DPTJ Script: How one Texas race team SAVED General Motors from the Corvair

Jim Hall's Chaparral team provided the data to save GM in court.

In the mid-1960s, the Chevrolet Corvair became the most reviled car in the United States of America. The automotive press loved this zippy rear-engined machine for its crisp handling and its race-y feel — but it didn't take long before the machine to become the center of hundreds of lawsuits alleging that the car was not only responsible for injuring and killing its drivers and passengers, but that General Motors had known that would happen all along. It was a huge allegation, one that at best would cost GM millions of dollars, and at worst would kill the company.

But the folks at Chevy's research and development department were adamant that they'd created a great, well-tested, and safe product, and they decided that the only way to prove it would be to fight back. The only way to fight back would be to gather as much data as possible about how cars handled. The only way to gather that data would be to hire the best minds in motorsport — the engineers and drivers who knew more about performance than anyone else — to undertake a comprehensive but secret program of testing.

And General Motors decided that the best folks for the job would be the tiny, Midland, Texas-based Chaparral race team, headed by automotive legend Jim Hall.

Introducing Chaparral Cars

Founded in 1962, Chaparral Cars was perhaps one of the most influential race teams in the history of American motorsport.

It all started with two men named Dick Troutman and Tom Barnes — two men who are worthy of an episode all of their own. Troutman and Barnes met in 1949 in Frank Kurtis’ race shop; Kurtis at the time was the preeminent race car builder in America at the time, with his Kurtis Kraft machines taking five Indianapolis 500 victories in the 1950s. Within a few years of its debut, the Kurtis Kraft made up the bulk of all open-wheel racing fields in America.

Troutman and Barnes started their careers working for Frank Kurtis, but they got along so well and worked so well together that, in 1954, they designed their own car — the Troutman-Barnes Special. While the car didn't break a ton of ground in terms of experimental design, it was exceptional in its craft. It was as reliable as it was beautifully made, and it became a winner almost right out of the gate.

When British-American entrepreneur Lance Reventlow wanted someone to build his Scarab sports cars, he recruited Troutman and Barnes to build those cars. By the late 1950s, the Scarabs were winning big sportscar races en route to a SCCA National Championship.

The two men still kept tinkering in their own time, and they came up with a car that Troutman told the Los Angeles Times could “compete with the imports” that dominated the racing scene at the time. This machine was termed the “Riverside racer,” and it featured a front-mounted Chevy engine in an ultra-light chassis. It had potential, but Troutman and Barnes needed money to actually produce the damn thing.

Enter, Jim Hall. A young racer at the time, Hall had come to the realization that if he wanted to progress in his career, he had to have his own American-built cars, because as a customer of European factories, he wasn't getting anywhere. The Riverside racer sounded appealing, and Hall was convinced to try it out at the Pacific Grand Prix, one of the biggest US races of the year.

In that race, Hall nearly finished second, just behind Stirling Moss in a Lotus 19, until someone else knocked him into the hay bales. But it was a match made in heaven.

In his official autobiography by George Levy, Hall recalled, “From that point on, I realized that I didn't want to buy last year's Lotus. I wanted something that was better. The Scarabs were doing well, and Troutman and Barnes worked there. So I made a deal with Dick Troutman.”

The deal was for a lightweight and nimble car propelled by an ultra-powerful Chevy engine, and it was a good deal — cheaper than it would be to import something from Europe, and much easier to repair. Plus, Troutman and Barnes planned on building five of these cars, and Hall knew a few guys who were willing to race them.

His first test behind the wheel of one of those machines came on June 5, 1961, and it turned out that the car needed a lot of work. And Hall was going to have to be the one to do it.

According to Hall, Troutman and Barnes could make a beautiful car, but they didn't understand the logic behind the reasons why certain pieces needed to be assembled in certain ways — certainly not the way Hall did, with his engineering degree and his keen interest in applying aviation engineering to his race cars.

