Half a century ago, at midnight on a closed public road in France, a silver Porsche belches fire from its exhaust as the driver shifts gears and puts his foot to the floor. The car has half the cylinders of the wedge-shaped, V12-powered prototypes it is chasing, but nevertheless it is gaining ground with hissing fury, speedometer nudging toward 300 kilometres per hour. Downshift, crackling flame, then a mighty surge forward as that shrieking hiss rises again. It’s the sound that for 50 years would be Porsche’s secret weapon: Turbo.
The Widowmaker. The whale tail. The original Bad Boys car. Both as a monster contesting the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans and Porsche’s most potent road-going car, the 911 Turbo has always been an apex predator. Turbocharging is the technology that took the 911 from a nimble little racer that made the most of modest power to a thundering juggernaut struggling to get all that horsepower to the ground. Over the years, Porsche tamed and refined the technology, turning a tricky-to-drive car into one of the greatest all-round performance vehicles you can buy.
But what exactly is a turbocharger, and how did it come to exist? It all began with General Electric engineer Sanford Moss, the mountain was Pikes Peak, Colorado, the year was 1918, and the device used was a monstrous airplane engine, strapped to the bed of a Packard truck.
Every combustion engine operates on principles so simple that children’s author Richard Scarry once sketched it into one of his picture books. Combine fuel and oxygen, provide spark to ignite it, then harness the power of that small explosion using a piston and crankshaft. The problem Moss was trying to solve was the lack of available oxygen at high altitude, and his solution was a clever method to force more air into the engine.
It wasn’t quite a new idea, as using a fan (called an impeller) to force air into the engine was already understood and referred to as supercharging. Moss’s tweak was harnessing the flow of the exhaust gas coming out of the engine using a turbine blade that spun in the exhaust stream. He attached the turbine in the exhaust with a shaft to the fan pressurizing the intake, and it worked: turbine-supercharging. Turbocharging!
For various technical reasons, turbocharging didn’t get a foothold in the automotive world until much later, and Porsche wasn’t the first to build a turbocharged road car. However, it did so in a decisive way, launching the 911 Turbo for the 1975 model year as the then-fastest series production car in the world.
This 911 Turbo—known internally as the 930, a name now widely adopted by Porsche aficionados—came with race-bred pedigree and also a reputation for viciousness to inexperienced drivers. Turbocharging requires enough exhaust flow to spin the turbine and start making pressure, or boost, and there isn’t much at low engine speed. As the rpms rise, power comes on with a wallop, hardly ideal in the middle of a corner. Racing drivers could handle it, but on 1970s-era tires, the 930 could fling a less able driver into the nearest ditch. Hence, a widowmaker.
One of the last of the rear-wheel-drive breed, the 1994 911 Turbo 3.6 that featured in the 1995 Will Smith movie Bad Boys sold two years ago for considerably more than a million dollars.
But if you knew what you were doing, it was one of the greatest driving experiences available. Certainly Bill MacEachern of Toronto thinks so, as he’s owned one of the most famous 930s out there since it was brand new. It’s the one featured in pictures in the instruction manual for Lego’s Icons building set of the 911. The car now has more than 1,200,000 kilometres on its odometer, and though MacEachern is now in his 80s, he’s still going the distance.
“I am out to take another cross-country trip to the Monterey Historics in a couple of weeks,” he says, when we meet in Toronto. “Always an adventure, especially when driving the less-travelled routes.”
On modern tires, a factory-specification 911 Turbo from the 1970s or 1980s era is far more predictable to drive than it was in period. There are even a few owners who fit winter tires and drive them around in the snow. The lag as the turbocharger spools up and then surges forward is part of the old-school experience, and this generation of 911 Turbo is of course highly collectible. One of the last of the rear-wheel-drive breed, the aforementioned 1994 911 Turbo 3.6 that featured in the 1995 Will Smith movie Bad Boys sold two years ago for considerably more than a million dollars.
In the mid-1990s, Porsche decided all-wheel-drive was required to manage the turbocharged power, a lesson learned from building the 959 supercar. And, starting in 1995, the 911 Turbo boasted twin turbochargers rather than one single large unit, helping to both reduce lag and increase power.
For the next generation in 1997, the switch to water-cooled engines for the 911 range upset the purists, and until recently, a used Turbo of this era was a performance bargain. In 2006 Porsche’s engineers introduced a first for gasoline-powered turbocharged road cars, with a variable geometry turbo. This technology adjusts the angle of the fan blades depending on engine speed, much as a pilot might feather a prop. Combined with more advanced engine management, turbo lag became nearly imperceptible.
Electrification is almost certainly the next step for the 911 Turbo, especially as Porsche has just launched its first hybridized 911. In the new 911 GTS, an electric motor sits on the shaft between turbine and impeller, and can provide boost even at low engine rpm. Any lag that might have remained is gone.
Two years ago, a 911 Turbo S set the production car record for climbing the Pikes Peak course, making the ascent in a blistering nine minutes, 53 seconds. It performed the feat with ruthless efficiency, no belches of flame nor smoking tires. Fifty years on, perhaps some of the drama that used to accompany a turbocharged 911 is gone, but in its place is something aficionados may value higher: speed.
Read more from our Autumn 2024 issue.
