Jim Hall of Chaparral Cars - American Inventors Interview Series

it's always a longer story than you originally think of I had a really good partner in chaparral cars a guy that I got along well with he was smart we talked about it a lot we went out to eat together we had a drink together so we spent a lot of time together and we talked about cars most of the time and I think that's where a lot of it came from I got to know some some people that were very knowledgeable in automobiles and vehicles and and that helped me I made an attempt to learn as much as I could about vehicle dynamics the way cars handle and perform and and I enjoyed learning it so I spent a lot of time at it because it tied right in with what I was doing I could go out and feel it and I could I could look at equations and understand it and so that was I think that was an important part of it yeah there's actually one of those there was one of those moments when it would just said oh wow that's it I build a car in 1963 that was very poor in its aerodynamic characteristics it had a lot of front-end lift and so I needed to fix that and I took it out and raced it for the first time towards the end of the season in 1963 and during the winter between 63 and 64 I did a lot of testing on it here at rattlesnake and and I've reshaped the front of the car to reduce the lift in front when I did that I realized that I'd made a substantial change in the characteristics of the car and I decided that what I wanted to do is build a car that had zero lift let's say it had the same weight speed that it had when it was sitting still so I did that actually and after I did that I realized it wasn't very good race car so then that got my mind going about well what what really needs to happen here and the first time that we actually produced a car where I pushed down on it with aerodynamics the hold game changed the lap times at the track went down substantially I could I could adjust the way the car felt in the corner I could increase its its cornering capabilities and that was just a while minute you know oh man this is really something so from that that point on really is where I began to study the real aerodynamics and how it affects the performance and handling of the car chaparral and my own career it's a little more scientific I mechanical engineer a graduate engineer and and I started racing after oil actually during college but that's when my career was after I had the degree and and so I I applied what I'd learned to what I was doing and as I said I I made a point of trying to understand the control and stability of cars and so it was with some trial and error for sure but usually it was a plan we had a plan and a theory and and I went after it to see if I could prove it and did a lot of measuring actually had a test track right there where I could run and it was very useful that's probably an advantage that we had during those days I could just go out and run during the morning say and then come back in and make some changes go back out in the evening and check it where I think a lot of a lot of the teams we were racing against in the in the sixties didn't have that capability yeah I think the basic motivation was to beat the other guys the making the car really nice to drive was something that I recognized as an important feature of a race car because after the races that we ran in those days were to our races and at the end of two hours of full concentration you were petite and if if the car was difficult in any way your performance towards the end of the race I thought suffered so I sited it was really an important feature to make the car not only predictable and and good but also easy and that's something that I worked on all the time al drove for me in the late 70s he did a great job lucky to get him we decided to go to Indianapolis because because I'd never done it and I had an opportunity to hire al right from him from the beginning I had raced against Al and road racing and he knew my capabilities and and shaffer else capabilities so it was a it wasn't a tough sell he was looking for a new new ride and and I got together with him and we ended up starting that season with really a total team we had a we had a really good driver we had the right equipment and we did really well from the very beginning so I had a very good experience with al gosh Dan's a wonderful guy that I braced against overall over a long period of time he's a road racer at the same time I was and in fact Dan and I drove together at Lamar in 1963 and usually I drove as a competitor of his and and he is a competitor of mine and I have to say I have an awful lot of respect for down on the track and off he he's a guy that you'd drive right up next to any time and know that he was going to take make every effort not to not to touch your or you bumpy or anything like that he was he was a great ethical driver and I liked racing against him a lot he was in a little different kind of way than me but he really took some steps out in a different direction from what other people were doing and was very good at it Roger and ice probably started racing about the same time we raced against each other a lot as amateurs I had some good races against Roger he was talented in a race car which a lot of people don't think about now but he was quite good I had an injury in 1964 where I couldn't finish the season and I knew we had I thought like not I didn't know I thought we had the best car so I got Roger to finish the season for me that year and he won two or three races right towards the end of 1964 in that shop for l2 and and at the end of the Xi's and he said you know I think I've done it and he quit racing so Roger drove is his last competitive race and one of our cars and won it so that was that was a nice feature Rogers been a good friend of mine since then and of course he's a tough competitor he stays in racing and has stayed is still going I don't know how he does it all but he does it and he still enjoys it that's great well let me go back just a little bit and I want to cover something else while we're talking about my brother dick my older brother was really instrumental in in a lot of of what I did and in the beginning I was a young guy dick was several years older had a little a little money and and he bought a sports car and I got to drive that before that my first race was actually in my brother's austin-healey in 1953 so that was my introduction nick was interested in racing all the time interested in cars like I was as a kid and he he actually helped Bobby unser we lived in Albuquerque when I was a young young man and I knew the answers and Bobby was about I think about my age anyway dick helped Bobby gets started in jalopy racing and then maybe even stock cars a little so dick had a little experience at that and when I graduated from college in 1957 I had had a job interview and thought I was going to go up to Chevrolet and they had one of those cutbacks and they they just said well we're not hiring so I was surprised and and along came graduation and dick called me so well I made a deal with Carroll Shelby in Dallas to open a sports car dealership and it's not really doing as well as I thought it would would you be interested in going to on there and just taking a look at it and see what you think so I I was looking for something to do and Carroll Shelby sounded interesting to me so I said sure and that's what I did when I when I graduated I moved to Dallas and and was in the business Carroll Shelby sports cars with Carroll for a couple of years and I learned I have to admit I probably learned more about racing than I did learn about the retail car business but I had a good start there also because I got to drive a lot of the cars that we sold I was kind of a good demonstrator because I was an unknown and yet I could perform pretty well in the car so it worked out to be a really interesting start for me I guess I'd been around cars a long time my uncle helped me build a soapbox derby car my dad and I put together a hot rod in the in Albuquerque and when I was going to school there a little model a and and then my brother got me started in sports car racing and I just continued from there I I had all had thought about it a lot obviously and it was pretty natural for me I seem to do do quite well at it if I put my mind to it I raced sports cars and as an amateur up until Oh 1962 and and during the last couple of years I realized that the cars that we were driving were not the latest thing from from Europe the European Stirling Moss and from England