Jim Hall’s Chaparrals were the cars to beat when the Can-Am series was born. In the SCCA’s US Road Racing Championship (USRRC), the amateur series that predated, and later paralleled, Can-Am, the Chaparral 2A had been almost unbeatable. Its outstanding success in 1964 and 1965 in the USRRC helped make it the top Can-Am favourite.
At that time, Hap Sharp, a partner in the Chaparral Cars company, based in Midland, Texas, shared the driving in the two-car team with Hall. Older than Hall, Sharp was a source of good ideas which, when bounced against his partner’s sound engineering education from Cal Tech, produced results.
The car’s pace was such that, before the USRRC race at Watkins Glen in 1965, Dic Van der Feen of the SCCA took Hall aside and pleaded; ‘Couldn’t you just take it a little easy this time, and not lap the cars behind you? It makes it look so bad when they’re lapped.’
Hall said he’d think about it, and then went out and, under pressure from Sharp, went so fast that the third-place car was triple lapped. When he saw Van der Feen after the race, he struck his forehead, rolled his eyes skyward and said, ‘I’m sorry Dic, I forgot all about it.’
By 1966, Hall was making his first big attempt to win races in Europe with Chaparral coupés, an effort that took far more time than he expected. The 2D coupés were the USRRC roadsters fitted with glass fibre tubs and rebuilt for long-distance racing. One of them won the Nürburgring 1000 Kilometres with Phil Hill and Jo Bonnier driving, and Hap Sharp the team chief.
British effort
1966 also saw the maturing of early attempts by the British to build cars to use the big American V8 engines that were on offer. With these behind their drivers, both Lola and McLaren became major competitors for the first time. But they were entering a field that for several years had been dominated by American-built, mid-engined specials, mixing powerful V8s with Cooper and Lotus chassis.
The Chaparral was the best of the all-new American cars that followed this first experimental stage.
A couple of years earlier, the Texans had forged a link with an arm of General Motors that was thrusting in new directions under the guidance of engineer, Frank Winchell. This
