These classic Chaparrals are impossibly cool. Here's why

Jim Hall was a Texan businessman turned racing driver. He was pretty damned handy, but there were a lot of handy drivers in the 1960s racing scene. No, what marked Jim out wasn’t his driving, it was the science behind it. And this at a time when dropping an almighty V8 into the car and turning it up to 11 was about as scientific as it got.

History seems to have stuck Hall’s Chaparral racing squad at the far end of parc fermé, but the more you dig, the clearer it is that he and his co-driver and co-team owner James ‘Hap’ Sharp had sussed aerodynamics and ground effects before Colin Chapman and F1’s other ground-breakers.

What amazing cars these were. A year after setting up, 1963’s Chaparral 2 used a fibreglass semi-monocoque, with a mid-mounted Chevy V8, a configuration that helped Hall secure pole and a new track record at Riverside, close to Los Angeles. General Motors liked what it saw, and actually stuck some money into the project. The result was the 2E (above) that debuted in the ballistic new Can-Am series in ’66 to the sight and sound of jaws dropping all along the pit-lane. The 2E looked similar to most of the other Can-Am cars, ie: utterly fabulous in a deeply scary sort of way, but had one major distinction: a huge wing sitting about four feet above its rear end, mounted on struts fixed to the rear hubs. This generated downforce over the rear axle (approximately 110kg at 100mph), while the design of the front end reduced lift. Down-what??

"When we built the mid-engined car in ’63, we had it going pretty good with no body on it. So we put the body on – a design I got from GM – and, whoa, it all went to hell," Hall himself recalled in a 2012 interview with Car & Driver. "It was slow, and the front wheels would come off the ground at 120mph. I started measuring stuff, moving bodywork around, trying to figure what did what. That’s when I realised we were dealing with not only ground friction but also vertical aerodynamic forces. GM had never said anything about vertical forces.

"We tried to downplay it because we realised putting vertical force on the car was so important. We thought the secret was out of the bag when the car showed up. At first, people were saying, 'That wing is just a crutch for their chassis, a poorly designed suspension.' It was interesting that it took two years for Formula One to copy it – a long time for them not to recognise the principle."

1969’s Chaparral 2H is one of TG's personal favourites, though. This time, Jim and Hap had really gone off the deep end, to the extent that the entire car looked pretty much like one moving aero device. Hall had hired 1964 Formula One world champion and 1966 Can-Am champion John Surtees to race it, but the Englishman – then and now a man renowned for making his displeasure known, if displeasure is what he was experiencing – decided that the 2H was not particularly to his liking, and demanded changes to the driving position. It was originally supposed to feature an enclosed cockpit, with the driver sat unfeasibly low within the chassis, and its wheelbase was a mere and tricky 85.5 inches long.

The idea proved better in theory than practice: Hall actually resorted to buying a rival McLaren M12 while they worked through their creation’s issues. The car’s enormous wing even ended up affixed to the middle of the car, and the 2H was still evolving when the FIA banned outsized wings (F1 was experiencing major teething troubles with its new-fangled wings, in that they were falling off all over the place).

More exotically bonkers still was Hall’s next move, the Chaparral 2J (above) – the trail-blazing ‘sucker car’. Amazingly, it used a 274cc, twin-cylinder Rockwell snowmobile engine to power two fans that evacuated air from the back of the chassis. It may have looked like a giant fridge/air conditioning unit, but by creating an area of low pressure under the car, and sealing it off with Lexan side skirts, Hall and his team were able to generate downforce without the burdensome drag side effects caused by wings.

Mind you, it was still powered by a 465 cu in, big block Chevy V8, which produced almost 700bhp. It didn’t appear until the third round of the 1970 Can-Am championship at Watkins Glen, where reigning F1 world champion Jackie Stewart qualified it in third place. Hall had also hired ‘quick Vic’ Elford, but as clever as it was the thing was also distressingly unreliable, not to mention highly controversial. Not unusually in motorsport when someone comes up with a smart idea, the rest of the pit lane figured that the car was too clever for its own good and must therefore be illegal; the FIA soon agreed and decreed that the fan principle was in breach of the ‘no moveable aero devices’ rule. Hall shut up shop, although Chaparral did briefly reappear a decade later on the US racing scene, but to no great shakes.

"Just over 10 years [after seeing the 2E at Brands Hatch], I was working with Gordon Murray, who I suppose was that generation’s Jim Hall," Charlie Whiting, a former Brabham team member, now the FIA’s top technical man in F1, noted in Motor Sport. "The [1978] Brabham fan car was totally different and an amazingly quick concept, which I suppose you can trace back to some of Hall’s theories, too. These days, of course, the rule books don’t allow for that kind of creative thinking…"

Jim Hall’s still around. Sir, we salute you!