“I couldn't say, ‘Oh, gee, they built it that way, so it must be for a purpose,’” Hall recalled. “I had to say, ‘Well, is it right, or do I need to do something?’ I realized I needed to do something.” He particularly realized he needed to do something when it became clear that the car really wanted to lift off the ground, just like an airplane.

Hall began to transform this car one part at a time, swapping new parts for old ones and dedicating himself to spending as much time on the track as he could. He started reshaping the bodywork to test out different theories he had to counteract lift, and he decided to settle down permanently in Texas.

When he voiced his plans to move down south, he was invited to join an investment group that included fellow racers Hap Sharp and Ronnie Hissom. Hap Sharp built his garage across the road from Jim Hall's, and the two men became fast friends even though Sharp was almost eight years Hall's senior. Sharp grew up with a father who flew planes and a mother who was a champion hydroplane racer, so he too understood the importance of aerodynamics. They were almost opposites in terms of personality — Hall an introvert, Sharp the life of the party — but ask them to solve a problem on a race car together, and they'd dedicate themselves to finding the answer.

By this time, it was early 1962, and Hall and Sharp were racing together in a Troutman-Barnes Riverside racer that had been so heavily modified it warranted its own name — the Chaparral 1. It was also clear that the car was getting seriously outdated. Hall and Sharp had ideas, and they had race shops. So what if they'd never built a car before? They were pretty certain they could figure it out.

And figure it out they did. Their first car, the Chaparral 2, began life as a fairly conventional looking sports car that began to evolve as Hall and Sharp began to solve problems with lift, the transmission, and more. The third iteration of the car, the 2C, was the first Chaparral to feature a rear wing — one that could be adjusted from the car. The chassis was made of aluminum and therefore lighter, and it set the tone for everything that came next — from a ducted nose to a more impressive wing to a fiberglass body — something that was pulled straight from boat racing, not from automobile racing.

Despite the fact that the Chaparral crew consisted of just around 20 people designing, building, developing, and testing the cars, its race shop down in Midlant, Texas was arguably one of the most fruitful beds of automotive development there ever was. What made Chaparral unique was the fact that so many of its personnel came from backgrounds in various forms of engineering, which meant that when a problem popped up in one of their machines, it was far easier to figure out what happened, come up with a possible solution, and then put that solution into action. No idea was too crazy, so long as it could be justified.

Chaparral competed in various SCCA and Trans-Am championships, but it also contested endurance events abroad, and it pushed the boundaries in the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, or Can-Am — an audacious race series that was founded on the fact that it didn't want to implement rules that would hinder technological innovation.

If you were going to pick a race team to help you learn all there is to know about, say, the way a car handles, well — Chaparral was really your only logical choice.

General Motors and the Corvair

Introduced in 1959 for the 1960 model year, the Chevrolet Corvair was a show-stopper. It was the first rear-engined car produced in huge numbers in the United States — and it almost instantly began making waves.

See, the Corvair was different. Yes, it had that rear-engined configuration, which in and of itself was hugely unique at the time. But it was also the first modern American car to feature swing-axle independent rear suspension, and it proved to be as fun to drive as it was spacious and economical. Plus, it was cheaper than a lot of Chevy's other models, which made for an instant appeal.

Consumer Reports, Car and Driver, Car Life, and Road Test all pointed out that while early Corvairs did need a little work in the handling department, the second generation introduced by Chevy proved to be a hell of a lot of fun. It was just about the closest thing to a race car that you could get for such a cheap price, and it was designed to prove that American automakers could experiment with their technology just as much as the Europeans did.

But it quickly fell part.

If you've been around the automotive world, you've inevitably heard of a little book named Unsafe at Any Speed, published by activist Ralph Nader in 1965. In fact, if you've heard about the Corvair at all, it was probably in connection to this book, which kicks off with a brutal takedown of the car and what Nader describes as its erratic handling.

See, not long after the Corvair started hitting highways around America in full force, it also began to be involved in accidents — strange, single-car accidents that seemed to come out of nowhere.

The first on record was the accident of Rose Pierini, whose Corvair flipped on a California highway in August of 1961. Pierini's left arm was severed in the accident, which took place at a road-legal speed of 35 mph.

