The Turbine That Almost Won: The Wild Story of Indy’s Gas-Turbine Race Cars
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For a brief, remarkable period in the 1960s, the Indianapolis 500 seemed ready to be conquered by a technology that looked as though it belonged in an aircraft hangar rather than a race shop: the gas turbine.
The turbine cars were fast, eerily smooth, mechanically exotic, and almost completely unlike the traditional Indy roadsters and front-engine racers that had dominated the race for decades. They also came tantalizingly close to winning.
The story of the Indy turbine is one of those rare racing episodes in which technological progress, clever engineering, bad luck, rule changes, and a little bit of controversy all collided.
The idea comes from a jet engine
A conventional racing engine works by burning fuel inside cylinders and using the resulting pressure to push pistons. A gas turbine takes a very different approach.
Air is compressed, mixed with fuel, and burned continuously. The expanding gases spin a turbine wheel, which can be connected to the drivetrain. Instead of hundreds of individual explosions occurring inside pistons and cylinders, a turbine produces a continuous stream of power.
The advantages seemed extraordinary for racing.
A turbine had relatively few moving parts. It could run smoothly at extremely high rotational speeds, and it could potentially burn a variety of fuels. Most importantly, its power delivery could be remarkably simple.
In the early 1960s, racing engineers began asking an obvious question:
What if you put one in an Indy car?
The answer would eventually produce some of the most unusual machines ever seen at Indianapolis.
Andy Granatelli enters the picture
The central character in the turbine story was Andy Granatelli.
Granatelli was one of American racing's great promoters, innovators, and technical opportunists. Through STP, his performance-products company, he became a major figure at Indianapolis and was willing to pursue unconventional ideas that established teams might have considered too risky.
Granatelli became fascinated with turbine propulsion and began working with engineers on a car that could bring the technology to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The resulting machine was not merely a conventional Indy car with a different engine.
It was a completely different philosophy.
The turbine engine could be mounted differently, the drivetrain could be simplified, and the car could potentially eliminate some of the traditional mechanical complexity associated with a piston engine.
The first serious turbine Indy effort arrived in the mid-1960s.
And it was fast.
1967: the year the turbine nearly won
The defining moment came at the 1967 Indianapolis 500.
Granatelli's STP team entered a striking four-wheel-drive turbine car designed by Ken Wallis and Colin Chapman-related Lotus engineering concepts. The machine became known as the STP-Paxton Turbocar.
It looked like something from the future.
The car was driven by Parnelli Jones, one of the most accomplished drivers in American racing.
The turbine produced its power through a sophisticated drivetrain rather than a conventional piston engine, and the car used four-wheel drive to put that power onto the Indianapolis track.
During the race, Jones discovered that the turbine's smooth power delivery made the car exceptionally easy to drive.
More importantly, it was fast.
The Turbocar moved into the lead and appeared to be on course for victory.
For much of the race, the futuristic machine was the car to beat.
Then, with only a handful of laps remaining, disaster struck.
A small transmission component failed.
Jones coasted to a stop.
The race was suddenly over for the turbine.
A.J. Foyt went on to win, but the image of the turbine car leading the Indianapolis 500 had already made its mark on racing history.
It had come astonishingly close to doing something that seemed almost impossible: winning America's most famous race with a jet-like engine.
The 1967 car wasn't the only turbine
The Paxton Turbocar gets most of the attention, but the turbine movement at Indianapolis was larger than a single car.
Lotus was also deeply interested in turbine propulsion.
The 1967 race demonstrated that turbine power wasn't merely a publicity stunt. It could be competitive at the highest level.
But there was a problem.
The turbines were becoming too competitive.
Indianapolis had always been a laboratory for racing technology, but officials also had to maintain some balance between different forms of propulsion. A turbine could potentially produce enormous power while avoiding some of the traditional compromises faced by piston engines.
The rules therefore began changing.
1968: Lotus and the turbine's second great chance
In 1968, Lotus returned with turbine-powered machinery, this time with Graham Hill and Art Pollard among the drivers associated with the program.
The cars were again extremely fast.
But the race demonstrated another problem with the turbine concept: reliability.
