![]() ![]() Jim enrolled in Caltech to study geology to do just that-but a month into his freshman year his parents and sister died in an airplane crash. Like his brothers Charles and Dick, he was expected to go into the family business. The family moved all around the West Hall grew up in Colorado and New Mexico before returning to West Texas. Jim Hall was born in 1935 in Abilene, Texas, to a successful family that made its fortune in the oil boom. Jim Hall at Road America in 1968 Alvis Upitis Dear God! Can-Am was famous for having no-holds-barred technical expertise, but this was something else: every other car looked like phallic fantasy, all elongated curves and swoops and short, stubby wedges, like 6th-grader math class daydreaming rather than real race cars, but here the Chaparral 2J was square, bulky, straight-paneled and utterly, breathtakingly, rational. Who knows what the other drivers and team managers and pit chiefs must have thought. Who knows what the crowd must have thought. They moved to the back of the car: two fans like jet engines, supported by three black Dagmar-shaped cones, looking more like a Star Wars escape pod than a road-going automobile. "Like the box it came in," the crowd observed. ![]() The rear wheels were encased in bodywork as flat and unadorned as a diner kitchen. ![]() The small white race car atop the trailer looked like nothing else: no wing, no velocity stacks, no scoops or side pods or wild cutaways or NACA ducts, hardly a curve of any kind. A small crowd gathered to watch the team unload. On July 12, 1970, a white Chevrolet pickup truck towing a trailer pulled into the paddock at Watkins Glen International Raceway for the third Can-Am race of the season. ![]()
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