is Peugeot, who protested when Porsche showed off its 901 in fall of '63, claiming to have somehow copyrighted three-digit sequences with center zeroes (203, 403, 404 etc.). Porsche renamed the 901 the 911, changed the 906 racer to the Carrera 6, and didn't abandon their nervousness about numbers until maybe someone in their legal dept. (if they had one) noticed all those BMWs (502, 503, 507) and Bristols (406 through 409) built without challenge from Peugeot. So the 907 and 908 showed up out of sequence, years after the 911.
Even though it was the Hoods Off festival at the Revs when our trusty photographer friends visited, the 907's engine lid was down, the better to show off the car's aerodynamic form. The photo below shows that even with the lid up, you don't get an especially clear picture of the engine. This has been a problem with Porsches for a while...
The shot below shows the 907 engine from the front; it was time-consuming to construct and to rebuild between races, and for this reason (as well as its 2.2 liter displacement limit) it gave way to the 3 liter flat eight in the 908. That engine, based upon the design of the production 911 flat six but with 2 more cylinders and 2 more cams, offered the Porsche team more horsepower and a more cost-effective way to go racing. But that's a story for another day...
*Footnote:
Briggs Cunningham's race cars and road cars were featured in "A Moment Too Soon: The Cars of Briggs Swift Cunningham", posted April 15, 2017. For a survey of OSCA history beginning with the founding Maserati brothers, see our posts entitled "The Etceterini Files: When a Maserati is Not a Maserati", posted Dec. 29, 2022, and "Almost Famous" in the archives for April 20, 2016. We delved into the history of Ford's GT40 in "Roadside Attraction: Shelby American Collection Part 2", posted Dec. 31, 2017, and the brief life of Porsche's 907 in "Paranormal Porsches Part 2: Porsche's Forgotten 907", posted May 11, 2019.
Photo credits:
All photos were generously provided by Paul Anderson except for the following:
Top: the author
2nd: RIch Harman, featured at racingsportscars.com
3rd: The Revs Institute
7th: pinterest.com
8th & 9th: the author
10th: Ford Motor Company
14th: Sports Car Market
15th: Wikimedia Commons
No comments:
Post a Comment