Vintage Race Car of the Week: The Chaparral 2J Sucker Car

[Swede4]

Thanks Brain for the great story. I remember reading how the competitors of this Jim Hall vacuum cleaner complained about the debris being expelled by those fans ? imagine having one of these pass you on the outside of a corner?and then throw everything it found outside the groove at you! Love the story, keep it up.

[mustang13]

A friend that followed Jim Halls stuff told me that the sled ehgines were air cooled and over heated. Being a life long snowmobiler I could see how this happened, I've over heated them in the cold! One other thing bad for the other drivers on the track, anything on the track came out of the fans and in the face of who was behind it. Still, this is the kind of innovation that most classes of racing are killing with cookie cutter and spec. rules.

[ls7gto]

doesn't the "COX" decal just rock! Takes me back to a simpler time.

[SpiderGearsMan]

in road racing - innovations killed all of the fun of road racing

[Brian Lohnes]

Spidey...I'm figuring a way to buy you beers sometime. Chevy was in fact working on the same deal before Hall brought it out. It was a cobbled together design at the proving grounds, but it did happen. It was some "non-racing" race engineering.


Indeed competitors did complain about being showered with rocks and junk from the track being strewn up from the car. McLaren was the loudest and the most prominent complainer, which was completely ironic because they had dominated the series for years....figger that! ;)

Guys, thanks for reading and bringing out more finer points than possible in a "pocket" biography. Hell of an audience to be in cahoots with!

Brian

[jfuelracer]

In 1980 I opened a transmission shop in Ventura, Ca. Next door was Jim Hall Jr. He had just started his carting school. A strange kinda man, but full of brains.

[Brian Lohnes]

Ain't that about the best kind of guy to be around though?

In my experience it has been.

Brian

[LSX-GTO]

Ain't that about the best kind of guy to be around though?

In my experience it has been.

Brian

Wait... don't you hang around Freiburger? There goes the being around "brains" theory... :D

/about to be banned

[ford141]

There was a team that tried this same idea in one of the Grassroots Motorsports $200X challenges. IIRC, it was the 2007 race? Anyway, a team of engineers built an '80s Corvette with a snowmobile sucker that worked quite well, they won the competition. The name of the team was Cheaparral. The car was also turbocharged, and I wonder if they would have won even without the sucker equipment...

[noboD]

If you read "Chevrolet = Racing" by Paul Van Volkenberg published 1972, Hall never designed this sucker car. Cheverolet designed and built it for him to test.