Pierini hired an attorney, David Harney, to represent her in court, and Harney took a pretty fascinating perspective here. While most lawsuits against automakers at the time focused on very specific defective parts, Harney was alleging that the whole design of the Corvair was flawed. What's more, he was alleging that General Motors knew about this, and that the company nevertheless knowingly sold cars that could kill or maim drivers in seemingly minor accidents that, in another car, would not have posed any risk.

Harney was seeking $300,000 for Pierini, though they later settled with GM out of court for $70,000 — which today is over $700,000. According to Ralph Nader in Unsafe at Any Speed, “General Motors decided to pay Mrs. Pierini rather than continue a trial which for three days threatened to expose on the public record one of the greatest acts of industrial irresponsibility in the present century.” According to GM, it only decided to pay up because there had been a miscommunication between Pierini and the GM dealership at which she bought her car, for which they accepted accountability.

Here, Nader presents a lot of evidence to support his assertion that Pierini was not at fault. A California Highway Patrol officer named John Bortolozzo who saw the wreck said that “all of a sudden the vehicle made a sharp cut to the left and swerved over.” During the trial, Bortolozzo claimed that when he inspected the crash scene, he could find nothing to signal driver error or the failure of one specific component. He also said that he'd investigated other Corvair crashes, all just as mysterious. His conclusion was that there was just something inherently wrong with the car.

The Pierini/Corvair wreck was just the start of what would become a media blitz. On January 13, 1962, the massively popular comedian Ernie Kovacs was killed after losing control of his Corvair station wagon following his wife home from a party. According to police, Kovacs somehow managed to careen into a power pole. All eyes turned to the car in question, and suddenly, over 100 lawsuits sprang to life, many of them alleging the same claim issued by David Harney: That GM had knowingly designed and sold a defective car.

As you can imagine, folks over at General Motors suddenly found themselves with a dilemma. The company's chief legal counsel was a man named Aloysius Power, and Power recommended that GM push these lawsuits to the side as quickly as possible — which meant, effectively, settling the cases with big-money payouts.

According to Power, settling the cases would be way more cost effective than battling the allegations in court — and anyway, who knew what a jury might decide? Who knew what precedent would be set, or how many hundreds of documents GM would have to unearth?

Frank Winchell, then head of Chevrolet's Research & Development team, adamantly refused.

In Texas Legend: Jim Hall and His Chaparrals, Winchell's right-hand man James G. Musser remembered the argument. Let me read this quote to you in full, because it's important:

“Winchell said we can't settle because, unlike other product liability cases we've had in past years where it was a specific defect on a specific car, the plaintiff was claiming the Corvair design was defective — the whole damn car. What that meant was, if they would win a case on that, then it would establish a claim that all Corvairs are defective. More importantly, it would be a bad reflection on the engineering organization of GM, that they had designed a defective vehicle.”

Obviously, Winchell had a strong investment in how GM's cars were perceived, since he played a role in bringing them to fruition. He didn't want GM to tacitly admit it was in the wrong by settling all those suits out of court. Moreover, he firmly believed that the lawsuit was inherently wrong. He refused to allow these suits to effectively label his engineers as murderers, and he refused to do anything that might be construed as admitting that.

No. Winchell wanted to fight — and, amazingly, his bosses agreed. But it would be no easy task.

In order to prove its case, GM would have to unearth all of the design documents it produced for the Corvair, as well as any testing data or correspondence related to the car. More than that, though, GM was going to have to put these Corvairs through the ringer itself in order to test the car's handling in increasingly dangerous situations, on all terrains, under all conditions. Oh, and it would also have to trial similar cars from its competitors, in order to evaluate the Corvair's relative performance compared to other machines you could buy on the market.

That in and of itself wouldn't be easy, but GM also wanted this testing to fly under the radar. It wouldn't be able to conduct it at its Michigan proving grounds. It also, theoretically, should hire a third party to conduct the testing, in order to avoid any allegations of bias or numbers-fudging. That third party should have an intimate understanding of vehicle dynamics, particularly at high speeds, and it should also have its own trial ground — ideally somewhere with a climate that enabled year-round testing.

