A
H
Gordon Murray’s
genius is explored
elsewhere in this
issue, but his 1978
F1 Brabham BT46B
“fan car” is worth
noting here.
It’s engine-driven
fan and sealing skirts
followed the same
basic principles as
the Chaparral 2J.
It raced just once,
comfortably winning
the Swedish GP,
before team boss
Bernie Ecclestone
decided his growing
role in F1 politics
was best served by
self-banning the
controversial car.
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jeez, your car wasn’t very good through
Turn 9, was it? What’s going on there?’”
That friendship would be tested as
McLaren, among others, lobbied Can-Am’s
sanctioning body, the SCCA, to ban the 2J
on the grounds of safety and for having a
movable aerodynamic device – the skirts.
Of course, Can-Am’s generous prize fund
was a significant chunk of McLaren’s annual
income, so maintaining the status quo was
the less-than-hidden agenda in all of this...
“I can’t deny the 2J was pretty
aggressive,” concedes Hall. “We ran up
against that mob mentality with the 2E,
too. I’ve been asked before what was said
about the 2J to get it banned, but we
weren’t invited to those meetings… But I
will say we were concerned enough about
it that we invited the SCCA to Texas to
take a look at it before we brought it to
the races, and we got their opinion on it.
“They said it was legal. So it was a bit of a
surprise to me that they ended up banning
it. That was my biggest disappointment.
We’d made a commitment to do it, and we
spent a lot of money, time, effort and hard
work and didn’t get to win a race with it.”
Hall also concedes that by running a
car that was so far ahead of its time and
the competition, some of the concerns
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regarding the 2J might have been valid.
“The potential of that kind of car was so
great that it could have put a strain on the
whole infrastructure,” he says. “And we
understood that. If you’re going to corner
50 percent faster than last year, boy, that’s
going to make for a hell of an accident. So
maybe the tracks and safety equipment
weren’t ready to handle such a thing.”
Opinion having turned against the 2J,
that 1970 part-season is all we have to
look back on. Had it been allowed to return
in ’ 71, Hall was confident of major success.
“Obviously, the main thing was to make
it reliable,” he says. “The only time that it
really ran well around a race track, we
were more than a second faster than the
competition, and sometimes two. That’s a
lot. We could improve the performance a
little bit, had we thought it necessary, by
being more accurate with the skirts, by
putting a little more power into the vacuum
system. So we could have improved the
performance of the car. We certainly
could’ve gotten some weight out of it. And
I think it would have been spectacular.”
