Fifty years ago Porsche changed the performance car world forever with the launch of the 911 Turbo. Adam Towler tells its remarkable story
PHOTOGRAPHYbyASTON PARROTT
SIMPLY ‘TURBO’ SUFFICES. WE ALL KNOW it means ‘Porsche 911 Turbo’. Always has, always will. The flagship of the 911 range; the sensible, bargain supercar. As the 50th anniversary of the model is now upon us, there’s no better time to look at why the 911 Turbo changed the face of performance motoring, and what it meant and still means, not just as a car but to the company that created it and the industry as a whole.
Porsche wasn’t quite the first, of course. GM had shown that turbocharging could work in a road car as far back as 1962, and while Porsche had been running a 2-litre turbo ‘six’ on the dyno as early as 1969, BMW claimed Europe’s first turbocharged production car with its 2002 Turbo in 1973. In truth a number of factors – and a healthy dose of Germanic pragmatism – coincided to bring Porsche’s most famous model line to life.
The first was that it had a new man in charge in the form of Dr Ernst Fuhrmann. After the bickering that had threatened to tear the company apart, the family had decided to take a step backwards, and Porsche’s first CEO was appointed at the beginning of 1972. A small man with strong leadership skills, a fiery temper and a slightly odd tendency towards superstition, Furhmann was a former Porsche engineer who also saw the value of motorsport. The company had spent a vast amount on winning Le Mans with the 917 – and then the Can-Am series with the turbocharged version – and while the purse-strings had now been tightened considerably in a harsher economic landscape, surely that new turbocharging know-how and marketing gold could be put to good use? Moreover, the boss also liked fast cars, and he wanted his engineers to build him one.
He decreed that the turbocharger was the way forward, and engineer Valentin Schäffer duly started work on a 2.7-litre turbocharged flat-six influenced by the 1000bhp-plus Can-Am racers. By the spring of ’73 it was taking its first hesitant steps around the Weissach test track, and at the 1973 Frankfurt motor show a silver 911 appeared on Porsche’s stand. Ostensibly a 3.0RS in looks, but with funky ‘Turbo’ graphics, the official line was that it featured a 2.7-litre turbocharged engine offering 280 PS (276bhp), enabling a 160mph-plus top speed. Interest, understandably, was high. This was in spite of it being an appalling time to consider such a vehicle, given