Those were some pretty tough criteria to meet, but someone did meet them. Their names were Jim Hall and Hap Sharp, founders of the highly successful Chaparral Cars, and they had their very own proving ground named Rattlesnake Raceway out in a desolate, snake-filled desert in Midland, Texas. In fact, they were already well into the process of converting their front-engined race cars into rear-engined ones, precisely because they believed a rear-engined race car would handle better.

They sounded like the perfect guys to take on this challenge.

The Corvair lawsuits

Now, to really understand the gravity of GM's decision to recruit the Chaparral crew to kick off its Corvair testing, we need to back up a little bit. See, in 1955, a massive crash at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France killed over 80 spectators. I talk that whole event in way more depth in a DPTJ episode titled 1955 Le Mans Disaster: How Racing's Greatest Tragedy Changed the World — but if you remember, one of the aftereffects of the incident was the fact that America's big three automakers — Ford, GM, and Chrysler — signed a voluntary agreement that they would no longer compete in auto racing. They'd come under fire for actively promoting a dangerous, high-speed activity after Le Mans ‘55, and rather than let those wounds fester, American automakers decided they were done with motorsport.

Clearly, racing in America didn't suddenly die off after the Big Three signed their pact in 1957. Instead, automakers basically withdrew their formal support of racing, as well as their works teams. Drivers could still race cars from Ford, GM, or Chrysler — they just wouldn't be hired directly by the team to do so, and the team also wouldn't have any in-house programs designed to develop race cars.

But as the 1960s got underway, Ford was changing. One of the new head honchos was a man named Lee Iaccoca, and Lee Iaccoca was determined to revitalize a dying interest in the automotive world. See, kids were coming of age ready to buy cars, but there was nothing fun or sexy on the market. They didn't associate American automakers with performance. But Iaccoca was determined to change that. In a few short years, he introduced the Ford Mustang, and he recommitted the company to motorsport, from NASCAR all the way to the big leagues at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Racing has always served as a to-the-second test bed for the automotive world. If you want to know how well a new technology or innovation can hold up, throw it on the race track. You'll learn real quick whether or not it's worth a damn.

If Ford was getting involved in racing again, then it was almost certain the company would end up lightyears ahead of its competitors on the performance side of things. General Motors wasn't quite ready to recommit entirely to motorsport, but Frank Winchell knew that if it didn't maintain at least some ties with the racing community — and with innovative minds like those of Jim Hall or Hap Sharp — then they risked becoming irrelevant in the developmental world.

It was with all this in mind that Winchell sent a crew down to Midland to inspect the Chaparral facilities. The only thing he felt the race shop was missing was a skid pad; if Chaparral would build one, then Winchell and GM would officially rent the facility from the team, as well as allow it to take on the testing. Chaparral agreed, and that was that.

Well, almost. GM still needed to sign off on the expense. So, on August 15, Winchell distributed a document titled “Chaparral Cars: Hall and Sharp” to the company’s executives. Among photos of Rattlesnake Raceway, financial statements from both Hall and Sharp, and press clippings of Chaparral's racing success, Winchell praises Hall and Sharp as representing the “knowledgeable, open-minded, progressive personnel essential to this undertaking.” Sure, Hap Sharp may not have been an engineer, but he knew a hell of a lot about this whole “vehicle dynamics” thing GM had suddenly grown so interested in — and alongside the technical engineering mind of Jim Hall, they were effectively a match made in heaven.

But what were the folks at Chaparral going to get out of this whole arrangement? That should seem fairly obvious, but I'll lay it out explicitly. First and foremost, GM was offering a lot of money to “rent” the facilities and to draw on the expertise of the crew at hand.

On top of that, though, GM would be showing up with heaps of equipment and vehicles — and they were asking Hall and Sharp to run these cars ragged. They wanted hard data, and lots of it, to wipe out any doubt that their Corvair was some inherently dangerous machine. That meant the folks at Chaparral would be engaging in a months-long crash course on vehicle dynamics, getting hands-on experience pushing cars to the limit. And if that wasn't enough, well, all that GM equipment would be laying around at the ready when Chaparral was ready to test its race cars. How's that for a sweet deal?

