— 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.” Driver and constructor The first of the true Jim Hall Chaparrals was built in Midland 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 and 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