On Hall's first outing with the Sports Car Club of America, at Laguna Seca Raceway in 1961, he finished an impressive second-behind a Maserati Birdcage. It was a very conservative race car: front-engined, tube-framed, with an aluminum body and a Chevrolet 318ci small-block. Hall and Sharp commissioned the racecar builders Dick Troutman and Tom Barnes to build a new American racer: the Chaparral. Born on New Years Day, hence his nickname Hap ("Happy New Year"), the broad-shouldered Sharp also played polo, gambled, raced powerboats (he won the US National Outboard Racing Championship) and eventually amassed over 100,000 acres of land in South America. Sharp was another Texas oilman who went all in to the racing game: he competed in Formula One at the same time as Hall, racing a Cooper Monaco nicknamed by the press "Old Dirty," to his chagrin. Hall bought a plot of land on the outskirts of Midland and paved a two-mile racetrack and garages, a gathering spot for burgeoning SCCA Midlanders named Rattlesnake Raceway. His brothers took over the oil business, and by sophomore year, Jim switched his major to mechanical engineering: "I wasn't interested in memorizing crystal structures," he told his former engineering department, "I got into the upperclassmen classes in engineering and started to really enjoy school-mechanics and dynamics and materials and thermodynamics." He started racing cars around then: his brother Dick had moved to Dallas to help another fellow Texan open up Carroll Shelby Sport Cars, and he drove and graduated in 1957 with a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering. 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. 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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