- All right guys,
I want you to imagine if you were a race car builder
and you came up with some technology
that was so revolutionary,
so advanced, so freaking crazy
that it got your car banned from racing.
Well, that's exactly what happened to the
Chaparral Can-AM team with their 2J "sucker car".
It took a whole new approach to aerodynamics in downforce
that no one had ever done before.
And it caused it's competition
to absolutely hate it.
And when you have engineering
that's controversial, whew boy!
That intrigues the heck out of me.
That's a little tush tickler for ya.
So, today we are going to look
at some of the wild engineering that went
into building one of the craziest race cars
to ever hit the track.
We're gonna look at how they used fans
from a Howitzer tank to suck the car to the ground.
How they used some unconventional bodywork
to create a vacuum while the car was zipping around
the track and how they kept 650 of 1970s horsepower
to the ground usin' an automatic transmission.
This car is a good one, let's go.
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Now back in the late sixties,
there was a little racing series
called the Canadian American challenge cup,
or if you didn't have time to say all those words,
the Can-Am series.
And it was a no limits free for all,
engineer and build whatever race car you want
and throw it on the track.
Now think early days of MMA,
nut punching, eye gouging, head stopping all legal stuff.
It was a wild (beep) time for racing cars.
And the 2J was one of the wildest of the bunch.
Now the Chaparral teams 2J was feared by its competitors.
On race day the car would not only qualify first,
but it would qualify a full two seconds a lap quicker
than the second place car.
Now other teams argued to the SCCA,
that's the governing body of the Can-Am series,
that the 2J was illegal and tried to get the car banned
from racing the series.
It had a massive seven liter V8 making 650 horsepower.
Now what really set this car apart from its competition
were two 17 inch fans from an M109 Howitzer tank.
And those two fans were powered by a secondary motor.
That's right, the 2J had two engines.
Now its primary engine was the all aluminum
Chaparral ZL1 motor.
You may have heard of it.
They put it in some Copo Camaro's,
those engines are the same ones
that were from the Chaparral race team.
And aside from its primary engine,
it also had a secondary engine,
which was a two cylinder Rockwell engine from a snowmobile
that spanned the fans up to 6,000 RPM.
I just gotta send that.
Two stroke too, that's freaking tight.
You like mixing gas and slapping frigging buns?
That's what a two stroke is.
The fans would suck the car to the ground
and shoot air out the back so hard
that it could power the 2J up to 40 miles per hour,
just on the fan power.
(dings)
What?
But the fans weren't there
to give the car a boost of speed.
It was designed to suck the car to the ground
and increased grip in the corners
without creating drag at high speeds.
Now you see with normal aerodynamic elements,
like wings and canards the air travels faster
underneath the ring creating a low pressure zone.
Now we talked about this before,
it's called the Bernoulli principle,
but the problem with more traditional forms
of making downforce is that they were rely
on the airspeed outside of the car,
and that is determined by how fast the car is going.
So, if the car slows down the air speed slows down,
making your wings less effective.
I'm talking to you, my civic boys.
That's why you gotta always drive fast in that little thing.
(laughs)
Now this has always been one of the big dilemmas
of aerodynamics to get the car to grip more from downforce,
you need to go fast,
which increases the amount of downforce you need
to maintain grip.
Now carrying on with that thought,
another problem with downforce generating elements
is drag, and drag refers to the car's ability
to cut through the air.
So the sleeker and more aerodynamic it is
the less it's affected by the air
and the less drag is holding it back.
But aerodynamic components need drag.
I mean wings need to cause air disturbance
to generate that low pressure.
So when you're at high speeds,
your air dynamics are working the hardest.
The most stress is being put on your wings
and your car is being pushed into the ground the most.
But that also means that your car is working harder
to push its way through the air.
That's why it's so hard to make a car
go like 200 miles per hour.
And if we look at the equation
to find out how much drag there is,
we can see that the velocity is squared,
meaning that the drag will increase quadratically
as airspeed increases.
Last time I talked about this,
I said exponentially and I messed up, I apologize.
Sometimes I go off script and I say things and I'm wrong,
so I apologize.
When it's a little two there,
that doesn't mean exponential, that means quadratically.