Testing got underway as soon as the skid pad was set up, and what resulted was a frankly incredible partnership between Chaparral and Chevrolet. Yes, Hall and Sharp were effectively defining the world of vehicle dynamics — but they also had opportunities to bring their race cars up to the company's Milford proving ground, where some of America's best engineering minds could take a look at, say, a Chaparral getting way too much front-end lift, and then devise some solutions to keep it on the ground. Then, back at Rattlesnake, they’d put the Corvair through its paces.

In Texas Legend, Jim Hall remembered, “We drove those Corvairs in just about every conceivable configuration. Unloaded, fully loaded. Different tire pressures. What we found was that if you tried hard enough, you could roll just about any car, whether it was a Corvair or a Ford Falcon.”

Further, Hall began working with big-name publications like Car and Driver to start feeding this new data to the public. There, he could argue that any rear-wheel-drive car inherently benefitted from a rearward weight bias — which is the exact opposite point the lawsuits were arguing. By the time the first court case popped up on the calendar, Chevrolet was ready to go to battle.

That first case took place in San Jose. The plaintiff was a 39-year-old woman named Doreen F. Collins, who claimed that the 1960 Corvair she was driving suddenly and violently went out of control on a straight stretch of 45-mph highway. The result? She crashed head-on with a truck, which killed her fiancé and her seven-year-old daughter, and injured her three sons. What the plaintiff didn't want to disclose was the fact that Mrs. Collins was driving on a temporary license with just four months of experience behind the wheel.

Still, she had a good legal team. Her attorney, the aforementioned David Harney, had pulled together a fairly impressive slate of folks with automotive and racing experience, including three-time national sports car champion Paul O’Shea, and former head of Chevy R&D Maurice Olley. Olley in particular claimed that he warned the design team that the Corvair's swing-axle rear suspension was “potentially dangerous.”

But Chevrolet wasn't going to back down. Oh, no. It had assembled a team that not only included the technical genius of Jim Hall, but the driving prowess of Formula 1 drivers Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss! No shade to Paul O’Shea, but these were some of the greatest drivers in the world — men who had lived through the transition between front-engined and rear-engined cars, and who intimately understood the benefits of that configuration.

And if you know anything about Stirling Moss, you probably know his formidable wit was a significant reason for both his success and popularity. That came into full force when Moss was being cross-examined by Harney about the stability of the Corvair and its primary competitor, the Ford Falcon on the skidpad. Both had demonstrated that at about 0.6g, they'd begin to lose control.

Harney asked Moss, “When you were driving the Falcon and it reached approximately 0.6g, did it become stable as it went out of the skidpad circle?”

Moss, obviously miffed, replied, “Point-five-six, whatever. It was stable to the point that it ‘went off’ the way it was pointing, if you call that stable, yes.”

Harney asked, “By definition, sir, isn't that stability in an understeering car when it leaves the arc? It becomes stable?”

To which Moss retorted, “Sir, it depends, if I may, what you call stable. If you are going to have an accident, whether you go to it stably without veering — this to me is not stability. My idea of stability is when I am in complete control of the car. Once I lose control, up, down, or sideways, the car is not stable in my mind. It is out of control.”

In Texas Legend, George Levy does a great job illustrating how Moss very tactfully tore apart the pin on which the whole court case hinged. First, he slid in the “point-five-six, whatever” note, which was designed to point out the fact that the Falcon had lost control at 0.5g, the Corvair at 0.6g. He also pointed out the fact that an out of control car is, well, out of control.

When the case was passed over to the jury on August 11, 1965, it took just four hours for the 12 jury members to clear GM of all responsibility.

At this point, there were hundreds of court cases against GM regarding the Corvair, with damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. General Motors knew that it was taking a risk with this court case, and that it was going to have to turn up with a whole lot of data to back itself up. It had hired the best of the best to get its head out of water, and with that one case in San Jose, General Motors established a precedent that another court would be hard-pressed to overturn.

