Fast Failures: American heartbreak at the Indianapolis 500

A real American hero was lost from the history books within sight of the finish of the 1967 Indianapolis 500. MARK GLENDENNING revisits the infamous STP turbine Indycar? The tale of the STP Oil Treatment Special turbine Indycar is one of gamesmanship and technical innovation, with a liberal sprinkling of mercenary opportunism. It wasn't the first turbine car to turn up at Indy, and nor was it the last. But it's certainly the most notorious.

The car was built in secrecy for famed owner Andy Granatelli, and over the course of May 1967, it snowballed from a curiosity as the first turbine-powered entry to qualify for the 500, to one of the most controversial machines in the event's history when it came within just a few miles of actually winning. Its flamboyance was entirely in keeping with Granatelli's natural showman's instincts: four-wheel drive, centrally-located fuel-tank, and a mid-mounted Pratt-Whitney helicopter engine - reportedly good for 550bhp - that sat right alongside driver Parnelli Jones.

The principle behind the gas turbine engine was the same as that which governs similar engines found in everything from planes to tanks today, although in the late-1960s the world was yet to give up on the idea that the technology might be viable for production cars. Turbines offered a lot of power in a small package, but were not efficient right across the power band, and also tended to be expensive. Jones tested the car for the first time at Phoenix a few months before the 1967 race, and his first impressions were mixed. "Andy had asked me to do a tyre test in the Novi, and I went faster than anybody else had gone," says Jones. "After that he was constantly after me to drive for him. "When he built the turbine car, he called me and said, 'come over, I've got something I want to show you'. That's when I saw it for the first time. I said, 'well, I'm testing my own car over at Phoenix in a month or so, so bring it over then, I'll take a ride in it and see what I think'. "I drove my own car and the turbine car, and went back and forth between them. The turbine car had a tremendous throttle delay time - three seconds. But the more I drove it, the more I kind of got interested in it. But I didn't think it was that quick. It wasn't faster than my car." Jones left the Phoenix test in two minds over whether to stick with his own car for the 500, or go with Granatelli and drive the turbine. "I finally decided that the only way for me to make a decision might be money," he admits. "So I asked myself, would you do it for $25,000? No. Would you do it for $50,000? No. Would you do it for $100,000? Well, I think I could qualify the car for $100,000. "So I told Andy that I'd do it for $100,000, and he said 'OK' straight away." Granatelli, being Granatelli, spent the lead-up to the race hyping the car's potential, which raised some questions when the car failed to impress during the early practice days. One of the main challenges was maintaining traction at the front during cornering, which the team solved by redirecting more of the power towards the rear wheels. Jones also instigated the addition of a makeshift air brake. "When you got that turbine spooled up ... when you backed off at the end of the straightaway, it was like the throttle was stuck," he says. "So you really had to use the brakes. "That was when I had them build a flap connected to the rear master cylinders, so if I hit the brake hard, at least you had something to hold the back end down. If you happened to lose the brakes at one end , you'd kill yourself." The car's real strength came into play when everyone was running on full tanks, because its relatively high torque meant that it struggled less than those around it with 75 gallons of fuel on board. "I didn't run any faster on race day," says Jones. "They all just ran slower, which made me look like I was sandbagging. I had no reason to sandbag; I'd already won the race . I just didn't slow down all that much with a full load of fuel." Jones qualified on the outside of the second row. "When they dropped the green flag I just stuck around Johncock on the outside and drove around everybody," he recalls. "I caught Mario coming out of the short chute and he gave me the finger. It was all over." At least, it should have been. Jones was leading comfortably when a $6 rear bearing failed just three laps from the end. The breakage was later traced to Jones overloading the bearing by gunning the car too hard out of the pits after each stop. "And I did not have to accelerate out so hard," he says. "I never was the smartest driver, by any means." It was AJ Foyt who ultimately had his likeness added to the Borg Warner Trophy that year, and while Jones's performance prompted a rush on turbine power in the lead-up to the 1968 race, protests over costs from other car owners led USAC to cut the engine air intake from 23.999 inches to 15.999; a change that would have limited the cars to just 161mph. Turbines - which two-time winner Roger Ward had written just weeks earlier would 'take over' Indianapolis in the future - were rendered obsolete on the spot. NOVI AT INDY During its early years, the Novi earned a reputation as a kind of Indy engine equivalent of a spicy chicken wing-eating competition - loud, terrifying, very likely to do you some sort of harm, and raucously popular. And in the final reckoning, it had everything an Indy 500 package could want, except success. Its distinctive fighter plane engine note made it a crowd-pleaser, and once Frank Curtis convinced Novi owner Lew Welch to switch to a rear-engine layout, the roadster had the looks to match - the finned Kurtis-Kraft Novi is still considered one of the most beautiful cars to race at the Brickyard. One of the Novi's best shots at a win came at the hands of Juan Manuel Fangio in 1958. The Argentine practiced alongside Raul Russo and likened the outrageous power of the V8 to the BRM V16. Team and sponsorship conflicts ultimately prevented him from racing the car, and unhappy with the alternative that he'd been offered, he opted to race in the French GP instead. The Novis finished 10th and 18th with Bill Cheesbourg and Russo respectively, and failed to qualify in the next two years. After a final hurrah with team owner Andy Granatelli, who purchased the rights to Novi ahead of the 1961 event, it finally exited the stage in a qualifying crash in 1966.

A sad, and yet weirdly appropriate, end for what has to be the most popular engine never to win a race.