and and some of the other guys would come over with the latest cars and and date and we couldn't we couldn't handle him well they were number one they were better drivers number two they had later-later equipment what they sold to American amateurs was last year's car basically so I thought I was approached by a couple of guys at Dick Troutman and Tom Barnes in California who wanted to build a car and I said yeah I'd be interested in that and I sat down with him and they they proposed the car that I thought would make a pretty good sports racing car it was reasonable priced used American stock block engine has had some good ideas so I went ahead with them and I and I bought the first one we called it they said well what are we gonna call it and I said wow I don't know when I thought about it and and we ended up with a name chaparral because it's indigenous to this area the Southwest it's the roadrunner I thought it was an appropriate name for a road racing car so that's where the name came from I drove that car for a couple of years and developed it considerably during that time it was a it wasn't particularly great at the start but I got better and better and that's one of the times I was more and more interested in why cars do what they do I met HAP Sharpe sold him a couple of cars when I worked in Dallas and then I moved to Midland and when I came out here after about a year happened I decided that the thing to do was to build a car here and and do it he he thought I knew enough about it and that we could probably build a competitive race car so in 1962 we started building a chaparral car here in Midland and that's really the start of it and we joined together we were competitors up until that time amateur competitors and we joined together to create shop rail cars with the purpose of building a competitive sports racing car that could compete against anywhere in the world so that's the start of it well I guess they all had heads there their moments and their good and bad points the first car that we built was was turned out to be quite an innovation because we decided we'd use the latest materials and construction techniques available so we made a tour of all aerospace companies I guess they were called aircraft companies in those days that we're producing rockets they were producing the latest in airplanes and whatever they'd let us see we wouldn't looked looked at we met a guy in Fort Worth at General Dynamics that was a structures engineer that was working on b-58 and we talked in a long time about it and he was really interested in and thought that fiberglass reinforced plastic was a great way to go for a very small production item because the tooling costs were low and the more we talked to him we decided to go in and partners with him actually he wanted to build boats and get him to do the structural work on our chassis and that's that's how we built the first car actually an Andy green and he built the first Chaperone chassis to our specifications but he was the engineer that stressed it so and it turned out to be very reliable very good and innovate his chassis it's the first time that people in the racing industry had used stress skin like an aircraft for the structure of the car and it lightened the car considerably it was also very durable and and not too expensive so it turned out to be quite a good thing that car and that chassis actually was used by chaparral up through in various models up through 1966 so it had a good life and was it was very very successful chaparral 2 took me to the US Road racing championship in 1964 and again in 1965 in the unlimited class so maybe we won more races with the original car we built and any other car we built that's really where I got my start on the aerodynamics was with chaparral too when I made the changes to the lift characteristics of that car is where I got interested in that the automatic transmission was HAP's original idea he drove my first car there's the chaperone to that had a 327 Chevy on a four-speed gearbox and and quite small tires in those days that's what was available and it would spin the wheels in just about any year up to fourth and he said well what's the transmission for he got out of it and he said why do we have a transmission and and so that's God has started and we thought well if we use a torque converter to multiply torque for starting and and we started with just a single speed design we were working on that pretty hard when I got associated with a fellow at Chevrolet in Detroit who was in charge of Chevy's R&D department his name's Frank Winchell and I want to mention Frank particularly because he was very very instrumental in my engineering career I got to know him well and he happened to be a transmission engineer and he said golly I mean yeah I got some ideas about that so he started he started some ideas himself and and he actually came up with that transmission for a prototype car that they built in in 1964 and I tested it I tested a transmission in in our car and it was very very good and easy to drive and and we thought it had a lot of potential so they made a deal with us to let us test that is a piece you know best piece of test equipment they they were in a little Frank was in a little tricky position because GM had signed an agreement that they were not going to get involved in racing and so this this was an engineering program more they didn't race and they didn't provide us with with racecars what they did is they they struck up a testing agreement with us and and it turned out to be a really good thing for me because they'd send equipment to Midland during the winter when they couldn't test in Detroit and an engineer or two and some mechanics and and we'd run it and run it and run it and learn about learn an awful lot about it so that gave me an opportunity to hone my skills both of the development person and as a driver it was it was a wonderful thing for me there are some of the things you did they wind it back up in the passenger cars right well I think they did particularly some of the Aero stuff later and we used a we developed that transmission a long time and and we ended up putting a lock-up clutch in it so that to make it more efficient at speed and that's one of the things that was added to all passenger cars later on when the economy a feature became important so I don't know whether we were the first ones to do it or not but we may very well have done it the wings of course not anything new wings had been run on race cars before but I don't think when they were they were put on cars that the person that did it made an analysis of what he was doing and and thought about the total effect I think they put wings on cars for a particular reason I know a guy put one on a car to run it a very high speed oval track in Germany way early and and it worked but you know that was the end of it nobody paid any attention particularly the wing came off when they went away from there and and so it wasn't there wasn't a real understanding of what happens when you apply a vertical aerodynamic force to a car when you do that you completely change its its characteristics and and up until the time we started putting aerodynamic downforce on cars I think most engineers thought of cars as lifting bodies they said you know they're flat on the bottom they're round on the top like a wing so they're gonna lift and we'll try to minimize that lift and we'll try to reduce the drag and do all the things we can to make the car more efficient but they never really said well what happens when you push down and that's what happened to me I realized what happens when you push down and what happens is you increase the traction capabilities substantially so the car corners faster it breaks faster tolerates faster and you can change the stability so that I know I saw a lot of aerodynamic studies again Jim where they looked at y'all stability of their cars and they were interested in what happens in a side gust and what how is the car controllable on the highway all the right things but they really weren't thinking about the vertical forces they were thinking about the the lateral forces and and so and it's really amazing what you can do once you change the vertical forces a little bit the lateral forces become almost second order so it's it's amazing what it did to both race cars and I think passenger car technology eventually the whole reason I got involved with Chevrolet as they were interested in in their Corvair handling because they had some lawsuits in 1962 and 63 and I that's when I got to know Frank