But as you can probably imagine, it wasn't just an easy sweep. The next case would be heard in Los Angeles in 1966, and it was a doozy. In Drummond v General Motors, the 16-year-old stepson of a man named Ralph Drummond was killed driving a 1960 Corvair that, the case alleged, was designed with defects and faults right through its very core. And the case was not going to go in front of a jury: It was going to be decided by a single judge, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Bernard S. Jefferson.

It was always going to be a big, decisive case. But just before it hit the courtroom, a bombshell dropped.

See, Ralph Nader had published his book Unsafe at Any Speed in November of 1965 — and it was a total flop. For all of its fiery prose, it turned out that customers weren't super interested in reading a tome that effectively told them the products they were buying were becoming increasingly complex and, as a result, potentially completely dangerous.

That is, until Nader publicly claimed in March of 1966 that General Motors had sent agents after him. Nader said he'd been followed and harassed, that private investigators had interviewed his friends and family. That he felt unsafe. And making things even worse, GM admitted it had investigated Nader!

Even though the automaker firmly denied that it had, say, dug around for information on Nader's sex life, the mere admission was enough to spark a sales frenzy. No one was interested in buying a book about some guy's thoughts on a dangerous car — but when it became clear that the author had been investigated for daring to speak out against a monolith of American culture, well; everyone needed a copy.

This was the atmosphere into which the Drummond v General Motors case kicked off, and it was a big one. Per George Levy, the trial lasted 16 weeks, during which time the court heard from 41 witnesses and generated nearly 10,000 pages of testimony. Again, Fangio was present — as was a 26-year-old Chevy R&D engineer named Robert James Eaton.

Attorney Harney's ears perked up at the mention of Eaton. Here was a young kid who could crack under pressure, who had only worked at GM for a few months and who ostensibly would have no allegiances or loyalty to the company. Eaton was only supposed to provide context, but Harney subpoenaed him to testify and held him on the stand for eight and half days of rigorous questioning.

As it turned out, Harney's intel wasn't complete. Eaton had gotten into SCCA racing when he moved to Detroit for his new job at GM, and he'd seen firsthand how well the Corvair handled on the track. Eaton never cracked, and it cast a serious pall over the plaintiff's argument.

Also causing a headache for Harney was the fact that Chevy's R&D team dreamed up just for the Los Angeles case. They grabbed a camera and a Corvair and attempted to recreate the accident exactly as it had been described. Inevitably, nothing happened.

Then they'd run the test again, going faster and faster and faster, until the car finally went off the road. As it turned out, to crash the way the plaintiff described, the car would have needed to be going a lot faster than had been claimed. It was a tool that worked so well for GM that they employed it in subsequent Corvair cases.

And it was also a critical tool because it counteracted a similar video provided by the plaintiffs, which showed Paul O’Shea losing control at slow speeds.

Judge Jefferson ruled decisively in GM's favor.

“The Court believes that the Corvairs went out of control and turned over when Mr. O’Shea was driving only because Mr. O’Shea drove in such a manner that the cars would roll over… the same driving skill required in getting the most out of a car's capability may also be used to take a car out of control and roll it over,” Jefferson wrote.

He continued, “It is the Court's conclusion that the Corvair automobile of the 1960 through 1963 variety is not defectively designed nor a defective product; that no negligence was involved in the manufacturer's adoption of the Corvair design; that the Corvair matches a standard of safety which does not create any unreasonable risk of harm to an average driver; that the cause of the May 16, 1960 accident and the death of Don Wells Lyford was due solely to the actions of said deceased and not to the design or any handling characteristics of the Corvair automobile.”

And thus, the rest of the lawsuits crumbled away. General Motors had defended itself, and it had done so with the help of Jim Hall and Hap Sharp.

