Texas Legend: Jim Hall and his Chaparrals

Texas Legend: Jim Hall and his Chaparrals

COMING JULY 2024

One of the greatest drivers of his generation, Jim Hall is even better known as an innovator. From tiny Chaparral Cars in Midland, Texas emerged a series of vehicles that changed the face of racing. His high-winged Chaparral 2E Can-Am car and 2F World Sportscar Championship contender may be the most influential race vehicles of the 20th century. Today, every Formula 1 car uses net downforce, driver-adjustable wings, composite chassis, side-mounted radiators, semi-automatic gearboxes and advanced telemetry to optimize vehicle performance — all things Chaparral pioneered in the mid-1960s.

  • First-ever book in which Hall tells his own story.
  • The massive influence of his introduction of net downforce to racing, which is now incorporated into the design of every major type of four-wheel competition vehicle.
  • How Hall shocked the world with innovative designs that won in every series in which they competed, including Can-Am, Trans-Am, the World Sportscar Championship, Formula 5000, United States Road Racing Championship, Canadian Sports Car Championship and the Indianapolis 500.
  • How Jim and John Barnard created the Chaparral 2K “Yellow Submarine” that won the Indianapolis 500 and USAC national championship, setting the template for the modern Indy car.
  • The massive resistance Jim faced from teams and sanctioning bodies intent on outlawing his legal but game-changing innovations. 
  • The connection to Chevrolet and the crucial role Chaparral Cars played in the defense of GM during the Corvair trials of the mid-1960s.
  • How Hall became a national celebrity, with Newsweek and Sports Illustrated covers, Coca-Cola commercials, and millions of “Jim Hall Authorized” slot cars and model kits.
  • Text based on the author’s extensive interviews with over 100 racing standouts, including Jim and Sandy Hall, Roger Penske, Jackie Stewart, Dan Gurney, Sam Posey, Brian Redman, Phil Hill, Al and Bobby Unser, Bernie Ecclestone, Johnny Rutherford, Gordon Murray, Adrian Newey, Gil de Ferran, Mario Andretti, Bob Lutz and Tony Southgate.
  • Big, beautiful and packed with facts and anecdotes, the book is lavishly illustrated with period photographs by many of the world’s best motorsports photographers, including Pete Biro, Bernard Cahier, Hal Crocker, Dave Friedman, Pete Lyons, Dan Boyd, Lionel Birnbom and Pulitzer Prize winner Bob Jackson.

In Texas Legend, Jim Hall tells his story — his life, his cars, his relationship with Chevrolet, his partnership with Hap Sharp, his battles with sanctioning body bureaucracies — for the first time to award-winning author George Levy in this authorized biography.

Foyt, Andretti Petty

Foyt, Andretti Petty

America’s Racing Trinity

Twenty years after they hung up their helmets, their names remain synonymous with the sport they carried to new heights. A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, and Richard Petty rose to fame just as the American media – print, radio, and, crucially, television – began to legitimize auto racing. The timing was perfect. In Foyt, Andretti, and Petty, the nation found characters as compelling as any in sports or entertainment.

Foyt was all Texas, John Wayne in a fireproof suit, stomping into Victory Lanes from Indianapolis to Le Mans. Andretti, who’d sailed from Italy with his family at age 15, struck for all outsiders the same yes-you-can chord sounded by another Italian-American, the great Frank Sinatra. Petty, the genial North Carolinian who signed autographs until the last fan went home, put a smiling Andy Griffith face on the American South, no small feat in the tumultuous ’60s.
They crossed paths often, on the track and in the headlines. Take 1967, which opened with Andretti beating NASCAR’s best at Daytona, peaked with Foyt’s third Indianapolis 500 win, and ended with a record 27 victories for Petty. Or the three-season stretch from 1977-79, during which Foyt became the first four-time Indy winner, Andretti earned the World Driving Championship, and Petty captured a landmark Daytona 500.

They even throttled back their careers in near-unison, Petty in 1992, Foyt in ’93, Andretti in ’94. Today all three are revered; as they walk through crowded pit areas, people step back to make way. Charisma never ages.

This is no mere three-act biography. Laced with quotes from first-hand interviews with Foyt, Petty, Andretti, and their peers, and spiced with period accounts from the motorsports world and the changing social landscape, this is award-winning author Bones Bourcier’s history of modern American automobile racing as refracted through the lives of three extraordinary champions.