The turbine itself could be very dependable, but the complete racing system contained many components that were operating under tremendous loads. Four-wheel-drive systems, transmissions, bearings, and other mechanical pieces could become the weak links.
The turbine cars therefore had an intriguing combination of strengths and weaknesses.
They could be devastatingly quick.
But Indianapolis races are long.
A car has to survive 500 miles.
The turbine's greatest enemy: the rulebook
After the near-win of 1967 and the strong showing of turbine cars in 1968, USAC began tightening the rules governing turbine-powered cars.
The changes reduced the advantages available to turbines, particularly their permissible power and intake arrangements.
This was an important moment in the story.
The turbine cars were not simply beaten by conventional racing engines. The regulations increasingly constrained the technology until its competitive advantage disappeared.
This was not unusual in racing.
When a revolutionary technology appears, the governing body often responds by changing the rules to keep the competition from becoming a technological arms race.
The turbine teams adapted.
But the window was closing.
1969: another near miss
The final great turbine challenge came in 1969.
Lotus again fielded turbine machinery, and Joe Leonard was among the drivers.
The cars were competitive, but the race again turned into a story of mechanical failure and heartbreak.
The turbine era had become almost a recurring Indianapolis nightmare: incredible speed, followed by some small mechanical failure at precisely the wrong moment.
The technology had demonstrated that it could work.
What it could not demonstrate was that it could reliably survive the Indianapolis 500 under the increasingly restrictive rules.
Why didn't the turbine take over?
Looking back, it is tempting to ask why turbine engines never became dominant.
The basic idea actually had several attractive features.
A turbine produces smooth power, has comparatively few moving parts in the core engine, and can operate at very high rotational speeds. There is no piston reciprocating hundreds or thousands of times per minute.
But racing exposes weaknesses that ordinary engineering may not.
A turbine can be inefficient at partial power compared with a piston engine. Its extremely high rotational speed creates difficult drivetrain requirements. Throttle response can also be different from that of a conventional racing engine.
And then there was fuel consumption.
At a track like Indianapolis, efficiency matters. Carrying extra fuel means carrying extra weight, and fuel stops can determine the outcome of a race.
There was also the matter of packaging.
The turbine itself could be relatively compact, but integrating it into a racing car was not necessarily simple.
The final problem was politics.
Even a technically superior engine has little future if the racing regulations progressively remove its advantages.
The famous “what if?”
The turbine era survives because of one tantalizing possibility:
What if Parnelli Jones had finished the 1967 Indianapolis 500?
The Turbocar was leading with only a few laps remaining when the transmission component failed.
Had it held together, American racing history might look very different.
The victory would have established the turbine as a proven Indianapolis technology and potentially encouraged more manufacturers and teams to experiment with alternative propulsion.
Instead, the turbine became a symbol of the road not taken.
It was close enough to victory to prove the concept, but not successful enough to create a technological revolution.
The strange beauty of the turbine cars
The turbine racers remain fascinating because they represent a moment when racing engineers were genuinely unsure what the future would look like.
Today, an IndyCar's basic formula is highly regulated. Engineers search for tiny improvements in aerodynamics, suspension, tires, power delivery, and efficiency.
In the 1960s, the possibilities seemed much wider.
Rear-engine cars were transforming Indianapolis. Four-wheel drive was being explored. Turbines appeared from seemingly nowhere. Aerodynamic experimentation was accelerating.
The turbine cars embodied that spirit perfectly.
They looked futuristic because they were futuristic.
And they sounded different, too. Instead of the explosive roar of a high-performance piston engine, the turbine produced an eerie, high-pitched whine that made it sound more like a low-flying aircraft than a racing car.
The legacy
The Indy turbine was ultimately defeated by a combination of reliability problems, changing regulations, practical limitations, and the extraordinary development of conventional racing engines.
But it accomplished something important.
It demonstrated that an entirely different form of propulsion could run at the front of the Indianapolis 500.
The 1967 STP-Paxton Turbocar in particular became one of the great “almost” cars in motorsport history. It was fast enough to win, innovative enough to change the conversation, and unlucky enough to become legendary instead.
The turbine era at Indianapolis lasted only a few years.
But those years left behind an enduring lesson about racing: sometimes the most fascinating machines are not the ones that win.
They are the ones that come within a few laps of changing the future.
