Racing stripe
Encyclopedia
- Racing stripes redirects here. For the film of the same name, see Racing StripesRacing StripesRacing Stripes is a 2005 comedy film directed by Frederik Du Chau, the director of Quest for Camelot. Although set in Kentucky, the movie was filmed in Pietermaritzburg and Nottingham Road, South Africa.-Plot:...
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Briggs Cunningham
Briggs Swift Cunningham II was an American entrepreneur and sportsman, who raced automobiles and yachts. Born into a wealthy family, he became a racing car constructor, driver, and team owner as well as a sports car manufacturer and automobile collector.He skippered the victorious yacht Columbia...
of racing cars to identify them in the field during races. Another purpose is to make it easier for a driver to align a spun out car with the circuit.
Cunningham racing stripes
The first racing stripes were applied to high-performance prototypePrototype
A prototype is an early sample or model built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from.The word prototype derives from the Greek πρωτότυπον , "primitive form", neutral of πρωτότυπος , "original, primitive", from πρῶτος , "first" and τύπος ,...
automobiles built as racecars by Briggs Cunningham
Briggs Cunningham
Briggs Swift Cunningham II was an American entrepreneur and sportsman, who raced automobiles and yachts. Born into a wealthy family, he became a racing car constructor, driver, and team owner as well as a sports car manufacturer and automobile collector.He skippered the victorious yacht Columbia...
and placed into competition as his motorsport
Motorsport
Motorsport or motorsports is the group of sports which primarily involve the use of motorized vehicles, whether for racing or non-racing competition...
team, beginning in 1951. Cunningham racecars usually carried two parallel blue stripes running from front to rear in the center of the white body so that spectators could identify the team's automobiles readily during races. The stripes often were called "Le Mans stripes" because of the repeated efforts of Cunningham to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans
24 Hours of Le Mans
The 24 Hours of Le Mans is the world's oldest sports car race in endurance racing, held annually since near the town of Le Mans, France. Commonly known as the Grand Prix of Endurance and Efficiency, race teams have to balance speed against the cars' ability to run for 24 hours without sustaining...
in France, where the French had a great affection for him. His tradition was soon adopted by other racing teams in many venues. Thereafter, the use of racing stripes soon became common in the 1960s and early 70s for both race and road cars.
Many automobile manufacturers soon decided that imitation of the Cunningham tradition could be profitable, and some "sportier" models of a manufacturer's range often featured stripes out of the factory (hence the derisive use of the term, go-faster). The Cunningham
Briggs Cunningham
Briggs Swift Cunningham II was an American entrepreneur and sportsman, who raced automobiles and yachts. Born into a wealthy family, he became a racing car constructor, driver, and team owner as well as a sports car manufacturer and automobile collector.He skippered the victorious yacht Columbia...
tradition was followed by Carroll Shelby
Carroll Shelby
Carroll Hall Shelby is an American retired automotive designer and racing driver. He is most well known for making Mustangs for Ford Motor Company known as Mustang Cobras which he has done since 1965...
on his Cobra
AC Cobra
The AC Cobra, also known colloquially as the Shelby Cobra in North America, is an Anglo-American sports car that was produced during the 1960s.-History and development:...
and some prototypes built as "Shelby" that sometimes were driven on the street in New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
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In 1996 a pair of 8-inch wide stripes was used on the Dodge Viper
Dodge Viper
The first prototype was tested in January 1989. It debuted in 1991 with two pre-production models as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500 when Dodge was forced to substitute it in place of the Japanese-built Stealth because of complaints from the United Auto Workers, and went on sale in January...
GTS, starting a revival in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
; they are sometimes referred to as Viper Stripes.
Purists call them Cunningham racing stripes, although the more generic American racing stripes also is used in Europe, because Cunningham epitomized the American motor-sportsman and racing car constructor. For three decades, Briggs Cunningham and his team were well known and extremely popular among spectators and racing professionals at European racing events.
Tradition established
The Cunningham tradition was quickly adopted on other racing cars of the 1950s and 1960s, which also began to have racing stripes applied to their paintwork. It had the effect of giving the cars a distinctive appearance on the track and made them easier to identify for spectators and commentators.In some cases, the stripes were applied asymmetrically and were used to identify on which side of the race car the driver was situated. Applying similar stripes to street cars is thought to give them the appearance of these racing cars, and by association, that the cars themselves had been modified for extra speed, whether or not they really had been. It can be seen as a mild form of car customization.
At times the tradition fades and is revived again.
Go-faster stripes
The humorous term go-faster stripes, was used in the Daily Mirror comic stripComic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
, The Perishers
The Perishers
The Perishers was a British comic strip about a group of urban children and a dog. It began in the Daily Mirror on 19th October 1959 and was written for most of its life by Maurice Dodd . It was drawn by Dennis Collins until his retirement in 1983, after which it was drawn by Dodd and later by Bill...
, on the premise that go-faster stripes are popular with boy racers. A running gag in the strip had one character selling his slow-witted friend a series of home-made buggies with "go-faster stripes" as a feature.
A typical form of the 'classic' go-faster stripes is a pair of parallel stripes in a contrasting color to the main bodywork which is fixed to the hood, roof, and trunk in a continuous run (with breaks for the windscreen and rear window). Other arrangements such as side stripes and stripes which form a loop across the hood, or trunk, and along the sides are seen frequently. The racing car appearance is continued by the application in some cases of competition number
Competition number
In many sports, a competition number is used to identify and differentiate the competitors taking part in the competitive endeavour. For example, runners in a race will wear a prominent competition number so that they may be clearly identified from a distance....
panels on the doors, hood, etc.
External links
- Cover of Time magazine dated, April 26, 1954 — the links at the bottom of the page lead to various years of production
- A Costin Lister Jaguar raced by the Briggs Cunningham team in detail and with history — with link to views
- Full list of Team Cunningham drivers — presented on site along with many other informative pages
- Road Racing Drivers Club — see deceased members list for the biography
- Briggs Swift Cunningham II — tribute 2003