Summary

In 1962 and 1963, Oldsmobile offered a short-lived turbocharged version of the compact F-85. Called F-85 Jetfire, it used a high-compression aluminum V-8 engine with a complex, troublesome fluid injection system. Chevrolet also developed a simpler turbocharger installation for the air-cooled flat-six engine of the rear-engined Corvair. The Corvair offered turbocharged engines from 1962 to 1966.

In 1962, Chevrolet and Oldsmobile introduced the world’s first turbocharged production cars, the Oldsmobile F-85 Jetfire and Chevrolet Corvair Monza Spyder. In this installment of Ate Up With Motor, we’ll discuss the origins of turbocharging, the development of the Oldsmobile Jetfire, and the turbocharged Corvair that nearly stole its thunder.

IMPORTANT AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is an automotive history article, NOT a guide to repairing or modifying these cars. I AM NOT A MECHANIC. I AM NOT QUALIFIED TO PROVIDE ANY ADVICE ON TROUBLESHOOTING, REPAIRS, OR MODIFICATIONS. I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW TO TURBOCHARGE YOUR CAR. I DON’T SELL PARTS, AND I CANNOT TELL YOU WHERE TO FIND PARTS.

Oldsmobile Looks for More Power from the Rockette V-8

In the late fifties, GM’s mid-price divisions, Buick, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac, developed a new line of “senior compact” cars, which became the 1961–1963 Buick Special/Skylark, Oldsmobile F-85/Cutlass, and Pontiac Tempest/Le Mans. All three cars shared a new unitized “Y-body” shell, which had some structural commonality with the rear-engine Chevrolet Corvair, but with front-mounted engines and a longer 112-inch (2,845-mm) wheelbase. Each car offered a lightweight aluminum V-8 engine (in two distinct versions, discussed in greater detail in the sidebar below).

As we’ve previously noted, when the 1961 Buick Special, Oldsmobile F-85, and Pontiac Tempest arrived, they were clearly positioned as economy cars, offered only in four-door sedan and wagon forms. Two-door coupes, fancier trim, and (except for Pontiac) more powerful engine options arrived quite late in the model year, probably as a reaction to the popular new Monza version of the Corvair.

Therefore, it’s somewhat surprising to learn that the possibility of supercharging the Olds F-85’s aluminum “Rockette” V-8 was first broached in the fall of 1959, a full year before the 1961 F-85 went on sale and almost 18 months before the introduction of the sportier F-85 Cutlass coupe. Exactly why Oldsmobile was so interested in extracting more power from the Rockette engine at that stage is no longer entirely clear; Gilbert Burrell, Oldsmobile’s chief engine development engineer, said later that it was a response to an emerging market for sporty compacts, but at the time, the introduction of the Corvair Monza was still months away, and if Oldsmobile anticipated a demand for sportier models, there was no evidence of that in the initial merchandising of the F-85.

The more probable explanation is that Oldsmobile was concerned about the Rockette V-8’s growth potential. The 215 cu. in. (3,528 cc) aluminum V-8 was light and relatively economical, but its compact size left little room for bore and stroke increases, and because Buick supplied the engine blocks, Oldsmobile couldn’t increase the engine’s displacement without Buick’s cooperation. The high-compression Cutlass engine would have an additional 30 gross horsepower (22.4 kW), but most conventional means of increasing horsepower much beyond that level would come at the expense of low-end torque and driveability. In the short term, the Rockette was certainly adequate — even in regular-fuel form, its 155 gross horsepower (115.6 kW) made it one of the most powerful engines in its class — but if that changed, Oldsmobile wouldn’t have many practical options. The Y-body engine compartment was cramped enough that even the compact aluminum V-8 was a tight fit, so installing the division’s larger V-8 would likely have required major surgery.

