1967 Chaparral 2F Comes to Project Motor Racing

July 15, 2026

Is That a DRS or a Park Bench?

The 1967 Chaparral 2F seems like someone asked a perfectly reasonable-looking sports car to wear a dining table as a prank. As it turned out, the prank was on every other racing team on the planet.

See, most racing cars of the mid-60s were still trying to go faster the traditional way. More power. Less weight. Braver drivers. And a little shaping here and there to give things a cool slant.

But air? Air was something that everyone largely forgot about once they figured out ways to cut through it to maximise speed.

Except for a fella named Jim Hall from Texas, who had some other weird ideas.

Hall, of course, wasn’t just a driver, team owner, and another madman with a Texan drawl and a big-block Chevy. He was also an engineer with a private playground in Midland, Texas, where Chaparral could test, break, fix, and then break entirely new things before most European teams had finished arguing about what bottle of white to have with the fish carpaccio.

And what Hall became obsessed with in the 1960s was air. Not carving through it. But using it to maximise a thing called grip.

The Big Wing Theory

The Chaparral 2F was built for the 1967 World Sportscar Championship and was, in very simple terms, Chaparral’s attempt to take its wild aerodynamic ideas and bolt them onto a closed sports prototype for endurance racing.

The result was unique, spectacular, and—in a world where the phrase is misused constantly—a game changer. As in, its thinking still echoes through motorsport today.

The 2F came with some traditional solutions of course. A moulded fibreglass monocoque and a mid-mounted 7L Chevrolet V8. Because there’s no replacement for displacement. Not in Texas, anyway!

But then things started getting a little … weird.

Starting with what no one saw: A three-speed automatic transmission. And ending with a thing nobody could ever unsee: a skyscraper of a high-mounted dinner-table-sized rear wing that looked less like a racing element than something that should require zoning permission.

And no, that wasn’t enough for Mr Hall. No sir, because the whole contraption was designed to move!

The wing was driver-adjustable, which meant drivers could reduce drag on the straights and add downforce when the car needed to stop and turn, and the struts were suspension-mounted, so the downforce fed directly into the rear suspension rather than simply pressing down on the bodywork.

Yup. Jim Hall was playing with the idea of DRS before most manufacturers had worked out where to put the cupholder.

The 2F also carried Chaparral’s wider aero thinking: side-mounted radiators, a cleaner nose, and a body shaped not only to slice through air but to make air work for the car.

Welcome to an era of racing posing as half science experiment half survival horror.

Fast, Fragile, Fantastic

Of course, because motorsport has a sense of humour, the 2F was brilliant and ridiculous all at the same time.

At Le Mans in ’67, the Chaparral had the pace to trouble the best in the world. In qualifying, it was right at the sharp end—second overall, just behind the Ford Mk IV—and it ran strongly before mechanical trouble did what mechanical trouble so often did to ’60s racing dreams: turned it into a long walk back to the garage.

And in the end, that was the story of the 2F. Blinding speed. Big ideas. Then something silly deciding it had seen enough.

But the legacy is something different. Because when it all held together, this thing was magnificent. At Brands Hatch in ’67, Phil Hill and Mike Spence took the 2F to victory in the BOAC 500, finally giving Chaparral’s winged wonder the result it deserved.

In Project Motor Racing, the 1967 Chaparral 2F brings all of that strange, glorious, slightly unhinged genius with it. It’s not just another big-engined sports prototype.

Map the DRS to a button and learn when to deploy it. Judiciously is the word of the day. This was the ’60s. Going into a slight kink at 280km/h with DRS fully open is not advisable. And neither is forgetting to shut it when braking. But at least you don’t need to bother shifting!

Yours to drive as part of the GT Icons Pack. Enjoy.

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