F1 Turbine Engine Proposal Being Analyzed by FIA?

In 1967, Andy Granatelli fielded a revolutionary car at the Indianapolis 500. This car was all-wheel drive and powered by a 550hp Pratt and Whitney turbine. It was eerily quite, incredibly fast, and handled better than anything else on the track. It led the race for 197 laps until the failure of a $5 bearing took it out of the race.

Around the same time, Chrysler was developing a turbine car for mass production, and Ford and Ranger of England were working on turbine powered over-the-road tractors. All of these were quiet, powerful and efficient. And none of them survived to achieve production status.

And now, more than 40 years later, turbines are finally coming back to racing? What took so long?

Anyone remember this one?

Upon further study, I have learned that the various governing bodies enacted rules which crippled the turbine powered cars and banned all-wheel drives. Further, Chrysler's efforts to produce a turbine car were crippled by US government regulations, and eventually killed as a condition of the first Chrysler bail-out.

Funny thing, that.

I think you missed something with the Chrysler turbine cars - they gave the performance of a slant 6, with the fuel consumption of a Hemi. Plus, the engine had a high production cost. And remember that noise is one of the things that was starting to be regulated at that time. No conspiracy, just basic economics.

I work for a company that uses aircraft turbine engines for ground-power applications. We have an S-10 pickup with a Rolls-Royce C-18 (GM/Allison 250) as our 'shop truck'. It gets roughly 12 mpg on diesel fuel no matter how you drive it. Changing the axle gears from 4.10 to 3.36:1 only made acceleration slower, and did nothing for fuel consumption.

Of course, the truck is nice and smooth at 100+ mph, and will gladly run there.

But, from any practical standpoint, it's a whole lot of noise, cost, and complication to get the performance you could get from a $1000 small-block Chevrolet V8. For a street driven vehicle, it's not such a good idea.

For a circle track racer, just running flat out for 2 hours in a circle, the light weight/endurance/power density of the turbine becomes more of an advantage.

For a helicopter which will operate at full power any time it's off the ground, and with weight being critical, it makes good sense.

That's nothin'. You should google the Dixie Chopper jet mower. To test mower durablility (and a little bit of marketing ploy), they outfitted a lawn mower with a 150-horsepower Chinook helicopter engine.

Chinook uses a pair of T-55 engines.

3650 hp continuous

3850 hp intermittent

4000 hp 'military power'

4250 hp 'emergency (~15 seconds operation that will exhaust engine life)

We have a few of them - wonderful engines excepting the 16000 rpm output speed.

If they used a 150 hp turbine, it was an APU engine - typically constant speed, good for hydrostat operation. Someone built a chopper (motorcycle chopper, not Dixie!) with one like that. There are a few out there... We always have people coming in wanting to use them for odd things.

Our motorcycles use the 325 hp C-18 or 420 hp C-20 Rolls-Royce engine... 250 mph or your money back!

Somewhere around the 1960s Rover entered a turbine powered car in the Le Man 24 hour race but it had to be unclassed because it gave enormous power but when they measured the engine capacity they came up with a relatively small number. From deep memory it ran well but I can't remember whether or not it finished.