Winchell and he wanted to hire some expert drivers and and in particularly he wanted to talk to me because I had an engineering education so I did a lot of work for him driving Corvairs to understand what they did at the limits of a control and that's where my education started in this actually there's another guy involved it was really important a fellow named Bill Milliken who is vehicle dynamics expert Cornell labs and then Cornell University then cornell labs top top guy and that's where i started learning about cars and what makes them do what they do they got in it because they wanted to understand Corvair exactly what it does at the limit and they wanted somebody to drive but I drove a lot of Corvairs right out to the limit of adhesion and when then we'd let the tire pressure down and I'd Drive around the skid pad with a wheel touching the ground you know and then we were preparing expert witnesses for their trials we took a lot of and had top engineers from around the country with reputations out and demonstrated it all and that's that's how I got involved with Chevrolet and a lot of those lessons you translated into the right good yeah and I and I go back to Frank cause I knew he knew a lot and I'd say well Frank when I do that this is what happens you got any ideas about that we had a long discussion we became very close friends and and he was really my mentor and helped me a lot to understand the engineering that goes on in a car people always ask well why did you have this relationship with Chevrolet and they weren't supposed to be in racing well it was really a test and a relationship and it grew into a little more I have to say but you know we both got interested in what we were doing and that's how it worked Dan Gurney was an innovator in his own right one of the things that he did that I thought was important is he he was interested in the engine development for an IndyCar and for Formula One and he just took the bull by the horns and he went to England where he knew the work could be done a little more reasonably there's a kind of a a cottage industry of in racing in England and he hired a fellow named West Lake to design first cylinder heads for the Ford engine and then I think they built a complete Formula one engine of which then was totally successful with I think he did a great job he he certainly had a lot a lot on the ball this is 1965 chaparral 2 and it's a it's been derived from the car that we built in 1963 when I changed the shape of the nose to decrease the lift I lowered the the peak line from up here to down here and I and I used a dam on the front to split the air and make it go around the car rather than under it the other thing I did was I was I took the air in for the radiator underneath and exited out the top all those things produced a negative force on the front of the car and got it down to where the lift was gone and we were actually pushing down on it once I did that I realized that I had to balance that in the back it didn't work out just to be a zero lift car so we started changing the back of it and and the first thing we did which is we kind of copied somebody else we put a little kick up on the back of it and it's in reality it turns out it's a flap it's uh it's like an airplane flap it turns the air up and it causes a high pressure area right in here and pushes down on the car the rest of what you see on here is kind of development for 1965 we added we added bigger surfaces we vented the low-pressure areas on the car these louvers we measured the pressure on the underside of the of the fender and then on the top and then we vented from the high pressure to the low pressure all that produced a negative down a negative force on the car which allowed it to grip the road better and in the car went faster and faster and faster now when I say faster I mean faster around the racetrack we put a lot of drag on this car it got slower on the straightaway and so our next step was to build a car that had a lot of downforce on it but didn't have the drag on the straightaway and that's where we went from here chaparral was a small small team in those days one of the things that's that I think was an advantage for me was was I was a designer I was a test driver and I was a fabricator in a lot of it I I shaped the bodies actually I'm the guy that went out there and shaped them I had some help usually actually my wife and I'd come back after dinner and I and I'd go to work on the clay or whatever medium we were working on and I'd make the changes that I thought were necessary I'd rough them in and then the guys had come back in the morning and they'd go through it the next day and smooth it all out and make it look away and then I'd critique it and do it again so yeah I did have help but most of the shapes that are done on shaft rails were my my sculpture I I'm a good fabricator I can make parts I get out with the guys and do it and I see why they can't make something a certain way so that when I design it I think I designed something that can be built and and then I go test it so you know I think that gives me immediate feedback as to what happens and I think it was a real advantage for me to be able to do that and it was it was a way I ran chaparral I was I was a leader in the sense that I said come on guys we're gonna do this and if we stayed until midnight I stayed till midnight I didn't I didn't say okay you guys finish it up I'm going home that was just my wife Cynthia wholly said well I don't see how you did it you could work you know four or five hours sleep and I could I could work 15 hours a day all the time it was it was so much fun and I was learning so much it didn't seem like work to me and I I just stayed with it did you have to motivate the others to share this desire you had or I think the guys I had working for me were were doing it with me and they were as motivated as I were they you know they wanted to beat the other guys out there and and we were a small team from Texas that rolled in and with a pickup and a trailer and and ran our races and left and that was yeah it was fun now we're looking at chaparral tui which is our 1966 km car in in 1966 we decided to build a car that embodied everything we've learned about aerodynamics up to that point and maybe a little bit about vehicle dynamics too so we did a lot of things with tui that are different from the earlier cars it was very successful in the sense that it was fast and easy to set up when we went to the racetrack I think it was a really versatile good race car it was not very reliable and we didn't win many races so from that standpoint it it wasn't as good we probably introduced it a little too early should have had more testing on it before we took it but that's the way we did things we were a small team we built the cars in the winter and took home racing into someone and that's no he's good tewi of course has the major feature is the wing and you see that it's a major feature of the car in order to balance that wing it's got it's got a similar system in the front it's got a duct like our radiator duct that comes in underneath and exits the top but there's no radiator in there so we can control the airflow in there with a with a flap that modulates the amount of airflow through there and changes the aerodynamic character of the car that matches what happens in the back when we go to to a low drag position for the straightaway and we go with it with a more or less trim airfoil we reduce the downforce in the front the car is fast on the straightaway and yet when we come to the corner it goes to a high drag position a high ground downforce position or it's it has very good braking at corners at very high speed it's and that system worked well the other thing we did on it we didn't have we wanted to move the radiators there for several reasons so we put them we put them in the side pods and that gives us more more rearward weight distribution car gets off the corner a little faster because it's got more weight on the drive wheels I think it was a I think from my standpoint it was a really really good design there again the major reason for a race cars to win races and and since we didn't prove it to much that people argue with me about it when we first showed up at the racetrack a lot of guys laughed at the wing but I noticed that the knowledgeable people didn't Bruce McLaren was down laying underneath looking a back up in there to see where those struts went and and Dan Gurney was standing there too so the guys that really knew they weren't laughing but a lot of people did