Okay, they're different.
Two to the X, verse X to the two.
Very different.
So, how do two big fans in a two cylinder engine
help you avoid those problems?
Well, it's really pretty ingenious.
(upbeat music)
The sucking the air out from the underside of the car
creates a low pressure zone,
just like a wing would,
but here is the kicker.
This low pressure zone isn't determined
by the car speed at all.
So it can grip just as much in the corners
as it can on the straights.
So this thing could carry speed through any type of corner.
And the fan system also didn't generate any drag, right?
I mean, it's all tucked underneath the car,
and if anything the fans push the car
just an extra little bit,
we've talked about it being able to go 40 miles per hour
just on fan speed,
so it's giving you some extra velocity
to propel your car in the forward direction.
Now, another advantage for the driver of the 2J
was that the fans sucked all that air up
and whatever debris it was like rocks
and it shot it out the back.
So people were literally eating your dust
as you drove by them,
another reason people freaking hated this car.
Can you imagine you're on your racetrack
and you're like doot, doo, doot, doo, doo,
some guy comes up beside you and his fans are blowing
all that crap right in your face?
So these fans are what made the car so well known,
but the fans alone aren't enough to submit this car
in the pages of Can-Am history.
The 2J has a few more tricks up it's jumpsuit.
(upbeat music)
Now looking at the 2J,
the bodywork doesn't look all that fancy,
but it was very specially designed
to maximize the vacuum effect underneath.
Now the rear wheels are enclosed
to help create a tighter seal for the fans
and the size of the car are straight and square
to house one of the most ingenious parts of the sucker car.
And that is the skirts. (whistles)
Now the skirts of the 2J are lightweight pieces
of lexan,
which at the time was a new polycarbonate material
from General Electric,
the same company that probably builds your washing machine
or your fridge.
Nowadays lexan and similar polycarbonates
are used in racing all the time
as a lightweight shatterproof alternative to windshields.
But at the time it was a brand new material in motor sports.
And what made these skirts special, though,
wasn't just the material,
but how they attach to the car.
So the skirts were actually free floating pieces
that use a series of pulleys and weights
and mechanical arms to balance themselves
with the suspension.
And the idea was that no matter what,
the skirts would stay perfectly level to the track surface,
letting the fans create a consistent vacuum effect
all the time.
But it wasn't a perfect seal,
and for good reason.
You're probably thinking "Well, how could it seal,
why would you want a perfect seal?"
Well, now I'm going to show you, okay,
have you ever taken a vacuum hose
and you put it directly onto a carpet and realize
it's a lot harder to move all of a sudden?
Well, this is why the TJ couldn't just let the skirts drag
on the ground.
The friction caused by the skirts
with the added pressure from the vacuum
would have actually slowed the car down.
But, if the skirts were too high,
the vacuum effect wouldn't generate enough low pressure.
So the Chaparral team found the perfect balance
between too much and too little vacuum.
And this is also why the skirt system had
to be so complicated and self adjusting.
That perfect balance and consistency was really,
really important.
You might be asking, "Well, why is it so important, Jerry?"
Well, imagine a car going around the corner.
Now the car were leaned to one side a little bit
as the weight shifts and it's called bodyroll.
You guys probably know about it,
when you turn around a corner you could feel your car
and you feel the weight shift.
Which means that the skirts on the inside would lift,
releasing some of the negative pressure,
which would mean that you would lose grip.
And in the middle of the corner,
that's exactly the last place you want your car
to suddenly lose grip.
So with the skirt system counterbalance
to the movement of the suspension,
that seal can stay consistent.
The result of all this was a car that could generate up
to 1.5G's of downforce without moving.
And when the fans kicked on the car would lower
a full two inches.
So, "Hey dude, oh my gosh, your car on bags?"
"Nah, Bro, I'm utilizing the Bernoulli principle."
But even with all this downforce,
the 2J was still running on the ragged edge
of what 1970s tires could handle
and to solve that problem,
Chaparral looked at an unlikely component, the transmission.
(upbeat music)
Whenever any of us think of racing,
you think about rowing through the gears, man,
just frigging banging through those sweet ass shifties.
