There are races remembered for the win. And there are races remembered for a breakdown. Indianapolis 1967 is remembered for a bearing.
Andy Granatelli was already, by the mid-sixties, the kind of figure the Indianapolis paddock never knew what to expect from. President of STP (yes, the very company that made motor-oil additives), he adored speed and hated convention. Granatelli was not an engineer in the academic sense—he was an entrepreneur, a man who found a technology, fell in love with it, and threw money at it with an enthusiasm that frightened accountants. He had spotted gas turbines long before 1967: back in the early sixties, he had tried fitting them into racing chassis, but those early attempts were crude and unconvincing. He needed the right engine and the right engineer.
The right engine was the Pratt & Whitney Canada ST6B-62—an aircraft gas turbine producing 550 horsepower, originally built for helicopters and light aircraft. The right engineer was Ken Wallis, who took on the task of designing a chassis capable of swallowing everything the turbine had to offer. And it offered things that would make a traditional race-car designer nervously reread the textbook. A gas turbine delivers torque in an entirely different way from a piston engine: it has no low-rev dead spots, no need to “wind” the engine up to the redline. Roughly speaking, it pulls smoothly and hard across almost its entire operating range—like an electric motor, only fueled by kerosene and howling like a little fighter jet.
The STP-Paxton Turbocar looked as if someone had taken an ordinary Indy car, inflated it sideways, and forgotten to attach exhaust pipes in the usual places. The turbine intake sat on the side, the engine nestled beside the driver, and power went to all four wheels through a Ferguson system—the very all-wheel-drive transmission Harry Ferguson had originally developed for tractors, then adapted for high-speed machines. Between the turbine and the wheels sat a torque converter, replacing the traditional multi-ratio gearbox. The driver did not need to shift—he simply pressed the throttle, and the car accelerated.
One detail about this design fascinates me: the car weighed 1750 pounds, against a USAC minimum of 1350 pounds. In other words, it was four hundred pounds heavier than it had to be—and still faster than everyone else. All-wheel drive, extra weight, an unfamiliar engine—by every Indianapolis canon, this should have been a recipe for failure. But the turbine made up for the mass with its smooth, inexhaustible torque. Where piston engines lost pull coming out of corners, the Turbocar simply kept accelerating—no jolts, no flat spots, no drama. Ferguson all-wheel drive added a grip that drivers of rear-wheel-drive cars, battling wheelspin on the exits of the Brickyard oval’s turns, could only envy.
The gas turbine had another feature, one difficult to appreciate until you look at it through a mechanic’s eyes: it had far fewer moving parts than a piston engine. No pistons, no valves, no camshaft. The rotor spins, the compressor squeezes the air, fuel burns in the combustion chamber, hot gases turn the turbine. Elegant simplicity—except that the temperatures inside are hellish, and the bearings operate at the very limits of their era’s materials science.
May 30, 1967, race day. Parnelli Jones—an Indianapolis veteran, winner in 1963—climbed into the Turbocar’s cockpit and began doing what the entire field feared. He led. He led methodically, without strain, lap after lap. The Turbocar ran as though the Indianapolis oval were a morning jog. Jones spent 171 laps out of 200 at the head of the race.
The gap to the chasers grew, and by the final ten laps the question was no longer “Who will win?” but “By how much?” The grandstands hummed—some with delight, others with irritation. A turbine car, sponsored by an oil-additive manufacturer, driven by a mustachioed cowboy—it was too much. Too strange and too effective for a world ruled by four-cylinder Offenhausers and eight-cylinder Fords.
And then—lap 197. Fewer than four laps from the finish. About eight miles from the checkered flag. A bearing in the drivetrain—a tiny part that had spun hundreds of thousands of times during the race—failed. The Turbocar slowed, drifted toward pit lane, and stopped. Jones climbed out of the cockpit, and his face said everything. The victory went to A. J. Foyt in a car with a conventional piston-powered Ford—a man who had driven brilliantly that day, but knew he had been running second. Jones was credited with sixth place—based on the number of laps he had completed.
Eight miles. A bearing. The full Indy 500 distance is five hundred miles, and the car had covered four hundred and ninety of them in a state of absolute superiority. Reliability rate: 98%.
The response from USAC—the organization running Indianapolis racing—was swift and predictable. Formally, nobody had banned the turbine. Formally, USAC merely “adjusted the technical regulations.” But the point of the adjustment was transparent: the permitted intake area for turbine engines was cut from 23.999 square inches to 15.999. A reduction of one third.
For a gas turbine, the intake is its throat. Air enters through it, gets compressed by the compressor, and is fed into the combustion chamber. Narrow the throat—and the engine chokes. Power drops, top speed falls. By some estimates, the new restriction knocked turbine cars down to roughly 161 miles per hour—a level at which they could still compete, but could no longer dominate as the Turbocar had in 1967.