As Burrell was no doubt aware, the fifties had seen a modest renaissance in mechanical supercharging: using an air compressor to force air and fuel into the cylinders of an engine at higher than atmospheric pressure. Superchargers were popular aftermarket accessories at the time, and Kaiser, Studebaker-Packard, and (briefly) Ford had all offered McCulloch centrifugal superchargers as regular production options. An engine-driven supercharger allowed big increases in power and torque using more or less bolt-on equipment that could be added to an existing engine without too much difficulty. Unfortunately, up to that point, most automotive superchargers had been expensive and rather limited in capability. They were useful in competition, to the extent racing officials were prepared to allow them, but they offered little benefit at lower engine speeds, and driving the impeller off the crankshaft via belts, gears, or chains tended to be noisy as well as consuming a significant amount of power. Their reliability had also left much to be desired, leaving them with a fairly checkered reputation in the U.S.

In considering this, Burrell recalled that the GM Research Laboratories had recently done some experimental work on turbocharging: forced induction using a centrifugal supercharger driven not by the crankshaft, but by the otherwise wasted energy of the engine’s exhaust stream.

Burrell later characterized this research as a single report that had been gathering dust for several years, but in fact a group within the Research Laboratories had recently spent about five years working on turbocharging, beginning in 1954 and continuing into early 1959. Those studies had begun with laboratory simulations and dynamometer testing of single-cylinder test engines, and progressed to include at least one Oldsmobile Rocket V-8 fitted with a turbocharger made by the Schwitzer Corporation (today part of BorgWarner) for diesel engines.

The report to which Burrell referred may have been related to a 1956 presentation by manager of Research Laboratories activities Alfred L. Boegehold, subsequently published in the trade journal Metal Progress, which examined possible directions for future automobile engines, including, among others, turbocharged aluminum Otto-cycle engines, gas turbines, and both two- and four-stroke diesels. That presentation noted that the turbocharged aluminum engine was by far the most efficient of the various engine types in terms of size and weight per horsepower, with only fractionally higher specific fuel consumption (fuel consumed per brake horsepower per hour) than a conventional cast iron engine.

Although Boegehold’s presentation dismissed the idea that turbocharged gasoline engines would be worthwhile for general passenger car use, the Research Laboratories team had continued their work, assembling an experimental turbocharged, fuel-injected 371 cu. in. (6,075 cc) Oldsmobile V-8 engine, which produced 317 hp (236.4 kW) at 4,000 rpm with 5 psi (0.34 bar) boost from a single Schwitzer turbocharger. When finally installed in a car in March 1958, the engine proved powerful enough to catapult the big Oldsmobile Super 88 to 60 mph (97 km/h) in less than 7 seconds and 100 mph (161 km/h) in less than 18 seconds, albeit with significant throttle lag at low speeds. This car was tested throughout 1958, so it seems likely that Burrell would have heard about it even if he didn’t have the opportunity to drive it himself. The Research Laboratories also conducted some experiments involving turbocharged Chevrolet truck engines, using turbochargers supplied by a California company called AiResearch, a division of the Garrett Corporation.

We should emphasize that the Research Laboratories projects had no specific production applications in mind, and the fact that some of those experiments had used Oldsmobile engines didn’t mean that the research was conducted for Oldsmobile, or even with any meaningful divisional involvement. The role of Research Laboratories work was to conduct foundational research in interesting new areas and enable the corporation to stay abreast of noteworthy recent developments, without any particular assumptions about whether or how that research might translate into production.

Blower Background

When the Research Laboratories began that work in the mid-fifties, automotive turbocharging was still largely unexplored territory, although turbocharging (sometimes called “turbo-supercharging”) was already an old idea. A patent filed by Swiss engineer Alfred Büchi (sometimes anglicized as “Buechi”) back in 1905 had proposed combining an exhaust-driven axial turbine, an axial turbo-compressor, and a radial piston engine on a common shaft. From this initial concept, Büchi subsequently developed the now-familiar freewheeling turbo arrangement, with a turbine and centrifugal compressor sharing a common shaft, but with no direct mechanical link to the engine crankshaft. Such a turbo-compressor promised a tidy solution to a problem that had been the downfall of many early attempts to supercharge internal combustion engines: the difficulty of devising a compressor and drive arrangement that would add more power than it consumed.

Although the concept of turbocharging was fundamentally sound, it presented an array of formidable design challenges. The rotating assembly had to be precisely balanced and properly lubricated to allow very high rotational speeds while also keeping the impeller and turbine sides tightly sealed and well insulated from one another — to say nothing of the problem of manufacturing a turbine capable of withstanding exhaust temperatures that in a spark ignition engine could easily exceed the melting point of aluminum.

