Chaparral Race Cars: Too Innovative For Their Time (2024)

The Chaparral cars are cars that were built way before their time. They look like cars that come from the future. Chaparral Cars was a pioneering American automobile racing team and race car developer that engineered, built and raced cars from 1963 through 1970.

It was founded in 1962 by American Formula One racers Hap Sharp and Jim Hall. The car was named after the Roadrunner. This was a fast-running ground cuckoo also known as a Chaparral bird.

We are going to take a look at the history behind these cars and why we feel that they were cars that were built before their time. You could say that these race cars are classic cars these days that were created by a group of men that had the imagination of creators from today times back in the 1960s.

Two Formula One drivers developed and founded iconic racing cars known as Chaparral cars.

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The Story behind Chaparral race cars

This company has a lot of exciting history so let’s dive right into it.

Dick Troutman and Tom Barnes were builders of the original Chaparral race cars. We know these models now as Chaparral 1s. Jim Hall purchased two Chaparral 1s to race. When Hall and Sharp began building their own cars, they asked Troutman and Barnes if they could continue to use the Chaparral name.

The Hall/Sharp cars are all named Chaparral 2s (models 2A through 2J for sports cars/CanAm cars, and the 2K which was the 1979–1982 Indycar). This is how we can tell who developed and designed which models.

Jim Hall played an iconic role in the business. He was the leader in the innovation and design of spoilers, wings as well as ground effects. The first Ground effect car was in fact the 2J Can-Am which was nicknamed the ‘sucker car’.

Jim Hall is a qualified Mechanical Engineer. His brother took over the family oil business and he wanted to design something mechanical. He once said:

“I wasn't interested in memorizing crystal structures, I got into the upperclassmen classes in engineering and started to really enjoy school—mechanics and dynamics and materials and thermodynamics."

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Did the cars win any races?

There are a lot of races that people have won in a Chaparral car. We are going to look at some of the most iconic races that were won.

In 1966, they debuted the adjustable wing. That same year, Chaparral won the grueling Nurburgring 1000km with the closed-co*ckpit 2D.

In 1964 as well as 1965, Chaparral won 11 of the 16 races in the SCCA's U.S. Road Racing Championship, the precursor to the SCCA Canadian-American Challenge. The Chaparral 2, as well as 2C, also won 11 other major races in that period which includes the 1965 12 Hours of Sebring.

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The engines in the Chaparral cars

The Chaparral 1 had a very strong and awesome V08 Chevrolet engine. It had six Stromberg 97 carburetors, a four-speed manual gearbox, independent front and rear suspension. Now we are going to take a look at one of the most powerful engines that were placed into a Chaparral car.

The Chaparral 2J is powered by an aluminum Chevrolet ZL1 engine, 427 cubic inches and it was able to produce 650 horsepower at 7000 RPM. It is paired with a clutch-less semi-automatic three-speed transaxle.

The Chaparral 2F was a closed co*ckpit prototype version of the 1966 2E. It was fitted with a very high movable wing, mounted on struts and spanning the full width of the car. The wing was controlled by the driver’s left foot. The car had an automatic gearbox so no clutch pedal which is why the driver was able to use their left foot. The wing could be pitched up, to make minimise drag on the straights, or down to slow the car down when cornering. The fibreglass bodywork housed a Chevrolet 7-litre engine.

Hall once told Competition Press in 1970:

“We can go full throttle without wheelspin or uncontrollable oversteer. You can't imagine the car can stop as fast or corner as hard as this one does."

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Why were these cars before their time?

Jim Hall is a firm believer that what makes their cars so different to everyone else at the time was,

“The reason our cars were different is because I took engineering in college and I understood it, and I worked at that and so when I came out and started to try to improve cars, I did it with more or less a scientific method. I measured it and I wrote it all down. Then I wrote the equations if I could so I knew what the forces involved were, and developed a theory.”

The fact that they could build a car that could hit 700 horsepower in the 1960s is astonishing and is one of the reasons why their cars were built before their time. Another reason is that race car enthusiasts believe that Chaparral and Jim Hall together, was where race car aerodynamics began. They added moveable wings that were controlled by the drivers left foot which is another reason as to why these cars were before their time. The minor tweaks and changes that they made to the wings of the cars, was where it all began and was a great reason as to why Jim Hall and the team at Chaparral made cars that were futuristic.

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