> "John DiFool">
> > Hmm I wonder if someone will design wings which alter their 'angle of
> > attack'
> > (using some servo system tied in with the brake and accelerator?) during
> > a lap, lowering it on the straights and increasing it in the turns?
> > John DiFool
> Jim Hall did that 30 + years ago with the Chapparall Can Am cars. He
> had a system where the rear wing laid flat until you pressed on the
> brakes...then the wing would rotate down to full downforce mode. The car
> was sometimes referred to as "the Flipper" I think it also almost killed
> him when a rear wing mount broke and he suffered some pretty big injuries...
> Can anyone fill in my hazy memory?
You're right about Jim Hall's moving wing. However, the wing was controlled by
a separate foot pedal. The car had automatic transmission, so there were was no
clutch pedal. I believe the default position for the wing was to have full
downforce and you had to push the pedal to straighten it out.
You're memory about the crash, however, is faulty. Hall was seriously injured
during the last race of the 1968 Can Am season at Las Vegas. Lothar
Motschenbacher's (sp. ?) car dramatically slowed in front of him, causing
Hall's car to hit the back of it, launching it in the air and landing upside
down. Hall's legs were badly injured and he never raced again. He, of course,
continued to design and build Chaparrals that others drove.
You may be thinking of when Formula One borrowed Hall's ideas, a few years
later. Hall came out with the wing on his 1966 Chaparral 2E Can-Am car.
Formula One got around to it in 1968 (Lotus was the first, I believe), and did
a pretty poor job initially. There were some *** F1 crashes due to
inadequately strong mounts. This caused the FIA to ban the high wings, which
pissed Hall off.
He then came back with some more radical designs to get around this, the
ultimate one being the Chaparral 2J "Sucker" car. This one had two snowmobile
engines sucking the air out from under the car. The box like skirt of the car
would lower down, essentially creating a vacuum. This car had phenomenal
grip. It theoretically could be driven upside down. Jackie Stewart, who drove
it for one race, said he could go deeper into a turn with it then any car he
had ever driven. Unfortunately, it suffered reliability early on and never
finished a race. Shortly thereafter, the other teams/drivers lobbied to have
the car banned, much to the detriment of the Can-Am series. The Formula Libre
(anything goes) spirit of Can-Am was broken, Hall (the father of winged
aerodynamics, ground effects, telemetry) left the series, and it was never the
same.
Dave Ewing
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David A. Ewing
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