WHEN TURBOS RULED THE WORLD
FROM F1 TO LE MANS TO RALLYING, THE IMPACT OF TURBOS ON MOTORSPORT WAS PROFOUND... AND OFTEN QUITE SCARY
Respect to Renault. Respect, in fact, to company founder Louis Renault who patented a form of supercharging back in December 1902, thus twigging on to the concept of forced induction early doors. Supercharging was used in WWI fighter planes, but the notion of harnessing exhaust gases to compress air and increase engine output was still a way off. But when it finally caught on, boy was it worth it: Formula One and the world of motorsport would never be the same.
But there’s a hidden history here. Have you heard of the Cummins Diesel Special whose ‘turbo-supercharger’ powered Fred Agabashian to pole position in the 1952 Indianapolis 500 (a race that counted towards the F1 world championship back then)? Fourteen years later, three cars arrived at the Brickyard with turbos affixed to their Offenhauser V8s: Bobby Unser’s Huffaker, Jim Hurtubise’s Gerhardt, and Bobby Grim’s (front-engined) Watson. Unser hated his car, but loved the engine.
“In ’66, the discovery happened because, man, when I’d light that thing up going down those two long straightaways, that son of a bitch’d go like hell,” he recalled. “And it didn’t go through the short chutes good, meaning you didn’t have enough room for the turbo to get to acting really good, you know? And the car couldn’t handle good, but man, when you’d come off of number four, number two turn, you knew that turbo’d kick in because if there’s somebody in front, you’re just gonna pass them. Doesn’t make any difference who they are.”
Two years later, he took the first of his three Indy 500 wins in a Rislone-sponsored AAR Eagle, also turbocharged, and the first to win America’s most famous race. From 1968 until 1996, every winner in the 500 would use a turbo engine. Elsewhere in the US, the Can-Am race series was a massive hit, not least because the regulations were practically unlimited. It spawned some of the wildest racing cars ever seen (check out Chaparral’s 2J and H), and saw pioneering experiments in aerodynamics, hi-tech materials and latterly turbocharging.
Porsche’s Le Mans-winning 917 already had a fearsome reputation, but that was nothing the addition of a turbo and Spyder bodywork couldn’t send into orbit (in fact, a 16-cylinder engine and extended chassis were both considered and rejected). Partnering with Penske in 1972, the 5.0-litre 917/10K produced in excess of 900bhp, and was the first turbo car to win in Can-Am, but 1973’s 917/30 made even that look under-endowed. It used a twin-turbocharged, 5.4-litre flat-12 good for an unbelievable 1,580bhp (in qualifying trim, at least), making it not just the most powerful sports racing car ever, but
“THE GROUP 6 SPORTS PROTOTYPE 936 BECAME THE FIRST TURBO CAR TO WIN LE MANS IN 1976”
with a dry weight of 820kg, also gave it a power-to-weight ratio of approximately 1,970bhp-per-tonne. Mark Donohue won six races back-to-back in this beast, and set a closed-course record of 221.1mph at Talledega in one. “It’s very light, it’s very fragile, it’s very sensitive to steering wheel movements,” he noted. “Consequently at those speeds, on this kind of banking it’s, you would say, very, very darty.”
In sports car racing, meanwhile, Porsche was also dominant: the Group 6 sports prototype 936 became the first turbo car to win Le Mans in 1976, with Jacky Ickx and Gijs van Lennep driving. (The Group 5 competition evolution of the 911 Turbo road car would win at La Sarthe in 1979; in fact it would win pretty much everywhere.)
And Formula One? It was slow to turn on to turbos, and cynical even when Renault first embraced the idea. In Renault’s Gordini Viry-Châtillon test centre on the outskirts of Paris, in February 1975, an entry appears in the official records for “the design of a high performance engine”. Jean Terramorsi was the charismatic MD of Renault-Gordini, and he’d dispatched former Alpine engine specialist Bernard Dudot to California to study turbo technology
in ’73. Dudot was a fan: he’d already experimented with the tech during his time at Alpine in the late Sixties, fitting one to the A110’s 1.6-litre engine – on his kitchen table.
Prototypes were soon bench tested; the 33T was a 1.5-litre unit, the turbo a stock Garrett item used on diesel engines. Yet it made 500bhp immediately, and when Gérard Larrousse tried it for the first time on 21 November 1975, in an Alpine A442 world sports car, his initial assessment would be prophetic. “Although I knew the chassis well enough, the engine was a violent, powerful monster when it was working properly. Unfortunately, you didn’t know when it was going to work properly and it happened suddenly. The turbo lag was very tricky to master. I was full of admiration for any driver who was going to handle this thing.”
Jean-Pierre Jabouille gave the F1 car its first run at ClermontFerrand on 23 March 1976, the start of what would prove to be a long and demanding ‘proof of concept’. “The main problem was assembling the engine and packaging it in a small car,” Dudot said. “It was heavy as well, and the weight balance was not ideal.” There were other more obvious issues, as driver Jean-Pierre Jabouille observed. “I had time to read the newspaper between the moment I pressed the accelerator pedal and the moment the car responded.” Lag: if the turbo had a middle name, this would be it.