It was not a ban, but a slow strangulation—for the moment. USAC acted according to a logic familiar to anyone who has watched regulatory wars in motorsport: when a technology threatens the established hierarchy, you do not kill it with a single blow—that would cause a scandal. You restrict it gradually, making it economically and technically unviable. Piston engines, meanwhile, continued to develop under the same rules, gaining ever more power. The turbines stayed where they were, pressed into a regulatory corner.
USAC’s argument looked reasonable on paper: equal opportunity, safety, preventing an arms race. But behind that argument lay simple arithmetic: piston-engine manufacturers—Ford, Offenhauser—were the foundation of the Indianapolis ecosystem. Their teams, their mechanics, their sponsors shaped the race’s economy. The turbine threatened to devalue decades of investment in piston technology in a single season.
Colin Chapman, founder of Team Lotus, watched the Turbocar drama from Hethel and saw not defeat, but a blueprint for the future. Chapman was a genius who built racing cars like a sculptor—removing everything unnecessary. If Granatelli was an entrepreneur throwing money at an idea, Chapman was an architect who turned an idea into form. In 1968, Team Lotus unveiled the Lotus 56—a car that looked as though it had arrived from the following decade.
A wedge-shaped body, sharp as a blade, all-wheel drive, a Pratt & Whitney STN76 gas-turbine engine—the heir to the very ST6B-62, but adapted to USAC’s tighter air-intake rules. Chapman designed the chassis from scratch, seeking to minimize weight and aerodynamic drag—to make up for what the regulations had taken away. The Lotus 56 possessed the beauty of things designed with obsession.
At the 1968 Indy 500, Joe Leonard—driving the Lotus 56—led the race. And once again, the turbine car had the piston-powered field looking at its tail. And again—a retirement: the engine stalled on the restart of lap 191, and Leonard silently coasted to the side of the track nine laps from the finish. Faster than everyone—but not to the end: the same story as the year before.
That season also brought real tragedy. Mike Spence, Lotus’s British driver, was killed in practice at Indianapolis. His death was not directly connected to the turbine engine—accidents happened in piston-powered cars too—but it cast the entire Lotus 56 program in dark tones. Chapman, for all his obsession with speed, took the deaths of drivers hard. The program continued, but the enthusiasm began to erode from within: the price had turned out to be human.
After 1968, USAC kept tightening the screws. Intake area was cut once more, making turbine cars less and less competitive. The window of opportunity the Turbocar had flung open in 1967 was closing, shutter by shutter.
Chapman still had Lotus 56 chassis left, and he had no intention of sending them to the scrapyard. The idea was audacious even by his standards: convert a turbine Indy car for the Formula 1 World Championship. Thus, in 1971, came the Lotus 56B—one of the strangest machines ever to take to a Grand Prix circuit.
Imagine it: winding European tracks, tight sequences of corners, elevation changes—and through them drives a wedge-shaped car weighing 600 kilograms, designed for the Indianapolis oval, where the turns are four left-hand bends and nothing else. The Lotus 56B had all-wheel drive in a world where everyone ran rear-wheel drive. It was heavy in a championship where every kilogram counted. Its turbine wailed amid the growling Cosworth DFVs. Visually, it looked like an alien—wide, low, with an air intake where a normal F1 car had nothing at all.
Three World Championship rounds. Three drivers: Dave Walker, Reine Wisell, Emerson Fittipaldi—the last of them already considered a rising star. The results—nothing. The car was slow in corners, suffered from turbo lag (a delay between pressing the throttle and turbine response—a critical problem on twisty circuits, where the driver is constantly working the pedal), overheated, and, according to the drivers’ recollections, handled like something between a speedboat and a luggage cart. Fittipaldi, who would become world champion a year later, climbed into the Lotus 56B with professional curiosity, but no illusions.
I think there is something touching about the Lotus 56B: it was Chapman’s attempt to prove that the turbine could live beyond the ovals. The attempt failed—but beautifully, and with Chapman’s characteristic grandeur.
After 1971, gas turbines never appeared in Grand Prix racing again. At Indianapolis, it had ended earlier: having become completely uncompetitive by 1969, turbine engines were banned outright from the USAC championship starting in 1970. No team chose to fight rules that strangled the technology faster than engineers could adapt it.
Was the turbine better than the piston engine? On an oval—almost certainly yes, at least in the 1967 configuration, before the restrictions. On winding circuits—probably not, and the Lotus 56B proved it. But we will never know what might have happened if USAC had allowed turbine cars to develop under the same rules as piston-powered ones. The regulatory war ended in a knockout: first the turbine was deprived of oxygen—in the literal sense, through intake area—and then the track itself was closed to it.
Parnelli Jones retired from racing in 1968 and became a successful team owner. Andy Granatelli did eventually win the Indy 500—in 1969, but with a conventional piston engine and Mario Andretti at the wheel. When Andretti crossed the finish line, Granatelli found him in Victory Lane and covered him in kisses—the photograph of that kiss became one of the most famous images in motorsport history. The man who believed in the turbine won without it.
And the drivetrain bearing in the Turbocar—a tiny part that cost a revolution—remains the most eloquent argument that in racing, the distance between triumph and sixth place is sometimes measured not in seconds, but in laps remaining.