and then there was a lot of complaints they said all we can't see it's blocking our vision and and it's going to fall off and hit us and so they you know there's a lot of complaining about it originally but after about the second race all that stopped when when everybody realized how fast it was and it didn't fall apart you think sometimes when you're inventing or being innovative if you have to go against the conventional wisdom and stick your neck out there you know I didn't think about it as as in terms of going against what was going on what I thought about it is how are we gonna do it better next time and and so it didn't look to me like it was a major change for us it didn't look tonight it was a natural progression of what we were doing and then when then when you show up with it you realized well boy it is different and and there are gonna be some some explanations and people wonder about a lot of things but from the standpoint of where we where we did it and how we did it it was a very natural progression of what we were doing or about be it when you bring an idea into the team today overlooking say come on Jim this is this is a waste of time yeah I got a little of that some of the guys particularly when they're tired working long hours and I say yeah I'd really like to get this done for we go to the race next week okay is it worth it but you know usually I could convince him I found it if if you can convince somebody that what you want to do is the right thing it usually is if you can't then then maybe you better rethink it so that happens its own for sure we had a lot of real loyal people in those days they came to Midland and and and work for us and stayed and I think they enjoyed where they worked even though we worked awful hard you talked to him today they they say boy we worked hard and they did I think harder than most people do but I think we all enjoyed what we were doing and we had a lot of loyalty now as a team grew bigger then that changes you know originally it was six or seven people and and and and a lot of those guys stayed with me a long time but as they as it grows then you tend to have some interchange of people management becomes a people managing business and and our indie teams for instance were probably twice the size of our of our road racing team and and you do a lot of races in a short period of time so it takes a lot of other things such as the travel and and just organizing to get it done and you need people to do that which I did I didn't do that part but it was it was more difficult and and and you can't keep those people or maybe the psychology changed a bit over that period of time where where the guys were in racing to maybe get the best job or the best pay and they moved around a little bit the next version you learned something from this thing you started fertilizing your mind with it's like that now I've got an even better ideas that how it happens yeah that's how it happens still building on downforce all the time we we used this in 1966 67 68 and I had a different idea for 68 originally that's that's my worst idea I think and and we can look at that if you'd like to or we can just go right by it an important feature of the wing is that the load that comes out of the wing is loaded onto these struts which go down and hook onto the rear suspension so that it's not transmitted through the body and the spring system of the car it actually goes directly to the rear wheels so that now you can control the pitch angle of the car very much better because you don't have to worry about this big force going into the bodywork the other feature of it is this is controllable by the driver in the cockpit and it's kind of a neat system the center of pressure of the wing is forward of the pivot so that it always wants to turn away from where it's hinged so if it's in this position it wants to stay there the driver has a has a pedal next to the brake pedal and when he gets out on the straightaway and he realizes that he's not accelerating as fast as he'd like to he just takes his foot over and pushes on the pedal that trims a wing out and adjust the front downforce when he gets to the end of the straightaway and realizes he's going to stop you take this foot off that pedal and puts it on the brake so it's automatic you can't it's a fail-safe you can't you can't go into the corner with a wing in the wrong now we did left foot break we didn't have a clutch with the auto transmission so we left foot braked and right foot accelerator well the way a wing works is is the airflow takes a longer path on the low-pressure side than the high pressure side the air comes into the wing and and goes up like this on the on the high pressure side on the bottom it comes in and goes around on a longer path like that so it creates that spreads the molecules of the air and and makes lower pressure on the bottom side of if it's an airplane that's the top side but in this case it's the bottom side so when that happens you create a big force between the pressure on top and on the bottom of the wing I studied I studied aerodynamics and thermodynamics in college and I learned to fly as a as a teenager so I had a experience with airplanes and so all that went together for me I can look at an airfoil or go get an airfoil book and calculate the amount of force we're gonna get out of this sized wing which is the way shop rails were built as opposed to just trying one and seeing how it worked we we actually knew approximately what kind of force this wing was going to produce before we actually build it this car was was designed and built for the 68 km seas and it's it's our most unsuccessful car I was injured in we didn't actually get to run it in 1968 because we didn't finish it in time and then I was injured towards the end of 1968 and laid in the hospital for quite a while that winter while this car was being finished and and I didn't get to do the test work initially and I didn't so I wasn't as hands-on involved and when we got ready to run it it wasn't it wasn't as ready as our cars typically were we hired a good driver to drive it but he didn't like it and we didn't seem to be able to get it set up for him so that he could he could drive it very well and I couldn't drive it to see what I thought was wrong with it so we had period that just didn't work for us very well it's got some unusual features that are that are interesting this the whole front end of the car is is a as a monocoque structure in other words the fenders the the seats everything up here is structure back to back to the engine boat kids so that this car is considerably lighter from any other car up till this time that we'd built because we used all this material thinner and better qualities to to produce the strength that we needed in the front part of the car the wing you'll notice is is actually it goes on stress but those struts go into the body the reason that is is after in 1969 they made a rule that said we could no longer do what I did in 1966 the reason for that is not a particularly good one but in my opinion the Formula one guys adopted high mounted wings for the 1968 season it took them two years which surprised me and and they had some some catastrophic failures on the racetrack and some spectators injured and killed and and so the FIA the sanctioning body made a rule that they wouldn't run those anymore and it's for safety reasons and I mean that's that's okay but you can build it safe they changed the rules for all the cars so so we couldn't run the wing mounted onto the strut this car actually has load Levellers on it so that we took the pitch out of it again it's got dynamic load leveling it's done with hydraulics so when the when it goes to its high downforce position it also turns on hydraulic system that puts the car right back where it belongs so there were a lot of interesting features on this car it's got even more rear weight distribution it's got the radiator clear in the back the air flow has to come all the way over the car and into the end of the radiator that worked okay people commented about the little vortex generators vortex generators are used to cause a swirl to mix the airflow because as you travel as the airflow travels along along surfaces it loses some energy so that the first part of the energy going in that whole first part of the air going in that hold that lacks energy so if you mix it up you get better airflow into the radiator that's just some incidentals about it john surtees drove it for us and in 1969 very very unsuccessfully well the way downforce makes a car