Greetings.

Briggs Cunningham also got John Fitch, the racing driver, to design a car for racing I believe it was LeMans. As I remember the frame was built like the Europeon vehicles and it was powered by a high performance Chrysler Hemi-head V-8. It was so well built that when John Fitch the driver went off of the elevated track in excess off 100 miles per hour, because of a large oil spill, he survived the over and over and over crash. The body had come off of the frame and the vehicle ended upright. The motor was still running and the lights were still on. Fitch looked at all of the guages and turned off the lights and the engine and crawled out. As he was walking out of the area he was met by people with flashlights coming down to find him in the dark. He said he had a hard time convincing them that he was the driver and that he was okay. It was very expensive for Cunningham to compete and as I remember he had some sort of business turn around or problem that stopped his racing support. I read John Fitch's book in the late 50s or early 60s and this is as much as I remember.

From "Cunningham", extracted from Sports Cars Of The World by Petersen Publishing, 1971:

"The production end of it just didn't interest me [Briggs Cunningham]. If we couldn't go racing, I didn't want to just build cars. The second thing was that we had run out of time on that five-year law. We had a company going and if you lost over $50,000 for five consecutive years the government would throw the whole thing out".

One problem was the execution of the cars. Chassis were built in America, shipped to Italy where bodies were built, installed, trimmed and painted, and then shipped back to the U.S. where the final work was performed. The cars (in the 1950's) were $9500 for the coupes and $10,500 for the convertible, as confirmed by Mr. Cunningham in this article.

As a side note, Cunningham's team ran Corvettes, Jaguars and Maseratis at Le Mans, after the Cunningham race cars were wound up, into the 1960's. If anyone deserved to win the 24 Hours, Briggs Cunningham did.