The Renault RS01 debuted in the 1977 British GP, where Jabouille qualified in 21st, eventually to retire (Gilles Villeneuve also made his F1 debut in that race). Unruly and unreliable, the RS01’s propensity for blowing its top in flamboyant fashion earned it the nickname the ‘Yellow Teapot’. The F1 paddock sniggered. Renault persevered.
When the Alpine A442B won Le Mans in 1978 (the team’s third attempt in a turbo car), with Didier Peroni and Jean-Pierre Jaussaud driving, there was some light at the end of the tunnel. The first win for Renault’s pioneering turbo finally and fortuitously came in 1979’s French GP, when another Jean-Pierre – Jabouille
– won from pole ahead of Ferrari’s Gilles Villeneuve and Rene Arnoux in the other Renault. (Their battle for second remains one of the greatest duels in F1 history, rather overshadowing the achievement.)
Yet Renault would soon be vindicated. By the time Alain Prost joined in 1981, the team was a front runner, the turbo concept now
“F1 IN THE EIGHTIES WAS BRASH, FAST, MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW”
taken up by Ferrari (whose 126 C2 was a monster). “You had to find the right moment to accelerate, and anticipate when the power would come through,” Prost noted. “There were corners where you definitely had to brake a bit earlier, so you could accelerate earlier, and be able to have the required power at the right moment. Your brain had to process things differently.”
No kidding. As the rest of the teams switched onto it, the Eighties saw F1 surf a monstrous wave of barely contained power. BMW, Ferrari, Honda, and Porsche all got with the programme. True, Williams and Brabham scored world titles with normally aspirated Cosworth V8s in 1980 and 1981, but from ’83 onwards it was a turbo world. Senna’s first win came in the Renault-powered Lotus 97T in the ’85 Portuguese GP. The boost pressure on these cars was ridiculous, the result a challenge like no other.
“You had this surplus of power and torque,” Martin Brundle recalled. “They were brutal. It tied the car in knots basically, because the chassis hadn’t evolved to handle the 1,300bhp we had in qualifying and up to 900 in the race. So they were a handful; they were moving around a lot. You could never fully relax and trust them, even on the straights.”
Take, for example, the 1.5-litre four-cylinder BMW unit in the Brabham BT52 and 53 (whose block dated back to the unit in the Sixties 1500 saloon). Nelson Piquet won the 1983 driver’s title in the
BT52, the first in F1 for a turbo car. Over to the man who designed those astonishingly pretty racing missiles, Gordon Murray.
“In those days, you usually got two sets of qualifying tyres per driver. For the first set, he would shut the wastegate down as much as he could, and we’d be running 4.8, 4.9 bar on the turbo. On a road car, 1 bar is stretching your luck, really. We’d advance the ignition a little bit, half a degree, and we’d see if the engine held together. We were probably getting around 1,000 horsepower – race horsepower about 740.
“We used to pack the intercooler with dry ice and I had a water spray with an electric pump that we used to spray onto the intercooler to try and keep the charge temperature down. Paul [Rosche, BMW’s engine wizard] calculated years later it must have been in excess of 1,300 horsepower. They couldn’t measure it because the BMW dyno only went up to 1,100 or something. I used to say to Nelson, ‘How do you drive round all weekend with 740 horsepower and then manage for a lap with almost double? How do you drive?’ And he said to me, ‘You don’t, really. You come out of the corner, get the car pointing straight in the middle of the road and then put your foot down and just hang on down the straight and then brake for the next corner.’”
This led to obvious problems, as Murray notes. “The chassis side of things couldn’t keep up. We were using titanium driveshafts in those days and we found that they were winding up and staying wound up. The shafts and the gearbox were bending and staying bent, and we were cracking gearbox casings. So we then had – it got so silly – qualifying gearboxes that would only do the two laps and then you’d have to chuck the gearbox away and put another gearbox on. Everything was designed for half that torque.”
F1 in the Eighties was brash, fast, mad, bad and dangerous to know. And costly. By the time McLaren’s MP4/4 scored 15 wins out of 16 races, powered by Honda’s sublime RA168E 1.5-litre turbo, the game was up. The FIA banned turbos at the end of the ’88 season; things had got too fast and too expensive.
Turbos had also been key to world rallying’s early Eighties dominion. In the Group B era, cars like the Audi quattro, Ford RS200, Lancia Delta S4, Metro 6R4, and Peugeot 205 T16 turned drivers like Walter Röhrl, Ari Vatanen and Michèle Mouton into household names. Not least because even these superstars were operating at the outer limits of what was humanly possible. “It felt like being one of those fighter pilots being launched off an aircraft carrier,” Vatanen observed.
Group B bounced off the rev limiter from ’82 until ’86, an era when spectators taunted the cars like matadors with an enraged bull. As Walter Röhrl’s co-driver Christian Geistdörfer said, “When the car was sideways, you could hear the ‘bm, bm, bm’ as we were hitting people.”
With power outputs north of 500bhp and Lancia’s turbo and supercharged Delta S4 upping the ante again, Group B simply became too dangerous. Drivers and spectators were killed.
The turbo tornado had blown itself out.
“TURBOS HAD ALSO BEEN KEY TO WORLD RALLYING’S EARLY EIGHTIES DOMINION”