I remember back in the day (late 60's) that the Chaparral and Jim Hall were the coolest things running.
"Throughout the 1960s—and into the 1970s and the 1980s—Jim Hall and his team at Chaparral Cars designed, built and raced legendary race cars that thrilled fans, amazed the competition, and were considered the most innovative cars of their time. Working quietly from their Midland shop, the Chaparral team took race car engineering to new levels of performance."http://www.petroleummuseum.org/Chaparral/Tour1Entry.html
Chaparral was the first to introduce effectively designed air dams and spoilers ranging from the tabs attached to the earliest 2C model to the driver-controlled high wing 'flipper' on the astoundingly different looking 2E, all the way through to Hall's most idealistically inspired creation, the 2J, the car that would forever be known as the 'vacuum cleaner'. Chaparral also used a semi-automatic transmission.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral_Cars