I think it's worth taking a second here just to note that any celebrations on GM's part were pretty muted. The fact of the matter was that even though it had defended itself in the court of law, it had floundered in the court of public opinion for years — and the court cases brought to light the sheer number of people who were being injured or killed behind the wheel of their cars. So what if those cars weren't intentionally designed to hurt people? They had. The battle in court may have been over, but another battle was about to kick off in the government, and within General Motors as a company.

Life after the Corvair

Over at General Motors, though, life after the Corvair was pretty complex. On the one hand, yes, the company had managed to defend itself in court to prove that it hadn't designed a car with the intention of hurting or killing its buyers. On the other hand, nobody cared.

Even though Chevrolet tried to launch a second-generation Corvair with a much improved rear suspension, the damage had already been done. People so strongly associated the Corvair name with death and injury that sales plummeted and GM had no choice but to nix the car from its lineup.

The court case also brought to light the fact that, even if the Corvair wasn't intentionally poorly designed, a lot of people were still dying behind the wheel. By 1965, before the Corvair cases even started hitting the courtroom, automobile accidents had become the number 1 cause of death for Americans under 44 years of age. A year later, crash fatalities exceeded 50,000, and those rates stayed high for several years after. And, as automobiles became an almost irreplaceable part of American life, well — folks wanted more.

In the aftermath of the court cases, we saw the passing of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which mandated that all automakers equip their new vehicles with a standard suite of safety equipment. People got sensitive about racing — particularly hot rodding on public roads. But it also meant the bigwigs at GM who had gotten away with subsidizing a race team for a few years had to figure out a new tack.

“We had to keep everything quiet,” James G. Musser recalls in Texas Legend. “Everything we did was charged to a vehicle dynamics program which started with the Corvair and expanded. It was not in compliance with the corporate directives at that point, so we were always concerned that we would be found out.”

Heading into 1967, the Chevy R&D program realized it could no longer justify the big-money expenditures going on down at the Chaparral facility, but it could justify using a racing team to test its big-block engines. Racing was familiar with the big-block already, but automakers were learning that they could charge passenger car customers a lot more money for a big-block than for a standard engine.

GM offered Chaparral use of its big-block engines and a three-speed torque converter transaxle for its race cars in 1967. Chaparral accepted. But the engines proved to be unreliable; according to Jim Hall, the new big-block faced 11 failures in just six races in a single car. Plus, with the fountains of GM money having dried up, there wasn't an opportunity to do a ton of testing, or to build a bunch of spare cars. And in endurance racing, it became very clear that the GM transaxles had a significant design fault. Chevy R&D would have to fix the problem, but because Chevy technically wasn't involved in racing, it had no reason to test that kind of equipment in rigorous race conditions.

Though there were plenty of good reasons for the relationship between Chaparral and GM to sour, it didn't — and in 1968, when Jim Hall dreamed up the iconic 2J, his first call was to Chevy R&D.

If you remember from last year, the 2J was one of the first race cars to attempt to exploit ground effect, or, an aerodynamic force that sucks all the air out from underneath the bottom of the car to create a vacuum. That vacuum creates an insane amount of downforce, which in theory meant that a driver would almost never have to lift heading into a corner. In Jim Hall's mind, the best way to achieve this would be by mounting two fans to the rear of a car, which would suck air out from beneath it. When he called up Chevrolet, he was interested in knowing if he actually had a viable idea, or if it was only smart in theory.

Thanks to the ample testing for the Corvair vehicle dynamics program, GM had assembled something called a Suspension Test Vehicle. This was a car that was designed to test a whole lot of different suspension set-ups with ease — and since it was fairly rudimentary, it would be easy to convert it into a rough prototype of the sucker car Hall had proposed.

The folks at Chevy R&D mocked up Hall's plan and found that it worked. They were able to generate 1.4g on the skidpad, which was a mind-boggling number at the time. Encouraged, R&D engineer Don Gates proposed to GM management that they be granted permission to develop an actual, fully-operational version of this sucker car — and that request was, unbelievably, granted. Even though there were clear racing implications, GM was interested in understanding what increased tire adhesion would look like, and this was a really effective way of pursuing it.

