Young Jim Hall: The Early Years

Today almost exclusively remembered as the genius behind the competition cars named for a road-running bird in the southwest, Jim Hall did not get the inspiration for his innovative designs overnight. Although he grew into an accomplished engineer, an excellent mechanic, and a top driver, it took Hall almost seven years of racing other people’s products before the first of his own rear-engined, composite-bodied cars hit the tracks in October 1963. Seven years was a long time in motor racing in those days and most careers came to an end within that timeframe. Since there are few comprehensive accounts of Hall’s early competition years, we decided to follow his career before he became an icon with his own designs. Our subject was a young man when he started racing, but the above title is not redundant. In the late fifties, two Texas drivers were named Jim Hall, though they were not related. Both raced a Ferrari 750 Monza so the local press distinguished them in race reports as Old Jim Hall [from Houston] and Young Jim Hall [a Dallas resident by 1957].

Born James Ellis Hall in Abilene, Texas, on July 23, 1935, Young Jim lived his early years in a number of places. His father, Ellis Hall, was a geologist who started the Condor Petroleum Company, an oil and gas exploration business. Developing wells involved frequent relocations for the family. Jim spent his childhood in Boulder, Colorado, followed by high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he and his siblings Dick [older] and Chuck [younger] became good friends with the Unser kids, Jerry, Bobby, and Al. At age seventeen Jim married Nancy, his high school sweetheart and, by the time he enrolled at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in 1953, he was the father of two.