For those reasons, the most commercially successful early applications of turbocharging were for low-speed diesel engines, whose cooler exhaust temperatures were less of a strain on contemporary metallurgy. In 1919, Büchi succeeded in arranging a deal between SLM (Schweizerische Lokomotiv und Maschinenfabrik, Swiss Locomotive and Machinery Works) and Brown, Boveri & Company to develop his turbo-supercharger designs for large diesel engines. This venture really took off following the introduction of Büchi’s improved “pulse wave” turbocharger design, patented in 1925, which further increased power through better exhaust gas scavenging. By the late thirties, Brown, Boveri & Company was making turbochargers for two- and four-stroke diesel engines with outputs ranging from 150 to 5,500 hp (112 to 4,101 kW), used in locomotives, ships, submarines, and a very wide variety of industrial applications. (The company, which is now called ABB, continued to make turbochargers through 2022, when it spun off that business as a separate company called Accelleron Industries.)

In a 1937 technical review in the Brown, Boveri & Company in-house journal, engineer Emil Klingelfuss confidently predicted that turbo-supercharging would inevitably also find widespread use in aviation, despite the significant additional problems involved in turbocharging high-speed spark ignition engines, with their much higher exhaust temperatures.

Indeed, by the late thirties, the aircraft turbo-supercharger’s hour was finally approaching after a protracted gestation. Back in 1916, Parisian engineer Auguste Rateau had patented an exhaust-driven turbo-compressor for high-speed aircraft engines, which was built and tested in 1917–1918 on a Breguet XIV A2 reconnaissance aircraft — probably the first working example of a turbocharger for spark ignition engines. Sanford Moss of General Electric (GE) had subsequently developed his own variation on the Rateau turbo-compressor, which was installed on a V-12 Liberty engine and tested on a truck-mounted dynamometer atop Pikes Peak, Colorado, in September and October 1918. However, the practical problems were far from resolved by the time of the armistice, and the lack of suitable high-temperature alloys greatly limited the lifespan of early aircraft turbochargers. Military officials remained ambivalent, preferring crankshaft-driven superchargers (although development of the latter had also been very troublesome). It was not until 1938 that U.S. Army Air Corps brass conceded that the performance benefits of turbocharging, particularly in altitude performance, were worth the bother.

World War 2 saw dramatic improvements in turbocharger technology, thanks in part to the availability of high-cobalt alloys better able to withstand the intense heat of a spark ignition engine’s exhaust gases. The use of turbo-supercharging — often in two-stage installations with separate exhaust-driven and crankshaft-driven compressors — allowed dramatic improvements in takeoff power, speed, and altitude. However, the metallurgical advances that made turbocharged military aircraft engines practical also hastened their end by accelerating the development of gas turbine engines. By war’s end, it was clear that jets would shortly relegate the most powerful aircraft piston engines to second-line duty, if not the scrapyard. At the same time, wartime turbo-superchargers were overkill for civil aviation (turbocharging wouldn’t become popular for light aircraft until the sixties) and were much too big and heavy to be repurposed for auto racing or hot rods.

After the war, turbochargers became increasingly common on smaller diesel engines, like those found in tractors and construction equipment. By the middle of the decade, there was also a growing number of turbocharged diesel engines for large trucks, offered by MAN (Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg, Machine Factory Augsburg-Nuremberg), Volvo, and Cummins.

Cummins had previewed its turbodiesel engine in dramatic fashion by entering a turbodiesel race car, the No. 28 Cummins Diesel Special, in the 1952 Indianapolis 500. The car was powered by an aluminum and magnesium version of the company’s 401 cu. in. (6,570 cc) diesel six, fitted with a Schwitzer-Cummins turbocharger producing up to 20 psi (1.38 bar) boost at 4,300 rpm. Driven by Freddie Agabashian, No. 28 qualified on the pole and set a one-lap speed record of 139.104 mph (223.866 km/h), but turbocharger damage from track debris took the turbodiesel car out of the running on its 71st lap, and rules changes meant that it never raced again.

