Long considered one of the benchmark examples of an Italian-American hybrid sports car, the Cunningham C-3 Coupe successfully combined competition-proven performance engineering with elegant European coachwork cues.

That the C-3 was one of 10 automobile models chosen for the New York Museum of Modern Art’s famed 1953 exhibit about rolling sculpture is perhaps its most telling endorsement—even the art world recognized the aesthetic and functional purity of this unique creation.

As one of the founding members of the SCCA, the wealthy sportsman Briggs Swift Cunningham II dreamed of the day when an American car would win Le Mans, and he toiled for many years with the aspiration of fielding that winner.

Starting in the early 1950s, Cunningham privately funded and built a succession of sports-racing roadsters that earned numerous wins at home, but the goal of winning Le Mans would remain elusive.

In the effort to qualify his racecars for FIA homologation, and to possibly subsidize his ma...