MORLEY’S WORKSHOP
ROCKET AXLES, GETTING ZEN AND DSG GEARBOXES
Idon’t mind a far-out gadget now and then. But one crossed my desk this week that really got my attention. It was called a Rocket Drag Axle and it was made by a company called Turboniques out of Orlando, Florida in the early 1960s. Big deal, you say…plenty of companies have offered beefed up third members for drag racing. True, but how many of them incorporated a rocket engine?
Let’s start at the start. Turboniques was the work of a bloke name of Gene Middlebrooks Jr who was a graduate of Georgia Tech and had a wicked sense of the insane. Clearly. He had previously worked in the aerospace industry, helping to develop missiles (which should tell you a lot).
Turboniques started out making conventional turbochargers (unheard of in the US in a passenger-automotive application in the 1960s) as well as gas turbines which ran on nitrate isopropyl monopropellant, or Thermolene in the Turbonique brochures. There was even a supercharger that was spun up not by a crank-driven belt, but by a gas turbine, so there were no parasitic losses. In testing, this unit took a 409 cubic-inch Chev V8 from 405 horsepower to 835 when the blower was spun up.
The Turboniques product that got my attention, though, was the Rocket Drag Axle which replaced the standard live axle and diff in your road car. The Drag Axle consisted of a replacement diff centre which connected to your driveshaft like a conventional rear end, but also incorporated a gas turbine that powered the diff directly. Like his other turbines, Middlebrooks’ Drag Axle was a low-cost turbine that was designed to deliver bursts of power for short periods of terror. Perfect for drag racing, then.
These axles were available in anything up to 1300 horsepower configurations, so once you lit the wick, the turbine would completely outrun the car’s engine up front. At that point, the Borg Warner sprag clutch came into play, allowing the turbine to take over driving the diff gears without waiting for the piston engine to catch up.
The company ran a VW Beetle drag car with a Drag Axle fitted, and it was capable of 9.36 second quarters at something like 270km/h. The catch was, of course, that the Drag Axle was more or less an on-off booster jet. And should you need to pedal the car during the run down the dragstrip, you were in all sorts. See, once you’d backed off the throttle, the layout and the fuel used meant the unit more or less became a bomb, waiting for you to get back on the throttle to detonate. Which is what happened. Several times. In fact, by 1967, the drag-racing sanctioning body in the US, the NHRA, banned the Drag Axle after numerous incidents and even deaths.
In the very late 1960s, Middlebrooks was charged with fraud, mainly over the fact that his products were trickier and more time consuming to install than the adverts would have you believe. In 1972, he ran out of appeals and the company was wound up. Gene Middlebrooks died in 2005.
Prices for the Drag Axle started at under $2000 and went all the way past $4000 which was a fair chunk of change in the 60s. But here’s the other bit I love: The products were all available on a mail-order business from adverts that Turboniques placed in magazines just like this one in the day. And Millennials reckon they invented online shopping!
I’d love to see (and hear) one of these things caning down a quarter-mile, or maybe just take a proper look at one. Anybody know anything more about the Rocket Drag Axle they want to share? Or anything else that could be filed under Mad Professor?