However, GM was in turmoil, and soon after the car started being put together, a new crackdown on racing meant they'd have to get rid of the prototype. They dropped it off in Midland, since it was, after all, Hall's idea, but it wasn't much to look at. At that point, it was just a tub and some body pieces — no engine, no wiring. The fans hadn't even been installed. But this prototype would become the basis for the Chaparral 2J, and the 20-man crew down in Midland set to work bringing it up to racing condition.

And then, not long after, John Z. DeLorean called up Jim Hall to ask if he'd like to officially race a Chevrolet Camaro as a factory team in Trans-Am. It was part of a ploy to market the Camaro to an enthusiast audience and represented GM's first official factory racing effort in years. Hall agreed. And, not long after, DeLorean also got really interested in the implications of the prototype that was slowly taking shape as the 2J. He wanted Hall to pick up the pace.

If you listened to our episode last year that focused on the 2J, you'll know that this was the car that effectively ended the Chaparral racing program. When it appeared on the track at the Canadian American Challenge Cup, it was unreliable and prone to failure, but the series realized the writing was on the wall. If it let Hall get away with this, then the other manufacturers and race teams would suddenly fall down a spending hole during a time when sponsorship dollars were drying up. By the end of the year, ground effect technology was banned in Can-Am, and Jim Hall quit racing.

Add to that the fact that General Motors had once again soured on racing in hopes of pursuing the kind of efficiency offered by Japanese automakers, and that was that. There was no reason for Hall to continue.

“As far as we were concerned, there really wasn't anywhere for us to go at that point,” Hall explained in Texas Legend. “We'd just already done what we'd done for the future. That's where I was headed, and we got it all kind of taken away.”

While it was a heartbreaking end for a race team that had done so much to advance the science and engineering of motorsport, it also served as a period of reflection. Hall, Chaparral, and GM had achieved a hell of a lot during the eight years it worked together, all kicking off with that vehicle dynamics program. But not everyone felt GM's appearance in Midland was a wholly good thing.

In his book Chevrolet = Racing… ?, R&D engineer Paul van Valkenburg wrote, “Possibly most important is the fact that Chaparral Cars didn't need outside help to function. It is conceivable that by not working with Chevrolet, they could have taken a more conventional approach to racing, and eventually have won more races.

Another engineer of the time asked, “Looking back, do you think we did Jim more good than harm? Or more harm than good?”

It was a good question — but it's perhaps a moot point. Part of the thrill of racing for Jim Hall was the engineering. It felt good to win races by being the fastest guy there, but it felt even better to win a race behind the wheel of a car whose very existence had shattered the boundaries of expectation — a car that would change the world.

Hall was doing that before GM arrived, but the might of a massive automaker allowed Chaparral to push those boundaries even further, stretching our imagination of what a car can be to its very limits.

Imagine getting carte blanche to do whatever you felt was necessary to improve both your craft, and the world in which that craft exists. Imagine how much you could learn, and how much you could teach other people. It would be like giving me a year off and $100,000 to write the next great American novel, or asking a chemist to play around until they create the drug that cures cancer. Maybe I don't achieve my goal. Maybe the chemist doesn't have a breakthrough. But maybe we had the freedom to experiment, and our experiments are the basis from which the next writer or chemist or engineer works.

Without GM, Chaparral may have won some more races, sure. But would it have changed the world?

Wrapping Up

Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys. Next up, we're going to be digging into the explosive war between the Fédération Internationale du Sport Automobile and the Formula One Constructors Association that nearly killed Formula 1 and transformed the sport into the big-money monolith we know it to be today

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show, give it a rating, and leave a review. And, if you're hungry for more, don't forget to check out the DPTJ Substack, where I'll be digging into contemporary motorsport news, breaking down the barriers of becoming a racing journalist, and keeping you up to date on everything you should be reading this week.

Finally, if you have further questions, sponsorship opportunities, or just want to reach out, I have an email for that: deadlypassionsterriblejoys@gmail.com.

Bibliography

• Texas Legend: Jim Hall and His Chaparrals by George Levy

• Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader