YOUR favorite racecars – 9. Chaparral 2K

Many of you had found it tricky to narrow your favorites down to just five, yet some of you had a clear No. 1 and no others. And, like ours, many of your selections were ones that fulfilled multiple criteria from a personal point of view – aesthetic beauty, period when you were first becoming addicted to racing, success, livery, piloted by your heroes. We understand, completely!

• YOUR favorite racecars – 10. Porsche 956/962

9. Chaparral 2K

It’s arguably the most fondly remembered Indy car since Parnelli Jones’ Ol’ Calhoun, but whereas the driver elevated the performance of Agajanian’s gorgeous roadster above its peers, the “Yellow Submarine” was a technical marvel that, with its ground-effect venturi tunnels, redefined the limit and encouraged its driver to push further and harder than he’d ever been pushed before.

Johnny Rutherford, the man who used it to score his third Indy 500 triumph and win the IndyCar championship in 1980, said: “At Indy that year, we had quickest time on every day but one. What I had driven there before, the McLaren M16 and M24, they only let you go so far. The Chaparral let you go so much farther, it really put you into a nervous situation. The edge of the universe was a lot shallower in the 2K than the M24…”

And John Barnard’s masterpiece was already a year old at that stage. Everyone had seen its potential at Indy the year before, when Al Unser (RIGHT, IMS photo) qualified third on the car’s debut and then dominated the first half of the race. Chaparral’s renowned founder, Jim Hall, recalled in amazement the opening lap of the race: “When they came down to take the green flag, everyone backed off for Turn 1 except Al. It was the most amazing thing you ever saw. He stretched 100 yards in the first turn, 100 yards in the second…By the time he came past us at the end of Lap 1, he had a lead of about 400 yards. But then…”
 
A melted transmission seal allowed all the gearbox oil to drain away by half-distance, and throughout the remainder of the season, minor issues haunted the team, preventing them from displaying the car’s true potential. But at Phoenix, the season finale, Unser was finally able to run trouble-free the entire distance and nailed the car’s first victory. His departure, along with Barnard and Hughie Absalom (chief mechanic), left the keys to the best Indy car to Johnny Rutherford and he brought with him Steve Roby, chief engineer at McLaren. Both had found themselves left high and dry when the English marque withdrew from Indy car racing to focus on Formula 1. Now they were back together but with plenty of work to get done.

At this point, let me hand the story over to Mr. Roby himself who voted for the Chaparral 2K in its 1981 form, pointing out that, “The 1980 car had lots of bodywork joins and parts which we did away with in the 1981 version.” The evolution of the car from the end of 1979 is perhaps more significant than many of us appreciated at the time.

“In 1980 I hired Eloisa Garza and we taught her how to do composites. She had experience building fiberglass pickup truck tops and we made vacuumed epoxy carbon fiber parts – quite a difference. The original bodywork of the car was simply polyester and fiberglass and it was not too rigid. The tunnels were drooping and dragging on the ground when I arrived, so we bolstered them with a foam sandwich just to get by but it was obvious that the forces we were encountering were much greater than the material could withstand.

“For the last race I designed and made a development rear underbody which was worth nearly a second a lap in private testing. JR could feel how good it was as he did a warm up lap at Phoenix and came back in as he needed padding to keep his left knee off his right knee!  Then he went out and drove it flat through Turn 3 at Phoenix for his first time ever. I did not want to run it for the race and show our competitors what we had for the following year but lost that argument so we painted the underbody yellow and ran it. That was the race where we qualified second with a blowing up engine and dominated the race but unfortunately Johnny tripped over a slower car and went upside down. He had some head injuries and wore the tip off his little finger and missed the championship banquet, but I was most upset over the world seeing our new underbody on TV!

“Having Jim Hall, the father of composite racecars, as a team owner was very handy. He contacted Hexcel, and he and I flew out to their factory and toured the facility. We did a deal with them for honeycomb and carbon, but there was not much dry carbon cloth available (to the public i.e. non-military) in 1980 so we had to do with “rejects”.  There may have been weave irregularities but it was a quantum leap for us so it was great.
          

