The Cunningham C-3 is a Grand tourer, designed and built by the B. S. Cunningham Company beginning in 1952. Intended primarily as a road car, enough C3 were meant to be built to homologate Briggs Cunningham's racing cars, making them eligible to race at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
History
To have his namesake cars homologated as a manufacturer for Le Mans, Cunningham needed to build 25 examples of the C-3.
Two pre-production cars similar in appearance to the C-2Rs were built at the company's West Palm Beach location; a roadster with chassis number 5205, and a coupe with chassis number 5206X. A third chassis, number 5206, was sent to the workshops of carrozzeria Vignale in Turin, Italy, where it received a new coupe body styled by designer Giovanni Michelotti, then working at Vignale. The factory considered chassis 5026 the official prototype, and subsequent cars received the Michelotti body style.
Twenty-seven C-3s were built. One reference reports eighteen coupes and nine convertibles. Others report twenty coupes and five convertibles with bodies by Vignale, plus the two cars bodied at the West Palm Beach factory. While early factory pricing was US$8,000 (US$ in dollars) for a Sports Convertible, and US$9,000 (US$) for a Coupe, the cost of a C-3 had risen to US$15,000 (US$) by 1951.