PETER CUNNINGHAM is leaning forward, hands firmly grasping the steering wheel, elbows out, eyes keenly focused. It’s a stance he must have assumed countless times in full racing gear, chasing victories over three decades for RealTime Racing, a team he founded in 1987.

Cunningham isn’t exactly chatty to begin with, but at this moment, he’s silent, transfixed with the task of driving his 1997 Integra Type R. It’s the crown jewel in a lineup of Acuras and Hondas at the RealTime Collection Hall outside Milwaukee.

He used to outrun BMWs and Mazdas in an Integra. Today, he’s outrunning a storm. The forecast called for rain, and this pristine white Type R hasn’t seen much weather. He’d like to keep it that way. So Cunningham is hustling. “It’s one of 320,” he says. “This car has the original tires on it and 15,000 original miles; all original paint.”

Cunningham also has a yellow Type R with only 4500 miles on the odometer. And a black one. But the unicorn of the collection is a red JDM version, owned by Honda R&D Japan and used as a test vehicle at the Nürburgring. “I did not have a mission to create a museum,” he says. “But I did want to try to collect a couple of old Hondas that had some connection with my racing career.”

Twenty years ago, he and fellow RealTime drivers decimated World Challenge Touring Car competition with these diminutive, front-drive Japanese hatchbacks. RealTime’s overwhelming success—often against more powerful cars—helped put Acura on the motorsport map and achieve its first four World Challenge manufacturers’ championships (’98, ’99, ’00, and ’02).

Andrew Trahan

Cunningham, an affable, middle-aged midwesterner with a dry sense of humor that keeps you guessing as to whether he’s joking or being serious, doesn’t gush about the Integra—or any Acura/Honda for that matter. But it’s clear that he loves them.

Why else build a collection hall to house 45 exemplary cars, from a 1966 Honda S600 to RealTime’s TLX GT race car, in which Cunningham set an Open Class course record at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb last year? Why else recreate American Honda’s original California storefront in the back of the collection hall, replete with a 1960 Chevrolet Apache pickup?

Cunningham has raced BMWs, Camaros, and Corvettes but always came back to the big H. Name a Honda or an Acura, and RealTime has won in it: Civic, Prelude, Integra, NSX, TSX, TLX. His team has been instrumental in developing the latest NSX GT3. This year, they’re running Honda Civic Type R TCRs.

At the close of the 2016 season, which was Cunningham’s last as a full-time driver, RealTime had earned a record 88 race victories on 27 different tracks in World Challenge competition.

Some have called Cunningham the winningest road-racing driver in North America. But partly as a consequence of earning so many of those victories in production-based, front-drive cars, he’s remained a half step out of the limelight. Having been inducted into the Sports Car Club of America’s hall of fame in January, perhaps now he’ll finally bask in it.

Andrew Trahan

MATTHEW DE PAULA: Why Hondas?

PETER CUNNINGHAM: I had already done a couple of years of pro racing in the [Playboy and] Escort endurance championships in ’85 and ’86, and then I cold-called Honda and asked if we could borrow a CRX Si to go ice racing with. The short version of that story is we ended up getting the car and winning the championship. Then my teammate and I were invited to come test for Honda’s summer program that they were running at Sebring, at the first IMSA Firehawk race of the year. I ended up earning a seat on the team for that weekend, and I didn’t mess anything up. So then they invited me to come back; then the next race and the next race, and now here we are 31 years later.

MD: What made you interested in the Honda CRX in the first place?

PC: On June 30th, 1986, I had leased a Civic Si, and that was my autocross car. I knew of the CRX Si, which was basically the same car, except for the wheelbase, so I kind of knew that it would be a good car for that.

MD: What’s your earliest memory involving cars?

PC: My dad would let me drive his car, an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, sitting next to him. So I was a driver from the beginning, and I would drive anywhere and everywhere, always. I was six, seven. He would take us to the mall parking lot and do donuts in the snow. We thought we had the best dad in the world and he certainly played a big role [in spurring an interest in cars]. But my sister Ruth did, too. She was into ’67 and ’68 Camaros and cars in general, and being around that kind of got me into it.

MD: How did you get into racing?

PC: I happened upon a gentleman in a parking garage working on his 911—and I didn’t know how to spell Porsche, or that it was a two-syllable word. So I was just talking to him and he’s like, “Oh, there’s this thing called autocross.” And then boom. [Slaps table.] I was a senior in high school, so I was 17, about to graduate. That spring, I went to my first autocross and just fell off the deep end, got totally immersed in the sport, spectated my first June Sprints in 1980, saw a lot of cool cars, and by 1982, I got a Mazda RX-7 Showroom Stock car and went road racing. . . . [Eventually] I sold the RX-7, got a loan on a Saab 99, and used the proceeds of the sale of the RX-7 to pay for my year of SCCA club racing.

MD: How did you go from an RX-7 to a Saab?

PC: My mom had Saabs through the Seventies. I took my driver’s test in her Saab on my 16th birthday. As a junior in high school, I got a one-year-old 99 EMS, which had blown the motor and was sitting at the Saab dealer. It was silver and it looked really cool. . . . I won the Solo II national championship in 1984 in a Saab 99 GLi.

Andrew Trahan

MD: Lots of talented club racers never make it to the next level. How did you parlay your early victories into a full-time racing career?