perform better is it increases the traction between the tire and the road in other words if you push down on the on the tire it increases attraction but it doesn't increase the mass of the car and and and what do you balance in the corner is is the mass that you're trying to get around the corner versus the traction that you have so without increasing the mass substantially you increase the tractive capability so the car just corners faster well if you can go around the corner faster substantially than the other cars you're going to win so how much faster with the car like this at the time have gone then in a car without down foot oh it would be it would be a would surprise you it would be of the order of several percent faster in the corner it might go as much as 10 or 15 miles an hour faster in some corners and the higher speed corners so it's it's a it's a big number that was anybody else onto this or did you have oh yeah that it happens quick and racing as soon as is recognized what's going on people go their own way and try to do what they think will help them and so by this time there were other people that were using quite a bit of downforce and so we kept continuing to try to increase it because we knew that was a way to to increase the performance of the car well that's what happens you you look at the rule book and you say is this within the rules and and if you decide it is then you go ahead and build it sometimes you're not sure enough so you ask and I've done that a time or two but and then when when they swim the rules makers and you don't talk to everybody obviously come along and they see that the car they think has a as an advantage or a disadvantage of some kind maybe a safety problem well then they're gonna they're gonna make a rule to change that and of course it the tracks are pretty much fixed so if if you make a car go to much faster then it becomes a safety problem in itself because the energy at impact is going to be higher and people are the drivers are possibly be hurting more because you're just going faster so that's the job that the rules makers are always torn about is well is this fast enough and what do we do to slow these guys down and then there's guys like us that are saying well what do we do to make them go faster so it's it's just a natural progression of things well we called it the ground effects car but vaccum ground effects but people called it the sucker car so it's been named that we brought this car to the 1970 can-am series and first time it had been shown in public it was it was it was impressive I'll say to say that but it didn't win the race this car has a tremendous amount of downforce it's a follow-on to our other ideas wings got chopped off in a certain way and so we decided and maybe there was another way to go at it and this is in effect an upside down hovercraft hovercraft principle is you pump air into a space below it and you pick it up just off the ground and and it glides around at very low friction almost none this car we've got a chamber where we suck the air out of it and pull it down the way we seal it is with skirts that run close to the ground they're actually articulated they go up and down with the wheels so that so that they don't wear particularly but they keep that small gap there's one that runs across right behind the front wheels and there's one that runs across the back of the car so that this whole area is sealed off we then extract the air from that chamber with an auxilary engine in here and a couple of big fans and we pull we could pull in the racing trim about four to five inches of water underneath vacuum and that translates to 2,000 pounds of downforce the car weighs about 2,000 pounds so by just tweaking it a little we could have driven it on the ceiling or on the wall and and as a matter of fact lexan those skirts are made out of a polycarbonate commercial name lexan and we we proposition GE about making a commercial and driving it on the ceiling we said you know we could make a helix shape road and we could just drive it up on the ceiling a guy could get out and shinny down a rope and leave it there but they when we quoted the price they said they didn't want to do that so we didn't do it and of course it probably would have been tricky because you'd had to done a lot of safety devices to make sure you didn't break the editor or hurt somebody anyway it would have been capable of that the car was extremely fast it qualified on the pole or ran the fastest lap at every track it went to it only never finished a race with all systems working yet it finished a couple of races but but up Oh in the top three or four it didn't win any races it was outlawed at the end of the 1970 season by the International Racing sanctioning body and in France the FIA and so a suction backing par suction round affects car could no longer be run so it only had a one one year life why did the Elwha what was wrong with him I think it scared him I think it would go so fast around the corners that it had everybody afraid of what it might do it's the capabilities of this car given development art you can go just almost as fast as the driver could stand you could pull enough G's on him that did he black out you know in every turn so it's there were some reasons they did it on a technicality and that irritated me because we had actually taken this to the american sanctioning body the idea and said we'd like to do this what do you think they all said well I think it's within the rules just like we did but the FIA found a technicality they called the the fans or maybe the skirts I've forgotten which to be moving aerodynamic devices and that's was articulated maybe articulated and aerodynamic devices and their description of the chassis prior to that time had been from the wheel centerline up but they they then included the skirts in as part of the chassis after that so it was just a little change in how it was how you read it and and that's the way they did it this was a real setback for chaparral because if you look at the last few years before this we'd had the high articulated wing banned by the FIA again on safety reasons because in my opinion when Formula One guys adopted it they didn't do it very very well and they had some accidents so that was the reason they they initially banned it and then at the end of the year they just said well we're not going to run articulated wings and I think that created a big problem because that's when air when airflow was really under consideration and all of a sudden I think the racing team spent just as much on the wind tunnel work as they as they did on the rest of the car at least they do that today and that's one of the reasons is because you can't run articulated wings anyway we had that we had that disallowed we had we took a high wing car to to Europe to run the manufacturers manufacturers endurance World Championship our chaparral 2f and with articulated wing and and it was quite a thrill for the crowd over there and it was quite a good quite a good car we won run the BOAC 500 in England and at the end of that year in my opinion because Ford had such a successful year and in that class the Europeans again decided to eliminate the big stock blocks that we americans ran so that was that hurt us and then in 1970 they disallowed this car so in in three years they just about eliminated every everything we'd done for the for the last period of time anyway it was a discouraging factor for us and very very costly and did you throw your hands up and say I'm leaving or what happened was your well I didn't have anything actually I did I said well maybe this is not the sport I ought to be in or the game out to be in because it seems like everything that that we've done the last few years is now illegal and I didn't have anything on the board that that I was really interested in pursuing at the moment so I just said I think I'll just I'll just take off for a couple of years and get out of this and see what take a look at it from the outside and see if that's really what I want to do well obviously what you came back yeah yeah I got Jackie Stewart to introduce this car when we when we first brought it out and the reason I could get him is he wanted to know what it was he was really interested himself and and jackie was too commanded too high a price for us our chapter L couldn't afford Jackie but he made us a deal for this first race so that he can come over and run it and see what it was and and he did a great job I really admire Jackie a lot he was a good sportsman and a really good race driver and