Every year, the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum in Midland, Texas, hosts a Live Drive gala for the dedicated members of the Chaparral Fan Club. (There's a double meaning.) The Fan Club is a devoted bunch: many remember seeing the Chaparral cars at the track as kids, teenagers. They drive in from Illinois and California and points between for the chance to see one of Chaparral's cars roaring around the Museum's rotunda, decades later. This year it was the 2J. We couldn't miss it.
Hall has never sold any of his race cars. For years, they sat in his garage right off Rattlesnake Raceway[1]. They are worth untold millions—but to the man who built them, what does that matter?
In 2004, the Museum took over the Chaparral collection, building a dedicated wing for the seven remaining cars. For a team that arose from oil money, there is no more fitting home.
Hall maintains that all of his cars be kept running, and for this task he enlisted Jim Edwards, Hall's personal mechanic, to bring the cars back up to running order. "They were all mostly together," said Edwards, who used to test cars with Hall at Rattlesnake Raceway. "Some of them ran well, some of them didn't run well, so we just went through them. What I primarily did was on the suspension pieces, we Magnafluxed everything and repainted it and then reassembled everything, got it so that they would be roadworthy. And then the engines that didn't run, we tuned them up and got them ready to go too."
The cars were kept as original as possible, though one was repainted. (A replica 2E sits in the Chaparral Gallery as a photo car: you can put on a cowboy hat and squeeze right into it. Photographer Kevin McCauley and I did just that.) Incidentally, the 2J was the hardest car he worked on.
The 2J was in fine fettle that day, crowd gathering around the entrance of the Petroleum Museum, baking in the West Texas heat. Museum specialists fired up the the big-block Chevrolet V8 with a roar. Hall climbed in. The dust kicked up almost instantaneously. The sound of the Rockwell JLO engine howled and whined with a constant drone, a sound that bored into one's brain, portending doom and chaos and everything in between. No wonder McLaren protested, having to hear that two seconds ahead into The Boot at Watkins Glen. . .
Hall hadn't driven it in thirty years. But to him, in that all-brief moment, it felt just right.
"It sticks so good that I never did learn how to drive it deep enough into the corners," said Hall. "You look at the corner, and you put your foot on the brake, and it stops. And you look at the corner, and it's still out there. How did that happen?"
"We had a joke about it: if you let the skirts down, where you didn't have hardly any gap to the ground, you could create a heck of a lot more suction under it—and we calculated, we could actually drive it on the wall around Sebring."
"I'm sure you took exception to Enzo Ferrari's statement that aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines," asked a guest.
"That's a cute statement, by the way," replied Hall, "and I don't know if he made it or not. Do you think he did?"
I don't know, the man said.
"I don't know either."
Chaparral may have been a team that strove too fast. Tempered by ambition, plagued by unreliability, its cars and the engineers who built them were always clamoring for one more year, one more turn around the sun to work things out. Next season, always next season! Instead, Chaparral was always a proof-of-concept, always in progress.
"When you see the Chaparral 2J, at Can-Am races, look it over carefully," said the program for the 1970 Monterey Castrol GTX Grand Prix[2]—where the 2J had nearly achieved its proof-of-concept potential. "You won't see any rear wheels. When it starts, there'll be a different sound. first, the sound of the booming ZL1 engine. Then the raucousness of the auxiliary engine and fans — earsplitting. And when all of this happens, you'll see the 2J hunker down as the suction takes hold. Out on the course, well you wait and see.
"There's never been a Can-Am car like the Chaparral 2J. The incredible Chaparral 2J."
References
- ^ right off Rattlesnake Raceway (www.motorsportcollector.com)
- ^ 1970 Monterey Castrol GTX Grand Prix (www.johnkrill.net)
