Occasionally, we like to dig into the RACER vaults and revisit a cool feature from the past. This deep-dive into the story of the Chaparral 2J first appeared under the title ‘Suck & Blow’ in RACER issue 253, August, 2013.

Chaparral’s 2J Can-Am ‘fan car’ took performance to a whole new level. Banned after a single season, it remains one of racing’s biggest ‘what ifs?’

Nestled between the myths and exaggerations, a factual story of the Chaparral 2J’s origin happens to exist.

Enough yarn has been woven about the genesis of the legendary 1970 Can-Am “sucker car” – last of the great sports racers to hail from Jim Hall’s Texas think tank – to blur fantasy from reality. The truth about this mind-blowing aerodynamic pariah can be hard to believe, but at its core, old-fashioned ingenuity was responsible for turning a wild idea into the fastest Can-Am car of its time and creating one of racing’s biggest “what if?” stories.

“You have to look back through our history a little bit to understand how that occurred,” says Hall, the driver-designer. “I actually recognized the value of producing and managing negative vertical aero force on cars in early 1964 and we used that principle on all our cars to good advantage afterward.

“Our winged cars, the 2E, 2G, 2F, were probably our most innovative designs, but when those (adjustable) wing systems were outlawed after poor copies on Formula 1 cars had failures, we had to think of a different way to apply aerodynamic forces without them.”

Connecting the aerodynamic dots – figuring out how to generate wingless downforce – came via Hall’s mailbox.

“A kid sent me a drawing of a car that looked like a beanie cap, those little caps kids used to wear with a propeller on top,” Hall recounts. “It had four wheels, with the driver peering out through a window of the beanie and the propeller on top. We looked at it and thought, ‘Wouldn’t this be a good way to do it?’ It wasn’t my original idea; somebody did send that to me.”

Thanks to the crayon-inspired design, the Chaparral team was sent into overdrive as a new Can-Am challenger was about to be born. But, like most of Hall’s creations, it first went through a “How the hell do we actually build the thing?” development phase.

“We got to studying it and thinking about it in terms of a hovercraft with negative pressure,” says Hall. “We looked at the power requirements, the skirts it would need to seal the car to the ground, and it appeared that it was a real do-able thing. Complex, but definitely do-able.”

With Chaparral’s partners at General Motors onboard, the 2J project began to gather momentum. Skirt material was sourced from General Electric’s Lexan brand, and a snowmobile engine was deemed suitable to power the vacuum system.

“It was a joint project,” explains Hall. “Chevrolet got involved with us in it and did some of the initial test work. GE got involved. The chassis was built; the engines were mounted. It was a normal car in some ways, and not very normal in others. It grew from there until we were done assembling everything and figuring out how to make everything work.”

Initial testing of the vacuum concept took place at a GM test facility in Michigan. From the get-go, the benefits were clear.

“Chevy R&D ran a Suspension Test vehicle (STV), which looked like a cigar box with a Chevy engine in the mid-section and a seat in front, and you could bolt suspension to it in so many different ways,” says Hall. “You could go out and test the roll-center heights, roll stiffness, pitch axis, anti-squat, anti-dive. It was like an erector set. The STV became our test mule for the 2J.

“We ran the thing with a plywood floor fitted underneath it, with a couple of McCullough engines sitting on it running fans, and some brushes and skirts and stuff around it to seal the bottom. And they’d run it on the skid pad; that was their first stab at it and that’s the first time I saw anything that verified you could actually do it.”

It wasn’t long before the first actual 2J was completed, giving Chaparral a chance to assess its worthiness as a racecar…and to see whether old and new technologies could co-exist in a single chassis.

“I think the hardest part about it was that it was like having two cars, but in one space,” Hall says with a laugh. “You had all the systems that we’d typically used on the Can-Am cars – the engine drivetrain, brakes, cooling, fluid and controllers, all that stuff. And then, in addition to that, you had a set of skirts that had to be maintained, and another little auxiliary engine to run with another fuel system, and so forth. It was certainly a complex car to work on…”

Inevitably for such a complex undertaking, myriad issues meant 2J wasn’t ready for the 1970 Can-Am season’s early-June start at Mosport, Ont., or at St. Jovite two weeks later. Its debut finally came in round 3, Watkins Glen’s mid-July Can-Am/World Sportscar Championship double bill, with reigning Formula 1 world champion Jackie Stewart at the controls.

Whether it was the Scot behind the wheel or, later in the season, the mercurial Vic Elford, poor reliability stifled the car’s sky-high potential. Far and away faster than the competition in its limited outings – just one for Stewart, and two plus a frustrating DNS for Elford – it proved fragile in the races. Its only finish was sixth-place in Elford’s debut at Road Atlanta, albeit slowed by ignition issues for the snowmobile motor, with an ensuing loss of suction.

Fact is, Hall had wanted to debut the car in ’71, after the kinks had been ironed out.

“I thought it was a test car myself and I was enjoying doing the test work, finding out how it worked and what we’d need to do to make it a racecar,” he admits. “But General Motors thought we’d have a hard time keeping stuff under wraps; they felt the car had already been exposed enough that if we didn’t go run it, someone else might jump in and race the concept before us.