and I had a little kind of pause with him there because when we got there all he talked about was safety and he went through the car and he looked at the seatbelts in the shoulder harness and the steering wheel one of the things we had done over the years as we come up with a removable steering wheel and the reason we did that is so the driver could exit the car if he needed to in a hurry and that's that's another chaparral innovation actually I just used by almost everybody now but so he liked that and he he wanted us to change a few things and then he started going around the track looking at everything and he would talk to the organizers about the guardrails here and this and that and I thought oh man this guy is really hung up on the safety I don't know whether he's going to get in there and drive it or not well I want to tell you that as soon as he got his work done there he jumped in there and strapped on his helmet boy he was he was on it and he did a great job at driving it he had some trouble it ran out of brakes and but he did establish fastest lap in the race and and had a great time so it was a good introduction and I really admire the guy well I think everybody was shocked at at the grip you're not used to having a capability of running almost two G's in the corner in those days our tires were only capable about 1.1 or something like that so we were and we had in some corners with this we were we were up to one point seven or eight G's which is you know fifty percent so yeah I mean that's a lot and and braking I could never drive tested it a lot but I could never make myself drive it into the corner far enough I mean you see the corner coming at the speed you're going you say well it's time to get on their brakes and you put your foot on the brake and and the car stops and you say oh gee I could have gone a little deeper and you come around you do it the next time and you have exactly the same reaction I mean I didn't drive it enough to get to where I could actually drive it deep enough in braking because you're gonna corner faster then then you're used to and it'll stop someone's fast this car was high drag anyway so but it would stop faster a little interesting sidelight if if the engine quits and you can't get back to the pits in this car the little fans will drive at about 30 miles an hour so you went away for a couple three years to see if you were really interested somehow you came back tell us about that well I got a a actually I had some guys at a cocktail party say why don't why don't we go Indy Racing and I said what's this weed and so they were serious local guys and and so I've thought about that a day or two and I wrote a business proposal when I took it around all six or eight of them and I said look if you guys have put up the money and I'll be the general manager I'll take your liability out of it and and let's go IndyCar racing it about half of them said yes and we put it together and we went to IndyCar race and we had a really good time and we built ended up building chaparral to ke our own Indy car and we we did some innovating with it a lot of people think that you know the engineering is sort of a boring thing you're stuck in an office of the slide rule or maybe your handy calculator nowadays it's actually pretty exciting business especially for young people to get into isn't it well boy it's exciting for me I'll tell you that I I don't think I would have been a success in my life really without without my mind you I don't understand how people live without an engineering degree I mean you understand the world around you and how things work and it really was important it really was important in my in my work I I think you can have a lot of fun with it if you get into the right vocation when we built this car for the 1979 Indy race we had seen what the Formula One guys had done with passive ground effects that is the shape of the the car underneath and we realized right away that for the high-speed track and in Annapolis it was the only thing to do so we built one pretty much by guessing by gosh we didn't have a lot of data but we knew what it needed to do and we didn't think it had to be right at the at the very top end of its performance the first time this car was built that way and it was very very quick it was Alan sir had it on the front row in 1979 and and he led the race it was so interesting the first lap he started on the outside rather than the pole but when he came around to turn one he didn't back off and everybody else did and he just motored around the outside and and by the time he came around the finish of the first lap he had a 200-yard lead on the rest of the cars and he just drove away from him for 250 miles and it had a transmission sealed burnt up and and lost its oil in the transmission then and so we didn't finish the race we went back to 1980 with the same car that had been developed we'd we'd worked on it changed the the aerodynamics enough to improve its its its downforce capability Johnny Rutherford put it on the pole and won the race going away in it so I feel really really happy about having built this car and gone back back to racing what the air comes in the front and it pulls the car - how's that work well it's actually all all done in the sides - the driver and the engine sit in the middle side pods are where the radiators are and you can see the shape underneath the car it's a venturi shape it's it comes in underneath the radiator runs along the bottom of the car and then exits out that a funnel in the back and what that does is it if you if you take the top of it as one half of the venturi and the road as the other half of the venturi it's just like Bernoulli said when you get the the throat that's where you get the low-pressure so all this area right here is throat and this car surprisingly enough at at 200 miles an hour produces just as much downforce as the sucker car the way this car makes more downforce is through a channel on the bottom of the car where the air flows and it all happens in the side pause it's not in the middle it happens underneath the radiator opening there that's the entry to the throat of a venturi in effect and then it exits out the back where you see the triangular shaped area it expands to the exit and this is a venturi and it uses the Bernoulli principle so the low-pressure is in the throat and the throat is up here right in the center of the car actually towards the rear so that you put balanced downforce on the car and the way you make the venturi is the shape of the car plus the road and that's that's what makes the venturi shape and then the downforce is provided by the low-pressure underneath the car okay this car bubbles is actually the Indy winner do we say this car one Indian 1980 with Johnny Rutherford driving how do you feel about that we're proud it not didn't did it go a lot faster because this is the first year this was on that well this car was was plenty fast to win their race there's no question about that it was actually more impressive against the field in 79 but we failed to finish we'd have been a little smarter we would run it - we don't want it to years in a row actually the first way the first way I ever made your downforce was I just wrapped a piece of welding rod around the front suspension drilled a hole in the fender and ran it up through there and calibrated it by putting weights on the car and then I go out and run and look at it and and oh gee you know it's lifting this far how much is that well that's 100 pounds Wow you know and then run it 150 miles an hour well that's that's a hundred and seventy pounds or that's 200 mil that takes the front wheels off the ground so you know that's that's how I first did and then we used to run a cable I used like a throttle cable from that same suspension point back into the to the cockpit and I made a little recorder that ran paper just across and a pencil so that I had a and then I had one fixed one so I'd make a zero whine I'd start out and just shake the car and run it about ten feet so that I got a little wiggle for where zero was and then I go out again and I'd run I'd run 60 and 90 and 100 something so then I'd get a I'd get a downforce curve and you know we had to adjust the shocks and run on a smooth part of the track and not run when it was too windy and we learned a lot of things but after doing all that stuff I knew a lot about that car and it was those simple tools that were infallible really I mean you didn't have to you didn't have to have a electronics degree or figure out whether it was really calibrated