Friday, July 01, 2005

Chaparral Update....


It's always exciting for me to visit the Chaparral Racing garages on the southside of town. I took my partner Del Sloan out today for his first visit and he, like me, was in hog heaven. The purpose of my visit was to see my friend Jim Edwards who runs Chaparral Racing for Jim Hall and who tends to the cars. Since I posted my Chaparral Racing website last year I receive a fairly constant flow of emails wanting to know more about the cars....or like the mail I received last week, wanting to know about visiting the offices and garages. I needed to ask Jim about a tour group from Dallas who wanted an upclose tour of the shops.

Most of the famous Chaparral's are in the Petroleum Museum's exhibit, but as you can see from the photo above there are still some significant cars from Hall's personal collection that reside in the garage area at Rattlesnake Raceway. The yellow Pennzoil Indy car was the one that Gil de Ferran drove for Chaparral, while the green car in front of it is an early 60's Lotus Formula I racer. Jim Edwards is leaning on the blue prototype that was developed by Chevrolet to be tested by Hall at Chaparral. Jim also has many what I would term, antique, vehicles as seen in the rear.

As we visited, Jim Edwards told me the interesting news that Jim Hall was developing a reproduction Chaparral 2E to be sold to the public....price to be determined. Now you too can race a little piece of history. And more news about a new Indy League racing team is brewing with Jim he may be looking for partners if you are interested!