“Initially, we didn’t have adequate brakes on it, and we had some skirt issues. The skirts were actually a system where they were tied into the suspension travel with great big push-pull cables. When the suspension moved and the chassis went up and down, the skirts went up and down too, meaning they maintained a more or less constant gap to the pavement to maintain the vacuum. That didn’t work 100 percent, but it worked pretty good. Overall, the car just wasn’t ready.”

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The team found workable solutions for the brake and skirt issues and seemed on the verge of a breakthrough, only for a more common racing malady to rear its head.

“The real blow to us was when we had it going the best, [the penultimate round] at Monterey, and the big old Chevy blew up in the warm-up,” says Hall. “Then we realized that we couldn’t get it changed by race time. There was so much stuff on the car –so many things to take off, put back on and reset – that it just wasn’t possible. I guess that was another problem…”

Camaraderie was part of racing back then, evidenced by the unexpected help from Chaparral’s main rivals to assist with the attempted Laguna Seca engine change.

“The McLaren crew, Tyler Alexander and his guys, were in good shape,” recalls Hall, “so he and at least one of their other good mechanics came down and worked like hell with us to try to get it together.

“And Bruce [McLaren] and I were good friends. We’d race hammer and tongs, then go out and have dinner and critique each other’s car! You’d say stuff like, ‘Well, jeez, your car wasn’t very good through Turn 9, was it? What’s going on there?'”

That friendship would be tested as McLaren, among others, lobbied Can-Am’s sanctioning body, the SCCA, to ban the 2J on the grounds of safety and for having a movable aerodynamic device – the skirts. Of course, Can-Am’s generous prize fund was a significant chunk of McLaren’s annual income, so maintaining the status quo was the less-than-hidden agenda in all of this …

“I can’t deny the 2J was pretty aggressive,” concedes Hall. “We ran up against that mob mentality with the 2E, too. I’ve been asked before what was said about the 2J to get it banned, but we weren’t invited to those meetings… But I will say we were concerned enough about it that we invited the SCCA to Texas to take a look at it before we brought it to the races, and we got their opinion on it.

“They said it was legal. So it was a bit of a surprise to me that they ended up banning it. That was my biggest disappointment. We’d made a commitment to do it, and we spent a lot of money, time, effort and hard work and didn’t get to win a race with it.”

Hall also concedes that by running a car that was so far ahead of its time and the competition, some of the concerns regarding the 2J might have been valid.

“The potential of that kind of car was so great that it could have put a strain on the whole infrastructure,” he says. “And we understood that. If you’re going to corner 50 percent faster than last year, boy, that’s going to make for a hell of an accident. So maybe the tracks and safety equipment weren’t ready to handle such a thing.”

Opinion having turned against the 2J, that 1970 part-season is all we have to look back on. Had it been allowed to return in ’71, Hall was confident of major success.

“Obviously, the main thing was to make it reliable,” he says. “The only time that it really ran well around a race track, we were more than a second faster than the competition, and sometimes two. That’s a lot. We could improve the performance a little bit, had we thought it necessary, by being more accurate with the skirts, by putting a little more power into the vacuum system. So we could have improved the performance of the car. We certainly could’ve gotten some weight out of it. And I think it would have been spectacular.”

SIDEBAR: (FLEETING) PROOF OF CONCEPT

Jackie Stewart qualified the Chaparral 2J third behind the two factory McLaren M8Ds for its 1970 Can-Am debut at Watkins Glen, delighting in the ingenuity of the “fan car” concept. In the race, despite vapor lock in the snowmobile motor reducing its suction, the 2J was too much for its brakes and Stewart called it a day at quarter-distance.

Fastest race lap for “JYS,” set with a heavy fuel load, was further proof of concept, but Jim Hall knew a lot more work was needed before the fast, but complex and fragile 2J could be made into a reliable racer.

Stewart’s F1 commitments ruled him out of further development, while the car’s huge cornering loads meant Hall was unwilling to put all the miles in himself. Instead, he called Vic Elford, who’d split his summer between racing Porsche 917s in the World Sportscar Championship and testing and – hopefully –
taking in some Can-Am rounds in the 2J.

The 2J ran a torque-converter and manually-controlled three-speed transaxle, and with the steering column running between the brake and gas pedal, left-foot braking was a necessity, not an option. But Elford had mastered the art driving a Ford Zodiac station wagon back in the UK, so that didn’t come as a shock. What did was the car’s slow-corner grip when he drove it for the first time at Rattlesnake Raceway, Chaparral’s private test track in Midland, Texas.

“As soon as the snowmobile engine started, the car sucked itself down about two inches,” he says. “The amazing thing was that the fans were making the downforce, regardless of the car’s speed, so it worked just as well in slow corner as the fast ones.”

With testing going well and its brakes beefed up, the 2J returned to racing at Road Atlanta in September. Elford put the car on the pole by 1.26sec over Denny Hulme’s McLaren, then finished sixth after ignition issues with the snowmobile engine.

At Laguna Seca, Elford was on pole again by 1.8sec, but didn’t start after his engine blew in the warm-up (see page 34). The 2J’s final race was Riverside, with another pole, by 2.2 sec, and another DNF. But earlier in the weekend, Elford had put on a remarkable demonstration of the car’s potential.

“Coming in to the long, fast, 180-degree Turn 9,” he says, “I was behind Denny, close to flat, and I just drove around the outside of him. He was so pissed off, he pulled into the pits and sulked. A wonderful car!”