or not because you know one thing we learned about that is that you have to do it versus air speed rather than ground speed we first just did it by the tachometer we don't have any speedometer or anything go get a tachometer car so you just run various speeds well then we figured out we really needed to be running to get it the closer to what you're really measuring we had to run at Aero speed so we wanted to run a air speed indicator on the car well I had to get away I found out I had to get out in front and up about ten feet from the car to keep it from being very much affected by the car running through the air in order to get dynamic pressure out there and then you have to establish a static pressure source and this is fun I read this one back in the old days in in airplanes for they they had instrumentation the guy was trying to measure speed and so he wanted static pressure source engineer a good smart guy and he said well I know how they do it so he took a thermos bottle put put that on one side of them in the manometer and and and and he's what he wanted a major on the other you'd open the thermos bottle shut it go make his test come back and check to see the road out and of course he took static pressure with him I mean if he knew he had static pressure because he got it when he was sitting there on the ground so that's the way I first calibrated our air speed indicator is the same way I use a thermos bottle and then we found a static source on the pitot tube that matched that so that we knew we had we knew we had a correct measurement but those those little items are I mean that's all pretty simple stuff but but if you use it right and you understand what you're measuring there's no you can go a long ways with just that much information it's important to have good information that way yeah it is you don't want to kid yourself on them on the data well we're standing in front of the chaperone offices and shops where these cars were built and developed and maintained this is a spot and there's a racetrack behind here yeah there's a test track behind it I guess yeah it's been called a race track called rattlesnake Raceway basically been used for testing for a long time sandy my wife's have been a big part of chaparral when I met her she was an executive secretary and I brought her to Midland and she walked in and saw my desk one day and said would you like me to straighten up your desk and I said Wow yeah and she never left that was her first day at work and and she worked here the whole time she did everything she she helped me a style the cars she she did you know answered the phone did all the mail did bookkeeping made the upholstery in the cars yeah she put up with me all these years she she used to say you know she call me ever ever warrants one when she wasn't here said you eat lunch and I'd say no well I know and she'd say well you better get something and that's the way I was about this job I I came to work and I worked and and then you know we we break off we usually spent long days but part of the time we'd break off is five or six o'clock and the guys that go home and I get some DEET and come back and we we'd work a while and then go home you know and that's that's just the way my life was and I rely wouldn't give it up for anything I look I loved it I wouldn't I didn't want to go anywhere else well I think there's no question that rattlesnake Raceway helped us we were able to go out just like today we're standing here first part of January it's about 65 degrees sunny and mild and we could test a lot of times during the winter so that we we got a lot of test work done here we could and we could just go right out and do it it's right in our backyard you get the car ready you take it out you don't have to load it on a trailer you just go out there and run it come back in where the shop is make whatever changes you want to do go right back out and run it again I think it was a big advantage now what more typical team have had to have done well that's what they would have had to done they would have had to design a test program figure out what all they were gonna test load it up take it somewhere test it do their come home then they go through the same thing again so they're looking at maybe spending a week doing something that I could do in a day one of the things I had was a really short feedback loop I I was doing most of the design work I did a lot of the fabrication then I get in and test the car so that I knew right away what the changes had done to the car what what did they and then I come back and fix it and do it again so I think that that speed of feedback has really helped help my career a lot some people have said it maybe changed my focus a little bit as a driver so that I wasn't as concentrated as a driver as I could have been but but I don't know on there I only found my my mind wander and sometimes on the racetrack and only only when it was a comfortable situation if I got out in the lead and and everything was going smooth sometimes I'd start thinking about well how can I make the car a little better but if you're in the thick of it I don't think I ever did that in race driving I think your concentration has to be has to be full this is rattlesnake Raceway it's as you can see it's not not maintained it's had a lot of weeds grow up through it and doesn't look too good now chaparral hadn't had the budget to to maintain this thing it's a little sad to me but it's deteriorating one of the things that we we built here when when we got involved with Chevrolet and testing the core various we built a skid pad so that we could run a circular path and and this is a skid pad I'll let the model airplane radio-controlled guys use it for an airfield right now but we learned an awful lot on that skid pad just by most racing people don't run skid pads but we learned an awful lot about tires camber what happens when you load one corner of the car differently from another corner we learned quite a bit of that right on the skid pad before we ever took the car out on the track and so it got to be a routine with me when before the car went to a race we always tested it it would never went to a race cold we bring it out here we'd run the skid pad both directions just make sure the car was balanced coming off of the setup plate and then we bring it out and run a few laps on the track just to make sure everything worked properly and that the aerodynamics was about right and then we'd take it back and leak check it and then loaded the go racing so whenever we got when we got to the racetrack we were ready to run right out of the right off the trailer and I think Phil Hill commented about that when he drove for us he said you know it's the first time I ever got in a race car that was really ready to run when I got to the racetrack so I think that was an advantage that we had and again a procedure that we we did that was was useful we're on the fastest part of the track now this is the second half of the of what we call the back straightaway it's got a little kink in the middle of it and then this turn at the end is so deceptive and hard to drive that it's probably not a good thing for a racetrack but it's what we had and that's what we use it used to tie you Zink it took me about 30 laps to get my timing right to get through this corner consistently it just starts out being straight and looks like a French curve and and and decreases in radius all the way around to the end of it ever changing radius and speed until you you you go from I say 180 miles an hour down to about 70 miles an hour right here so it's a it's a very difficult turn to drive but but also an interesting one the reason it was here is because we we drove it in on the track in Mexico City and we thought it was so hard to drive we wanted to learn how to drive something like that and that's the reason happened I put it here the rest of the track is very very fast that was a slow astern average speed here quite high hundred miles an hour very early in the game we used to run it in the high 57 second range or a two-mile track engineering is really the physical science applied so you learn the laws of nature and what what makes the world go around really and and that's the reason that you have enough knowledge to to make decisions that make sense when you're working with mechanical equipment and I just feel like an engineering education is a wonderful tool for anybody in business but particularly if you're in the performance kind of business like aircraft any kind of performance voting cars all that kind of