Chaparral Chevrolet 2x
The history behind GM's crazy Chaparral 2X concept
Chevrolet's virtual racer is six kinds of crazy. The real racers that made it possible were just as nuts
Insane. If you had to pick one word to describe the knife-edged, impossibly low Chevrolet Chaparral 2X Vision Gran Turismo concept from this year's L.A. Auto Show, that'd be the one.
Head-first down the chute at 400 km/h – you'd have to be out of your mind. The 2X is part bionic armour, part wheeled Olympic skeleton, part spray-on racecar, and all around bad idea. The driver lies prone, arms and legs akimbo, with any high-speed crash sure to send limbs tumbling in four directions like an instantaneous drawing-and-quartering. They should have called it the William Wallace.
And then if that wasn't cuckoo enough, the whole thing's powered by an air-shredding 671 kW laser beam that somehow develops 900 hp. Oh yes, Dr. Evil, this thing's ill-tempered. It's as frickin' ill-tempered as it gets.
Little wonder then that the 2X is bound only for the virtual world, where its pilots may safely put it into the barrier at top speed and then simply hit the reset button. It might be a glimpse of the future, but it's a future that's a long way off, at least until we develop a way to bring people back from the heap of jellied protoplasm that'd be the result of any misstep in this wheeled madness.
But the Chaparral isn't just a look forward, it's a nod to the past as well. The Ford GT40, the Porsche 917, the Lotus 25: these are all well-known racecars, even to the casual observer. There was another name too, perhaps now obscured somewhat by the mists of time, but one that's just as famous. A Chaparral is a type of roadrunner, sometimes known as the ground cuckoo. A half-crazy flightless bird? Oh yes, that's the story: wait until the reverse hovercraft shows up.
Not unlike Shelby , the Chaparral story begins with a talented Texan getting into motor racing in the 1950s. Jim Hall was born in 1935, started tinkering around with hot rods in high school, and began racing while he was still in college. The experience ended up with him changing education streams from geology to mechanical engineering. If before he was going to make a living at getting oil and gas out of the ground, then now he was going to spend a career burning both in the name of speed.
Also read: Ford and Shelby — How a Texan chicken farmer created a legend
Anyone who struggles to see the relevance of high-level math and physics could learn much from Hall's example. "The time I spent studying math," he said, in a 2009 interview, "and doing things that I couldn't quite see the use for when I was a youngster really turned out to be valuable to me."
Hall was also a true wheelman as well. His older brother gave him that early introduction to racing in an Austin-Healey, and when Hall came out of college, he even had a job demonstrating cars with Carroll Shelby's sports car business. This natural driving talent would reach its pinnacle with 12 appearances in Formula One racing during its golden age, racing behind the wheel of a Lotus.
However, a horrible crash in 1968 that required twin knee replacement would put an end to Hall's racing career. His technical achievements by this point already overshadowed his driving days and would change the sport of racing forever.
In those early days of racing, Hall formed a partnership with a fellow racer named James "Hap" Sharp. The first Chaparral car was one they commissioned from a manufacturer out in California, and the pair set about modifying it. It was a fairly standard frame-based racecar, with the engine up front, and little concession to aerodynamics, except to minimize drag.
These were the days before data-collection and computerized simulation, a time when guys with pocket-protectors and slide-rules would put men on the moon. Plenty of racing drivers at the time were extremely brave – they had to be, given the attrition rate – but only a few brought a scientific, deliberate way of thinking about racing technology to the table as well. Jim Hall and Hap Sharp formed Chaparral after gaining permission from the original builder to use the name for their own design. Essentially, they created the NASA of speed.
The first Chaparral 2A was entirely unique in that it had a mid-engined monocoque design. At a time when Formula One was only just coming around to the idea that front-engined cars couldn't handle like rear-engined machines, Chaparral stuck a Chevy V8 in the middle of an aerospace-style fibreglass racer and created a dominating track presence. The design was thanks to Andy Green, an airplane designer from General Dynamics, and the car was released just months apart from Colin Chapman's similar innovation in F1.
That first car was unique, with its eight intake tubes and eight raked headers sticking straight up out of the middle of the body like the spines of some monstrous porcupine. It was loud, fast, and light, and it could out-handle the front-engined cars on the corners.
However, Chaparral's next innovation was even more important. Building on that aerospace theme, they became one of the first manufacturers to begin using aerodynamics.
At the time, most Formula One racers looked just like torpedoes with wheels attached and an engine bolted in. They scrubbed around the track on their skinny little tires, and would occasionally achieve sufficient lift on the straightaways to get loose and get into catastrophic accidents.
During testing at Chaparral's Rattlesnake Raceway, out in the Texan desert, Hall discovered that the work he was doing reshaping the front end of that first Chaparral 2-series was helping the car bite deeper into the corners. It was the Eureka moment – half by accident, half by trial and error, Hall had discovered downforce. Wings started showing up. Lap times started dropping.
There was also something else going on here that was letting the budding Chaparral racing get the funding and development they needed to win. In 1957, the Detroit Agreement had been signed by the members of the Automobile Manufacturing Association, promising to take the focus off racing and other high-speed exploits. Similar to the "Gentleman's Agreement" that the Japanese car industry would use to limit horsepower, this pact encouraged the idea that cars would be marketed on their "ability to provide safe, reliable, and comfortable transportation, rather than in terms of capacity for speed."
Overt racing got shut down, but backdoor support found its way to teams like Chaparral. However, Hall's aerodynamic innovations were all his own, and soon the shaky early prototypes were sorted out (one had been nick-named the Eyeball Jiggler, for obvious reasons), and be-winged racers started showing up.
These days, spoilers are found on everything from 1,000-horsepower tractor-trailers set up to run at Pike's Peak to the trunklid of an otherwise stock Honda Civic. The Chaparral cars were among the first to employ them, running at the very forefront of using air-pressure at speed to gain grip in the corners – and they had another trick as well.
Cars like the high-winged Chaparral 2E were equipped with automatic transmissions, leaving the driver with a third pedal free. Sneakily, Hall designed this pedal to look like a clutch, but what it actually did was feather the huge wing to reduce drag. The angle of attack could be set to maximum when hammering out of a corner, allowing for all that V8 power to get to the ground, or dropped off for better top speed on the straights.
By the time pressure from GM meant that the seven-litre 427 aluminium motors were showing up in Chaparrals, the cars were somewhat over-engined. It took all of Hall's skill behind the wheel to keep them competitive, and after that severe crash in '68, driving duties would have to pass to someone else.
There was, however, one more truly outrageous car to field. In 1970, the Chaparral 2J arrived, and I think it can safely be said that no car has ever sucked as much as this one did.
With a 45 hp snowmobile engine propelling two 17-inch extractor fans, the 2J looked like an industrial dishwasher bolted to a Le Mans prototype. Colloquially called the sucker car, or the vacuum car, it was basically a hovercraft in reverse, riding on a wave of negative atmospheric pressure. There were a few mechanical problems to be sorted out, but when it worked, it was seconds faster in a lap than the best the world could field. At the end of the season, exasperated officials banned it outright.
There would be other success for the Chaparral team, including wins at the Indy 500, and some successes in CART racing. All through this, Hall would be with his team, working 11- and 12-hour days.
But today's 2X concept, wearing that historic "66" badge, is a proper tribute to the daring innovations Hall and his team built in the 1960s. It's certifiably crazy, that's for sure, but when it comes to go-fast cuckoos, that's what Chaparral means.
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Source: https://driving.ca/auto-news/entertainment/the-history-behind-gms-crazy-chaparral-2x-concept
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