James Ellis Hall (born July 23, 1935) is a retired American racing driver, race car constructor, and team owner. While he is best known as a car constructor, he was one of the greatest American racing drivers of his generation, capturing consecutive United States Road Racing Championships (1964, 1965), two Road America 500s (1962, 1964), two Watkins Glen Grands Prix for sports cars (1964, 1965), the 1965 Canadian Grand Prix for sports cars, the 1965 Pacific Northwest Grand Prix, and scoring a massive upset at the 1965 12 Hours of Sebring over a contingent of factory-backed Ford GTs, Shelby Daytona Coupes, and Ferrari entries. If anything Hall's accomplishments behind the wheel have been overshadowed by his pivotal contributions to race car design through his series of Chaparral sports racing and Indy cars. Hall's cars won in every series in which they competed: USRRC, Can-Am, Trans-Am, Formula 5000, World Sportscar Championship, Autoweek Championship, Canadian Sports Car Championship, and the Indianapolis 500.
Hall was born in Abilene and raised in Colorado and New Mexico. While studying engineering at the California Institute of Technology, he began racing in local sports car events. After a promised job at General Motors to work on the Corvette failed to materialize due to a late ‘50s U.S. recession, he became involved with older brother Dick in Carroll Shelby Sport Cars in Dallas, the area’s leading importer of European road and race vehicles. This experience played a crucial role in his development as a driver and helped the dealership sell cars. Shelby would put Hall in one of the new racers and often as not, Hall would go out and win in it. Shelby would then brag that if a rookie could win in it, it must be a pretty outstanding piece of machinery. Soon, however, fans across the Southwest started to recognize that Hall was one of the most promising young drivers on the American racing scene.
Hall's abilities drew international attention at the 1960 United States Grand Prix at Riverside. Driving his own past-its-prime Lotus-Climax, he ran a surprising fifth for much of the race until the differential started to give way a few laps from the end. Of Hall's run, Competition Press (now Autoweek) wrote, “It looks as if Texas has another international caliber driver ready to take Carroll Shelby’s place now that Shelby has announced his retirement.”
At Riverside, Hall was approached by California car builders Troutman and Barnes who were seeking funding for a new front-mid-engined, two-seat road racer. Hall backed the project and named the vehicle Chaparral. He had success with the Chaparral 1, winning the Road America 500 and other races. Almost as soon as it was completed, Hall began thinking of a successor vehicle he would build himself.
Possibly no designer from the second half of the 20th century has had more enduring influence. Hall pioneered wings, movable aerodynamic devices, side-mounted radiators, semi-automatic transmissions, and composite monocoque chassis structures, all of them innovations later adopted by and still present in every Formula 1 car. He was one of the first to recognize and demonstrate the performance benefits of torsional rigidity. The chassis of his Chaparral 2 — it later became known as 2A to distinguish it from subsequent Chaparrals — was by design about four times stiffer than those of the leading sports cars of the day. Hall also introduced the world's first constant downforce racecar, the 1970 Chaparral 2J, which used a snowmobile engine to power two fans to reduce the air pressure between the bottom of the car and the road regardless of vehicle speed. (Both wings and ground effect tunnels generate downforce that varies with vehicle speed.) At the 1970 Riverside Can-Am the 2J qualified more than two seconds faster than the championship-winning McLaren M8D. The 2J was also the first car equipped with vacuum-protecting “skirts,” another innovation later adopted by Formula 1. Although it was quickly banned, the 2J “vacuum cleaner” concept was copied eight years later by Brabham Formula 1 designer Gordon Murray who figured out a way to circumvent the rules. The resulting Brabham BT46B won the only race in which it was entered, the 1978 Swedish Grand Prix, proving significantly faster than Colin Chapman's ground effect-tunneled Lotus 79, which secured that year's championship. The development of downforce, from spoilers on his Chaparral 2A to wings movable and otherwise on his Chaparral 2C, 2D, 2E, 2F, 2G, and 2H to the suction system on his 2J, was arguably Hall's single greatest contribution to the sport and the one most copied. In 1979, Hall also became the first to bring ground effect tunnels to IndyCar racing with his groundbreaking Chaparral 2K. Today, because of Hall, downforce is part of the design brief for every major form of racing car — Formula 1, IndyCar, Le Mans, NHRA, NASCAR, World Rally Championship cars, and more — and most high-performance road cars.
"When you put an aerodynamic downforce on a car, it increases the traction and allows it to corner at a much faster speed than it did before,” says Hall. "So that’s really what Chaparral did over a period of years in various ways, and that one idea had a tremendous effect on the future of auto racing.”
The first of the true Jim Hall Chaparrals was built in Midland, Texas during 1962 and 1963. At the same time Colin Chapman was building the first monocoque Formula 1 car, Hall was developing a monocoque sports racer of his own design made of composites. He and partner Hap Sharp had scouted the nation's leading aerospace companies for the latest advances in construction techniques. At General Dynamics they met Andy Green, who was designing fiberglass engine fairings for the Convair B-58 Hustler, the world's first supersonic bomber. They hired Green to apply the same advanced fiberglass composite technology to create the first successful full composite racecar monocoque. The advantages of the plastic chassis were twofold: it was much more rigid than traditional chassis, which greatly aided handling, and lighter, aiding performance in all dimensions. When Hall met people from Chevrolet Research & Development, GM's own internal skunkworks, at the 1962 June Sprints at Road America, they picked each other's brains for new ideas. One result was the adoption of a semi-automatic “torque converter” gearbox.
Today, semi-automatic gearboxes are commonplace in racing, but when Hall introduced them — and won with them — onlookers and rivals alike were mystified. Here again Hall's engineering background came into play. “Not only is there literally less work to do,” Hall explained in an article he wrote for Autocar in 1965, “we can keep both hands on the steering wheel, at all times concentrating entirely on exact placing of the car in a turn and just when and how much to brake. Another value is the reliability it induces in other components. It is not possible to over-rev the engine or damage the drive train with shock loads from mismatched shifts and other poor driving techniques.”
The car that came to be known as the Chaparral 2A might have been completed sooner, but another outstanding driving performance, this time at the 1962 season-ending Mexican Grand Prix, led the British Racing Partnership (BRP) Formula 1 team to offer him a seat for the 1963 season. Hall accepted the offer, but neither the team nor Hall realized that BRP, which had scored wins in previous seasons, was on the verge of decline. Nevertheless, Hall managed to accumulate three World Championship points. His best finish was fifth in the 1963 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, his first time at the fabled track.
While Hall was in Europe, work continued on the 2A at the small complex in Midland that he co-owned with partner Hap Sharp. Midland was far away from established racing infrastructure but next to the aptly named Rattlesnake Raceway that Hall and Sharp used as a proving ground.
Once it was finished, it proved a revelation. Hall put it on the pole at its first race, the October, 1963 Los Angeles Times Grand Prix, over an international-class field that included soon-to-be F1 champions Jim Clark, Graham Hill, and John Surtees, and future Motorsports Hall of Fame of America legends Dan Gurney, A. J. Foyt, Roger Penske, Lloyd Ruby, Parnelli Jones, Rodger Ward, and Richie Ginther. Hall led easily until sidelined by an electrical fire.