thing he requires that knowledge well the the biggest impact that that we had on racing that maybe I personally did was when I realized the importance of vertical aerodynamic force on a race car and what could be done by placing the center of that force and the right place on the race car it you can increase the performance by tremendous amount its cornering and braking and acceleration performance and you can make the car handle the way that the driver would like it to handle that is predictable that's what the driver really wants he wants the car to be predictable so that it does what what he thinks it's going to do when he makes makes a control motion and you can do that with their dynamic vertical force and and it really changed the whole racing future from that point on it's made a tremendous impact and I don't I don't know why I happen to be in the right place the right time to really realize that but it was fortunate and I had I had the background I had the experience and and the time was right so it was it was something that I'm most proud of this corner is about a hundred and ten miles an hour in the cars we ran in the 60s quite high-speed you drive to the inside of the corner right in here stay out a little for the for the s back the other direction and then you try to get down where the camber is a little better down in here this part of it was about the same speed both turns about a hundred and ten and then you want to make sure and get on the power early to accelerate out and use all the road to the outside we pitted here and this is what our pit area was this little straightaway we reached about 125 miles an hour this turn you had to break really hard straight into it was about a 90 mile an hour turn in those days go clear to the inside back out almost to the edge but the camber gets bad out there so you don't go all the way and then back in this one's 85 it's just a little slower and so you had to adjust your speed between corners and then you want to make sure and get on early coming off of that one because this is the longest straightest part of the course where you're going to accelerate and carry your maximum speed for the longest distance when our cars were aired and dynamically correct we could get through this little kink flat out so we just kept our foot in it right down along this line and very easily turned through this corner without upsetting the car and we never had to live now before aerodynamics downforce we couldn't do that at all that car was that Turner was quite slower and this is the the difficult decreasing radius turn I talked about before we reached about a hundred and eighty miles an hour here and then you I had to break really hard right here and then establish a radius about in the middle of the corner for a long time held my speed held my speed and then I taught it start to bleed off a little bit when I saw the church I braked and I braked out here like this and then I had the right speed for about sixty to seventy miles an hour right the slowest part right there and then back this way and again accelerate over the hump the wheels got a little airborne here and spin the wheels when it came down and complete the acceleration on into the the first of the s turn that we started film in a minute ago major thing that you could feel is a tremendous increase in grip and the performance and braking it you almost you couldn't believe how deep you could drive the car into the corner before you had to put on the brakes because it got so much grip when it was stopping and it just was something that amazed you all your senses were telling you that you needed to brake but you didn't really need to brake yet so so it was a it was a real challenge to drive the car in deep enough I didn't get to do enough laps with it myself really hard laps for me to get comfortable driving at the limit and I know Jackie said he didn't and Vic Elford who drove it the rest of the season I think got pretty good at it that's where he did a lot of his passing as was under braking and and he got to where he was very comfortable going in as steep as you could go with it but he may be the only only man that ever did it so what kind of memories are coming back today anything is in this day I've got thousands of laps here so you know I know each time the oh nice little piece of it and word where to go and where not to go and why war that little place out right there it's all it's all part of testing and and learning about the car and trying to see what your your capabilities are in the car and I you know I I have so many memories I for instance the aerodynamics I just used to come back on that straightaway and and run a set speed in order to make up a day to run so I did a lot of that kind of thing in addition to trying to run it max performance all the time so you never forget the track do you know we're gonna thought about running it backwards some and I tried it a few times but you know it was we had so much data on it the other way that we were hesitant to you know to recalibrate and get everything get the knowledge going the other direction well we're on rattlesnake Raceway and this is a good part of it actually there's a there's a little hump behind us that's coming coming down this way cars got a little airborne and then into a right-hander down here that's about a hundred and ten mile an hour turn it's a good part of the test track and we did an awful lot of work here this is the kind of thing that I think made our team more successful as we were able to come out here and test just almost any day well it's that's a long time ago you know that's the 60s and 70s or a long time ago and and chaparral has actually been in storage for quite a while and we haven't had had the budget to maintain the whole facility and this is one of the parts that's that's not being maintained very well I'm disappointed in that but that's that's the way life is well I can tell them that just because I studied engineering it wasn't boring and it wasn't all there's a lot of work to it but it wasn't all work there's a lot of fun things about it and I got involved in a sport and in a career that I couldn't have done without it I think it's it's fabulous that I had that education and I look back on it very kindly now the the time I spent studying math 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 and I think that shows in our work well the message that I might that I might convey is that I'm really lucky and proud to have lived in America because this is a place where where a guy like me can take advantage of our in a free market system and and and do something that that's important and and do it on my own make my own decisions I think the freedom that we have to do what we want to do is the most valuable thing that we have and I hope I hope we can manage to maintain that because the world's getting more complicated all the time but I think the American model is the one that has really allowed me to do what I want to do everything you do you don't think about in terms of what people are going to think about it I know I I did my life in an ethical way and I in and I kept my reputation throughout my life and I'm proud of it and I think I think that's the most important thing well I guess the moment that I that I realized that down force was important happened right here and and so that's that was a key item in my life and and I also began to understand quite a bit about the way automobiles behaved and and that happened out here on the racetrack really you can do a lot of it in the office looking at equations and thinking about the dynamics of the thing but to actually experience it really drives it home to you and I think makes it more important to you I think it's a difficult business to get in it's small and there are a lot of people that are interested to get in I think you just have to get around it you probably have to volunteer a little bit places in order to get somebody to see you and then you have to work hard and do a good job and you'll be noticed that's the way I didn't go out and and hire a PR firm I went out and did a job and and and when I and I was recognized for results not not for not for talk

Channel: René Reiche

Views: 236,551

Keywords: Chaparral, Chaparral 2D, Chaparral 2A, Chaparral 2E, Chaparral 2J, Chaparral 2K, Jim Hall, Racing History, Sucker Car, Fan Car, Venturi, Bernoulli, High Wings, Early DRS, History of Downforce, Invention of Downforce, Discovery of Downforce

Id: Z0rXyMwFMUI

Length: 79min 11sec (4751 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 09 2019