PC: I met a man named Martinus Dieperink, and we formed a team called MPS Motorsports. We went and did the inaugural Playboy Endurance Cup in ’85 in a Toyota Supra in Showroom Stock A, and in ’86 did some Escort Endurance and some Firehawk Series in a Nissan 300ZX Turbo. . . . We never really made a huge mark those two years, but it still helped when I called up Honda. They had no idea who I was, but they researched it and realized that I, in fact, had been at all of these races. And that was the next milestone, that I got hooked up with Honda.

MD: Once with Honda, did you develop an affinity for the brand?

PC: I didn’t start out just falling over the deep end and having a Honda tattoo on my chest. But it just worked out that way—and who better than Honda to have that with? I can certainly have an appreciation for brands other than Honda and Acura. But it just was a very good relationship, because they were very good to us with their reliability and good handling and performance.

MD: Your Integra Type Rs were unstoppable—more wins than any other car in World Challenge Touring Car history.

PC: It was just so good out of the box, and the series had trouble slowing it down. I mean, of all the cars that we ever raced, that thing was so stock. It had Mugen shocks, a Mugen computer, and often-times, the motor was very stock. And we were up against some pretty stout competition, and year after year after year, the car kept finding a way to victory lane.

MD: Relationships between race-car drivers and manufacturers can be tumultuous and short-lived. How have you and Honda managed to work together for so long?

PC: There was never any long-term commitment or anything in those early years, and only in the last 15 years has it been more formalized with contracts and everything else. So it was very informal and matter-of-fact. And we wouldn’t know until the last minute if there was going to be a program next year. I was doing more driving for other teams, especially in the Eighties and Nineties and early 2000s. But that’s why I formed RealTime Racing, to have a backup plan, a safety net to know that I would have a job the next year.

MD: How did your shop become involved in the development of Honda/Acura race cars?

PC: When Honda Performance Development was around, they weren’t really involved in our level of the sport, and it was only since the mid-2000s that they began to play a role in what we were doing. But then it wasn’t until the 2014 TLX program that, all of a sudden, we’re in a huge partnership with HPD, because we were relying on them for so many ingredients to make that TLX program a reality. Now that relationship has continued and thrived with the GT3 development program and campaign.

MD: Do any tech or learnings from RealTime trickle back into Acura/Honda production cars?

PC: I would say that it definitely does in certain ways, and I think that probably now more than ever with the NSX—maybe less so with the TLX, because that was, for the first time, not really as much of a production-based car as anything that we had ever had before. We certainly tried hard to break shit, and that would go into improving the breed. For the record, a good bit of the success that we had was because of the engineering of the vehicles, all the stock components that we were punishing just would not fail. So the cars were already good. That being said, we could still learn from things as we found the time out or the mileage out of a part.

Andrew Trahan

MD: You have more seat time in Hondas and Acuras than just about anyone else. What makes them special?

PC: The strong points of the Hondas and Acuras were always their handling, and their engines were fantastic. But invariably, we weren’t fast in a straight line compared to the people that we were racing against. Case in point, when we were racing the second-gen CRX Si against Eagle Talon Turbos, they would outqualify us by six seconds a lap. But then they’d have parts fall off or they’d come in for gas, and we’d still just stay out there.

MD: You’ve recently been involved with development of the NSX GT3. How has the development process gone? It seems like a much more complicated car than the ones RealTime ran in the old days.

PC: We’ve gotten a lot accomplished. We’re up against some pretty swoopy cars there, many of which are on at least their second iteration of a GT3 car, if not their third. So that’s pretty tough to start with—not having a GT3—to begin to understand what it’s going to take. But it did take a lot of work by a lot of people to get to where we are today, which is a car that’s not fully developed but is starting to flatten. We were on this very steep learning curve, and now it’s flattening out. Still more work to do. We’re still learning more every day on what the car likes and how to make it go fast on a qualifying lap, how to make it go fast for the duration of a race.

MD: Is the front-drive versus rear-drive debate as heated on the track as it is on the road?

PC: Not everybody could make a front-drive car go fast. There’s a lot of rear-drive car guys that couldn’t get into a front-drive car and figure it out. And for that matter, vice versa. I probably have as much rear-drive experience as I do front-drive experience. It’s a different discipline, is the easy answer. Just like how a NASCAR driver who is really good on ovals can’t just go over to Sears Point and Watkins Glen and set the world on fire and vice versa.

MD: You’ve won in all kinds of cars. What, at the end of the day, makes someone fast?

PC: If you don’t have innate ability, you’re never going to be that good. . . . People have it in degrees. But it’s a seat-of-the-pants feel, and you can go to as many driving schools or have a professional coach and spend a lot of money going racing and doing all of the things, but if you don’t have it, then you can’t buy that. You either have it, or you don’t.

MD: Did you have aspirations for IndyCar or Formula 1? What kept you in sports-car racing all these years?

PC: I think the opportunities. There weren’t really opportunities for open-wheel. There were a lot of pretty people that wear their driver’s suits not tied around their waist but just hanging down—you know that you’re a formula-car driver when you see that. And you had to write a check for that. No one was getting paid to drive one of those cars. So, it was just a path of least resistance. I wasn’t doing anything noble trying to honor the production-based stuff. But certainly over time, it started to make more sense, that “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” [idea]. These are the real cars; you can look people in the eye and say, “This Integra has some different parts on it from stock, but the reason it’s doing as well as it is, is because of how it came from the factory.”

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io