And when a car slows for a tight corner,
you can hear the manual downshift.
Everybody knows that.
Pop up on pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
That was perfect. (laughs)
So what if I told you that this fricking 2J sucker car
this marvel of engineering was running
a three speed automatic transmission.
I know that friggen blows your mind, right?
But, this slush box was one of the reasons the 2J
could get its 650 horsepower to the ground.
Now with a standard manual transmission,
the power output of the engine goes into the gearbox
through a clutch.
And when the car is in gear,
the clutch disc is squeezed against the flywheel
of the engine so that the clutch spins at the same speed.
And that spins the gears of the gearbox
and eventually the wheels.
Now the problem is that the power delivery
of that clutch system is either on or it's off.
So to change gears in a race car,
you got to be super duper skilled.
You've gotta know how to rev match,
you've gotta know how to heel-toe shift,
you've gotta throttle blip,
you got to do all kinds of stuff
that us normal drivers take for granted.
And if you mess up even just a little bit
with an engine this powerful on 1970s tires
that can't handle that power,
you can shock the system.
So to explain what that means,
imagine a car accelerating through a high speed corner.
It's getting faster and faster,
right on the limit of grip.
And as it shifts up, the power to the wheels is cut.
And when the power comes back on,
the engine is spinning at a different speed
than it was before.
Now race car drivers train to match the revs
as much as possible,
especially because a new gear means a different ratio
and a different engine speed for the new wheel speed.
But imagine if you're off by even a little bit,
all of a sudden the engine is driving the wheels
let's just say five miles per hour,
slower than it was a second ago.
And that discrepancy and wheel speed is enough
to break the tires loose and spin the car.
But with an automatic,
the clutch system is replaced with a torque converter.
So instead of a clutch and a flywheel,
the engine output drives an impeller,
and that's just like a propeller,
but instead of moving through fluid, fluid moves through it.
So impeller spins and a housing filled with thick fluid,
and that housing also has a turbine.
And as the fluid spins, it spins the turbine.
So instead of friction,
we're using fluid dynamics to drive the wheels.
So for the Chaparral cars,
this meant that the fluid of the torque converter
would dampen any abrupt changes in the engine
or wheel speed.
And this is one of the main reasons people often say
that automatic cars are slower than a manual equivalent,
especially in early days of automatic transmission,
because there's a parasitic loss of power to the fluid
in a torque converter, especially under acceleration.
But on the flip side of that,
you get a smoother ride and that smoother ride helped keep
the 2J on track.
And Chaparral also used this automatic transmission
for a slightly different reason.
If they were to have a manual,
the 2J woulda had four pedals.
And if we know anything from Clover lore, four is bad.
So in their previous cars,
Chaparral had a wing that would be controlled
by a pedal under the left foot.
Now on the straights,
you could press the pedal and flatten out the wing
to reduce drag.
And it was basically a primitive DRS system
that's used in Formula One today.
Now active arrow was eventually banned in the Can-AM series
and because it was banned, the 2J team was like,
"All right, cool, whatever,
you don't want to let us use active arrow, fine,
I'll just go and borrow some tank fans
and I'll put them under my car
and I'll suck it to the ground."
That's why you gotta love about engineers, man.
You ban us from doing this.
We're clever, okay.
We're gonna bend the rules just a little bit.
(laughs)
Now the engineering on the 2J was ahead of its time.
And if the Chaparral 2J had been allowed
to compete in 1971,
I bet they would have worked out all the kinks
and racing today might look a little bit different,
but you know,
the concepts didn't totally die.
F1 teams like Brabham and Lotus tried
to use this tech as well.
So let me know in the comments,
if you want to see us break breakdown how they did it.
I mean, that'd be pretty cool, right?
I'd be into breaking down some F1 technology
if you're interested in it.
Do you guys like Formula One?
I know Nolan does.
He's made a bunch of episodes on Wheelhouse.
You should go and watch those.
Thank you for watching all these videos on Donut.
We love you guys.
We're gonna keep making videos every day if we can,
maybe even twice a day,
there might be a time when we'll be on 24/7.
Could you imagine?
Thank you, bye for now.