Four icons of the air-cooled era demonstrate why, despite its widowmaker reputation, the 911 turbo has remained Porsche’s flagship for 50 glorious years
WORDS BEN BARRY PHOTOGRAPHY MAX EDLESTON
Swollen hips covering fat, low-profile tyres, ʻwhale-tailʼ spoiler, italicised script on the engine cover… Nothing figuratively or literally says youʼre packing boost quite like the rear end of a 911 turbo. This year the landmark model celebrates 50 years since its debut at the 1974 Paris Salon, so to celebrate we have assembled the air-cooled bloodline that tells the first half of that story.
The Stuttgart marque was always going to adopt turbocharging sooner or later – after all, the technology is near universal these days to cut emissions and save fuel. But when Porsche first used exhaust gases to spin up a turbine and force air back into the engine, it was all about performance and motorsport.
There is more to come on that story from p92, but briefly… When new rules outlawed Porscheʼs 917 for 1972, following back-to-back Le Mans wins, it turbocharged the flat-12 prototype and ran rings around the opposition in the North American Can-Am series. Then, when the oil crisis rained on that parade, Porsche turbocharged its existing 911 racing steed. The 2.1-litre Carrera RSR turbo was initially campaigned as a prototype because Porsche sold no comparable production car, but the more showroom-relevant Group 4 and Group 5 competition required at least 400 road cars to be produced.
The 911 turbo shown at Paris in 1974 (internally codenamed and known widely as the 930) was the start of all that, with a 3-litre engine that shared its bore and stroke with the RSR race car, but added a single KKK turbocharger. Together with a lower (6.5:1) compression ratio, Bosch K-Jetronic fuel injection and just 0.8 bar of boost, it made 260bhp at 5500rpm with 253lb ft of torque at 4000rpm. Drivers of the standard 2.7-litre 911 had to work their cars a lot harder for less performance – 210bhp at 6300rpm and 188lb ft at 5100rpm – but, then again, the turbo was almost twice the price, at DM67,850.
The rest of the 911 was also upgraded to make the most of the extra power flowing to its back wheels – hence rear wheelarches flared to accommodate 15in alloys that were 8in wide at the rear (7in at the front) in road trim, along with beefed-up semi-trailing arms in cast aluminium rather than pressed steel, uprated wheel bearings and the signature spoiler to squash it all into the ground at speed.
John Brewerʼs beautiful