“We set about making the entire upper body in carbon-epoxy with honeycomb where necessary and the tunnels in carbon-honeycomb-epoxy.  Our parts were laid up wet and then vacuumed to squeeze out the excess epoxy. We were very impressed with the rigidity of the finished part.  Our strength testing was a little crude though: it consisted of Berni Ferri walking down the tunnel with the underbody attached to the car.  If it did not deflect then we were golden. I designed new tunnels and made the molds for both the top and underbody.

“For 1981, the upper body split lines were changed and the sidepods were a little different. If I remember correctly, articulating skirts were banned so we made the bodywork go down to just above our polyurethane skirts and did away with the parts on which the articulating skirts operated and this gave Pennzoil more space for their name. With the loss of the articulating skirts, the center of pressure moved to the rear so I made longer sidepod nose pieces (which you can see in the photo taken at Milwaukee, LEFT) to try to get the center of pressure more forward. We also found that the wake off the front wings influenced the flow into the tunnels so any reduction in front wing frontal area resulted in more total downforce. Later in the year we managed to achieve a good balance with good total downforce with a set of much smaller cord wings.

 

“A nice by-product of all this carbon work was that the upper body stayed true to static shape at speed, which was not true with the polyester-fiberglass body. We discovered some interesting problems also. The carbon over and under the exhaust pipes prevented the heat from escaping and the carbon over the radio antenna was problematic for the radio. In both of these areas, we solved the problem by replacing the carbon with a Kevlar-only “window”.  Another interesting by-product of our carbon-honeycomb bodywork was that it absorbed radar signals and we would often see guys with radar guns looking at their instruments in disgust as they “missed” us passing by.  We got a great chuckle out of this.  Of course the use of all of this carbon also reduced the weight of the car – a win-win situation.
          

“Just a word about the paint, which was an interesting feature of this car.  Pennzoil had a hot rodder come over to Midland, Tx., from L.A. to teach our painter how to apply the paint.  The paint is just a base coat of yellow but it has pearl flakes suspended in the clear coat and the pearl is what makes the car glow in poor light so well.  It was not so easy to apply as the paint gun had to be agitated all the time to keep the pearl from sinking to the bottom of the reservoir.  Too much pearl and the car was greenish, too little and it was yellow.

“Contrary to the standard of the day the car and pinstripes were hand-painted, not decals.  This small detail caused me much anguish as our sign painter in Midland was a biker and a little tardy to say the least.  We had to send out search parties to find him and drag him out of a bar in order for the car to go in the truck and we never left him alone while he was working.  He did tell us that a few drops of alcohol served to keep his hand steady while doing the pin striping!
          
“During early testing of the car we found that the silver spun aluminum wheels were not up to the task so we had Max Boxtrom cast us some three-spoke black magnesium wheels.  The Pennzoil folk wanted us to polish the wheels but I wanted the guys to be able to concentrate on the car itself, not polishing wheels, and I thought the black wheels transformed the look of the car from pretty to forceful so I made a bet with them that if we won Ontario the wheels could stay black. We won and the wheels stayed black.”

Some of your comments –

Preston Proctor: “The Yellow Submarine was not perhaps the prettiest car but was a dominating functional design.”

John Fulton: “This car was like the girl that walked into the room and made you realize all the girls you thought were beautiful were just average.”

Karin Nelson: “All of Jim Hall's cars were awesome and unique, but this one ran and won as good as it looked.”

Paul Lewis: “One of the most aesthetically pleasing cars of all time.”

Steve Ross: “Growing up in Indianapolis in the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of cars jump out at me as being beautiful but this is my all-time favorite. Not only was Lonestar J.R. my favorite driver in my youth but that car, with its wonderful yellow paint job and turn-terrorizing low profile, captured my imagination. At the time, I took my bicycle, painted it yellow and affixed cardboard signs with the No. 4 on its handlebars and between the frame bars, and rode up and down the street dreaming of Indy glory. Simply one of the best.”