Turbodiesel light trucks and passenger cars wouldn’t arrive until the seventies, so other than the Cummins Diesel Special, the only notable attempt at automotive turbocharging during this period was an aftermarket kit designed in the late thirties by Ray Besasie of Besasie Engineering in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. First advertised around 1940 and marketed again after World War 2, it produced about 3 psi (0.21 bar) boost at 22,000 to 30,000 rpm, which Besasie claimed was good for a 25 percent increase in engine power. Few were sold, and we’re not sure how durable they were; the Besasie turbocharger was essentially a shade-tree engineering project. Nonetheless, some of Ray Besasie’s family and friends claim that GM engineers consulted with Besasie as part of the corporation’s early turbocharger research.

The Pros and Cons of Passenger Car Turbocharging

Even with high-temperature alloys to provide the necessary heat tolerance, turbocharging still had another serious limitation for automotive applications: what we now call “turbo lag.”

Because a turbocharger is driven by exhaust gases, the speed of the turbine and impeller depend less on engine rpm than on load. Under light load, the exhaust stream may not turn the turbine fast enough to produce much if any boost, and the presence of the turbine increases back pressure in the exhaust system, reducing power. When load increases, it takes some time for the rotating assembly to accelerate enough to provide useful boost, creating a noticeable delay in response. For industrial, marine, or aircraft engines that mostly operate at or near maximum load, turbo lag is seldom a significant concern. Until fairly recently, it has been much more troublesome for passenger cars and light trucks, which are frequently required to accelerate from idle and which spend much of their lives operating at less than 50 percent of maximum load, resulting in big disparities between on- and off-boost performance.

On the other hand, in this era, that was also true of contemporary crankshaft-driven superchargers. While we now tend to think of superchargers as offering immediate boost with no lag, that generally wasn’t the case prior to the eighties. A crankshaft-driven centrifugal supercharger of the late fifties or early sixties generally produced maximum boost at something between 25,000 and 30,000 rpm, and typically had to reach at least two-thirds of that speed to make even half its rated boost. Positive-displacement superchargers, like the Roots-type Detroit Diesel (GMC) blowers beloved of drag racers or the vane-type superchargers offered in this era by Judson and Shorrock, were a little stronger than a centrifugal supercharger at low speeds, but suffered substantial air leakage that greatly limited their volumetric efficiency at lower rpm. Moreover, with any crankshaft-driven supercharger, the need for step-up gearing forced a tradeoff between boost at lower engine speeds and the real danger of overspeeding the compressor at higher rpm. The larger Shorrock superchargers of the fifties, for instance, were redlined at only 5,000 rpm! McCulloch tried to mitigate this problem by using variable-speed or variable-ratio drive systems to provide the necessary step-up gearing, but their complexity made them maintenance-intensive and rather fragile.

With a turbocharger, the relationship between engine speed and boost is more flexible. The boost generated by any centrifugal compressor depends largely on the tip speed of the impeller, which is a function of the impeller diameter and the square of its angular velocity. A larger-diameter impeller produces more boost at any given speed, so crankshaft-driven centrifugal superchargers for passenger car applications generally use relatively large impellers to keep rotational speeds (and the need for step-up gearing) within reason. Since a turbocharger has no mechanical connection to the crankshaft and no need for step-up gearing, it can produce the same maximum boost with a smaller-diameter impeller rotating at higher speeds; minimizing the diameters of the impeller and the turbine significantly reduces the polar moment of inertia of the rotating assembly, which makes the turbocharger more responsive to changes in throttle position.

Turbocharging also offers another compelling advantage over mechanically driven superchargers: It’s possible to maintain constant boost over a fairly broad range of engine speeds by controlling the flow of exhaust gas to the turbine. There are several ways to accomplish that, but the most common control system is a wastegate, a valve that allows some of the exhaust gas to bypass the turbine if manifold pressure or boost pressure exceeds a certain threshold. Using a wastegate obviously doesn’t prevent turbo lag, but once the turbine reaches the speed necessary to produce the desired maximum boost (a point known as control intercept), the wastegate will hold boost pressure at that level all the way up to the turbine’s maximum operating speed, with far less mechanical complexity than a variable-speed drive mechanism for a crankshaft-driven supercharger.

Oldsmobile and AiResearch

Gil Burrell clearly considered all these points and saw much greater potential than Boegehold had three and a half years earlier. By using a wastegate-controlled turbocharger and limiting maximum boost to a modest 5 psi (0.34 bar), it would be possible to set a very low control intercept — as low as 2,000 rpm at full throttle — and maintain that boost through almost half the engine’s useful rev range. This approach wouldn’t provide a huge gain in peak horsepower, but it would produce a healthy increase in torque at the engine speeds more commonly used in normal driving, and the relatively low boost requirements could easily be met with a small, responsive turbocharger. Better still, a turbocharger installation along these lines would impose only modest penalties in fuel economy and engine weight. In principle, therefore, a turbocharger could be made to provide many of the advantages of a larger-displacement engine in a lighter, more compact, more fuel efficient package.

Using a turbocharged engine in this way is now very common, but it was an unusual idea in 1959, although there was some precedent in Studebaker-Packard’s recent use of a 289 cu. in. (4,737 cc) Studebaker V-8 equipped with a McCulloch VS57 supercharger to replace the departed Packard V-8. Unsurprisingly, none of the turbochargers then available commercially in the U.S. — all or almost all of which were intended for diesel engines — were really suitable for what Burrell had in mind. Oldsmobile therefore approached AiResearch about developing a new turbocharger for this application.

The Garrett Corporation had originally established its AiResearch Manufacturing subsidiary (styled until 1942 with a lowercase “r”) in 1939 to develop cabin pressurization systems and other related products. In 1950, the parent corporation, seeking to diversify beyond the aerospace industry, had directed AiResearch to develop turbochargers for commercial applications, beginning with Caterpillar Tractor diesels. In 1955, Garrett reorganized the turbocharger business line as the AiResearch Industrial Division, headed by Wilton E. Parker, who had previously worked on Garrett’s gas turbine program. The new division got off to a rocky start: Developing a commercially viable turbocharger turned out to have a painful learning curve, and the early Caterpillar turbos had been troublesome, requiring considerable work (and no small amount of patient client cooperation) to resolve. Turbocharger sales were modest, and the division didn’t turn a profit until late 1958. Nonetheless, AiResearch remained prominent in the field, thanks in no small part to engineers like turbine research director Werner Theodor von der Nüll (sometimes anglicized as “von der Nuell”), who was considered a leading expert on supercharging and had presented a number of much-cited papers on that subject.

We don’t know what kind of production volume the Oldsmobile proposal envisioned, but it appears it wasn’t much — Wilton Parker was dubious that the project would do much for his division’s still-shaky bottom line, even though GM was offering to underwrite the engineering and tooling costs. GM also insisted that AiResearch provide an extremely thorough breakdown of production costs, including not only the costs of parts and tooling, but also factors like the amount of machine time involved in each manufacturing operation, a level of detail AiResearch had never attempted to calculate before. However, GM was willing to pay for a comprehensive cost analysis study to develop the data they wanted (perhaps in anticipation of eventually bringing turbocharger production in-house, although that never happened), and the prospect of gaining even a small foothold in the auto industry was attractive, so Parker finally agreed.

An essential step in any successful supercharger application, and one where most aftermarket superchargers are necessarily a compromise, is properly matching the blower to the engine. To give AiResearch a head start in this area, Oldsmobile arranged for the GM Engineering Staff to conduct a series of bench tests on a Rockette V-8 fitted with a Roots-type supercharger. Armed with this data, AiResearch was able to deliver the first prototype turbocharger in March 1960. Oldsmobile engineers tested the turbo on the dynamometer and in a test rig in April and May. In June, they fitted the turbocharger to an early production aluminum V-8 and installed it in an F-85 prototype for testing at the GM Proving Grounds and on the road.

The rotating assembly of the AiResearch T-5 turbocharger was quite small, with a turbine just 2.4 inches (61.0 mm) in diameter and a 2.5-inch (63.5-mm) diameter impeller. As a result, its polar moment of inertia was only about one-tenth that of the Schwitzer D4U turbocharger used on the Research Laboratories’ experimental Oldsmobile Super 88, which had a 4-inch (101.6-mm) impeller. (For comparison, the impeller of the various McCulloch and Paxton superchargers had a diameter of 5.78 inches (146.8 mm).)

To withstand exhaust gas temperatures that could reach up to 1,550 degrees Fahrenheit (843 degrees Celsius), the turbine of the AiResearch turbocharger was cast of Haynes Stellite Alloy No. 31 (HS-31), an extremely hard alloy of cobalt, chromium, nickel, and tungsten that had been used for aircraft turbo-superchargers since around 1941. The compressor impeller, whose temperature requirements were less extreme, was die-cast aluminum. Turbine and impeller were mounted on a 0.5-inch (12.7-mm) diameter shaft 5.75 inches (146 mm) long, running on two aluminum sleeve bearings, with the turbine and impeller sides separated by a cast iron housing that acted as a heat shield.

Boost pressure was regulated by a poppet-valve wastegate, controlled by spring-loaded diaphragms in the boost control assembly that sensed compressor inlet and outlet pressures. The spring preload determined how much outlet pressure could exceed inlet pressure before the pressure on the primary diaphragm would begin to open the wastegate bypass valve, progressively reducing the amount of exhaust gas entering the turbine. This didn’t cut off boost completely; rather, the wastegate served to relieve excess boost pressure, allowing boost to equal but not exceed the desired maximum value.

While crankshaft-driven superchargers typically placed the compressor “upstream” of the carburetor(s), in what was sometimes known as a blow-through arrangement (because it blew pressurized air into the carburetor), Oldsmobile decided to position the turbocharger impeller “downstream” of the carburetor (a draw-through arrangement). In this way, the pressure drop through the carburetor would help to keep the impeller’s idle speed high, and the compressor outlet could be positioned as close as possible to the intake manifold so that pressurized air-fuel mixture would have a relatively straight shot into the intake runners. Using a draw-through impeller also avoided the need for an air box to seal the carburetor.

For the turbocharged engine, Oldsmobile eschewed the downdraft carburetors of the normally aspirated Rockette engines (and most contemporary American V-8s) in favor of a side-draft carburetor, selected mostly for packaging reasons. Existing horizontal carbs didn’t have enough venturi area, so GM’s Rochester Products Division developed an all-new 1.50-inch (38.1-mm) single-barrel side-draft carburetor, the Rochester Model RC. This was of more or less conventional design except that it had no throttle butterfly valve. Instead, there was a separate horizontal throttle body, connecting the carburetor to the compressor inlet, which contained primary and auxiliary throttle valves, the latter used under certain conditions as an additional boost limiter.

Production Approval

We should reiterate at this point that although the GM Research Laboratories had conducted the preliminary research and the corporate Engineering Staff had provided some technical support, the Oldsmobile turbocharger program, known internally as XP-200, was very much an Olds project, not some corporate initiative awarded to (or foisted on) the division. Indeed, the only reason Oldsmobile pursued the idea at all was that Gil Burrell saw promise in it and Olds chief engineer Harold Metzel agreed that it was worth investing some of the division’s not-unlimited development resources.

It eventually fell to Oldsmobile general manager Jack Wolfram to convince corporate management to approve the XP-200 program. Wolfram was not a notably progressive executive, and he bore no small responsibility for the staid character of contemporary Oldsmobile cars. However, the turbocharger project promised to expand the utility of the Rockette V-8 for a fraction of the cost of developing and tooling an all-new engine, and perhaps reclaim some divisional pride in the bargain. Oldsmobile staff and executives were apparently rather sensitive about the aluminum V-8’s Buick origins (having their own engines was an important part of each division’s identity in those days), and Oldsmobile’s reputation for advanced engineering had been slipping of late. The most recent noteworthy innovations the division had fielded were the J-2 triple-carburetor setup, discontinued in 1958 in the wake of the AMA racing ban (and wholly overshadowed by Pontiac’s similar but better-promoted Tri-Power option), and the short-lived and troublesome “New-Matic” air suspension system, which had also been dropped. Oldsmobile had some more interesting projects in development — the division’s work on front-wheel drive began in this same period — but none was ready for public airing.

Another factor was the recent debut (in May 1960) of the Corvair Monza. This sporty version of the rear-engine Corvair featured bucket seats, a novelty in those days, and was shortly offered with a higher-output engine (RPO 649) and a new four-speed gearbox. The Monza had been an immediate hit, taking even Chevrolet by surprise and demonstrating that there was a largely untapped market for sporty compacts. Oldsmobile’s immediate response would be the F-85 Cutlass, which would arrive in April 1961, with bucket seats and a four-barrel premium-fuel Rockette V-8. Judging by Burrell’s subsequent comments, we suspect that Wolfram used the popularity of the Monza to help “sell” the turbocharger project, presumably pitching it as a kind of sportier Super-Cutlass.

The Oldsmobile turbocharger program received production approval in the summer of 1960, but testing of what Oldsmobile marketers dubbed the “Turbo-Rocket” V-8 continued through early 1961. Repeated full-power dynamometer runs found that the aluminum V-8 withstood the additional heat and pressure of turbocharging relatively well, but Oldsmobile made some changes for greater durability, fitting engines slated for turbocharging with heavy-duty pistons, aluminumized intake valves and valve seats, longer bolts for the main bearing caps, and Moraine M-400 aluminum inserts for the main and connecting rod bearings. (These parts were added during Oldsmobile’s engine assembly process, and were not shared by Buick, which never offered a turbocharged version of its aluminum Fireball V-8.) To deal with the greatly increased blow-by that accompanied boosted operation, Oldsmobile also equipped turbocharged V-8s with positive crankcase ventilation, not yet a universal feature on American engines (although they would shortly become mandatory in California and New York).

Other refinements to the production turbocharged engine included a higher-capacity cross-flow radiator; a bypass fuel filter, larger fuel lines, and a fuel return line to handle the greater fuel flow requirements; a higher-voltage ignition coil; cooler spark plugs; and a revised distributor advance curve. All Turbo-Rocket engines also had a vacuum-controlled throttle stop (normally fitted only to F-85s with Hydra-Matic) and a damper on the throttle linkage to slow the closure of the primary throttle valve.

There were also a variety of preproduction changes to the turbocharger itself, which was revised to incorporate an integral wastegate, reverse the direction of shaft rotation (mostly to allow the hot exhaust pipes to be mounted farther from the underside of the hood), and adopt a reshaped diffuser with a water jacket for better cold-start performance. AiResearch finalized the turbo design that spring.

Chevrolet Turbocharges the Corvair

By that time, news of the Oldsmobile turbocharger was beginning to spread, both in the industry and within GM. In June 1961, the project unexpectedly became a race, as Chevrolet began a crash program to add a turbocharger to the Corvair.

The ostensible rationale for turbocharging the Corvair’s air-cooled “Turbo-Air” flat six was similar to the rationale for turbocharging the F-85: There were limits to how much Chevrolet could increase the displacement of the air-cooled flat-six engine — at that time 145 cu. in. (2,372 cc) — and extracting more horsepower risked hurting driveability. As it was, the RPO 649 High Performance Turbo-Air engine had rather racy valve timing and a noticeably lumpy idle.

During this period, there was a good deal of aftermarket hop-up equipment available for the Corvair, including at least three different engine-driven supercharger kits. Chevrolet engineers claimed to have considered and rejected a crankshaft-driven supercharger, saying it would have consumed too much power, taken up too much space, and coexisted too uneasily with the blower belt that drove the engine’s cooling fan. There was probably something to those arguments, but it also can’t have escaped Chevrolet that there was the possibility of a world first.

The Corvair turbo package, developed by engineers Robert E. Thoreson and James O. Brafford, bore only the broadest resemblance to its Oldsmobile rival. Chevrolet used a larger turbocharger, supplied by the Thompson Products Valve Division of Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc. (later TRW, Inc.), with a 2.97-inch (75.4-mm) turbine driving a 3.00-inch (76.2-mm) centrifugal impeller, drawing through a 1.31-inch (33.33-mm) Carter Model YH side-draft carburetor and producing maximum boost of 11 psi (0.76 bar) from about 3,500 to 4,500 rpm. The turbocharger had no wastegate, boost being regulated solely by the restriction of the single-throat carburetor and dual-outlet muffler.

The turbocharged engine combined the hotter camshaft from the RPO 649 engine with the lower 8.0:1 compression ratio of the base Corvair six, and incorporated a host of modifications to enable the air-cooled engine to survive the greatly increased temperatures and pressures that accompanied turbocharging: a nitrocarburized (Tufftrided) chromium steel forged crankshaft; exhaust valves of Nimonic 80A nickel-chromium alloy with chromium-silicon steel valve stems and aluminum bronze valve guides; reinforced pistons with chrome-plated compression rings; stronger connecting rods; and an oil separator to deal with the increased blow-by. Because prolonged periods at maximum boost could increase cylinder head temperatures precipitously, Chevrolet also opted to include a cylinder head temperature gauge as standard equipment on turbocharged cars.

Perhaps the Corvair engine’s most unusual feature was in its distributor, which provided an initial spark advance of 24 degrees before top dead center (BTDC) and replaced the usual vacuum advance with a pressure-controlled retarding device that could retard the spark timing by up to 9 degrees under boost, to prevent detonation.

The Oldsmobile F-85 Jetfire and Chevrolet Corvair Monza Spyder

Oldsmobile officially announced its turbocharged engine when the 1962 models debuted in the fall of 1961, but production was delayed until spring. Chevrolet beat Oldsmobile to the punch both in offering turbocharged preview cars for the press to sample and in delivering production models in dealerships, albeit only by about two weeks. Both cars went on sale in April 1962, the world’s first turbocharged production cars.

Oldsmobile and Chevrolet took different approaches to marketing their respective turbocharged engines. Chevrolet made the turbocharger part of a new “Spyder” option package (RPO 690) for the Corvair Monza, and initially required buyers to also order a number of other performance options. Oldsmobile initially told the automotive press the turbocharged engine would be available as an option on all F-85 models, but when it finally arrived in showrooms, it was offered only on a new top-of-the-line F-85 model, called Jetfire.

Where the Spyder package was available on Monza coupes and convertibles, the F-85 Jetfire was sold only as a two-door hardtop — the sole pillarless hardtop in the F-85 line — with a list price of $3,049, $355 more than a Cutlass coupe. The price premium wasn’t outlandish compared to contemporary aftermarket supercharger kits, which typically cost at least $300 (not including installation, if you weren’t equipped to do it yourself), but it was still a lot of money for 1962.

Aside from its hardtop roof, the F-85 Jetfire was identified by dual wind splits on the hood, brushed aluminum side trim, distinctive emblems, and dual exhaust outlets. Inside, the Jetfire was largely similar to the F-85 Cutlass, with a deluxe interior featuring bucket seats, “Morrocceen” vinyl upholstery, full carpeting, and chrome highlights. Standard equipment included a center console, on which was mounted a “Turbo-Charger” gauge whose needle swung between green “Economy” and red “Power” quadrants to indicate when the engine was operating under boost. The gauge was more a gimmick than a useful instrument, and its position and angle made it difficult to see while driving. Unlike the Spyder package, which included a new instrument panel to accommodate the head temperature gauge and a tachometer, the Jetfire made do with the standard F-85 dashboard, which remained free of distracting instrumentation other than the speedometer and fuel gauge.

Like any F-85, the Jetfire’s standard transmission was a column-shifted three-speed manual (a Warner Gear T-85 unit with unsynchronized low), although very few cars were so equipped — according to Jetfire expert Jim Noel, just 16 ’62 Jetfires and a further 45 ’63s had the manual three-speed. Sometime after launch, a floor-shifted four-speed manual transmission (the ubiquitous Warner Gear T-10 box with its “wide-ratio” gearset) became optional, listing for $199.80. However, most Jetfires had automatic transmission, the unloved three-speed Hydra-Matic, a $189.00 option.

(We’ve observed that there’s some argument about whether the Hydra-Matic used in the Jetfire and other Y-body Oldsmobiles had three or four speeds. The answer is “three,” although 1962 Oldsmobile brochures and factory literature described the Hydra-Matic as a four-stage (“4-S”) transmission, arguing that the small amount of additional torque multiplication the “Accel-A-Rotor” in the fluid coupling provided when starting from rest in first (or reverse) constituted an additional “stage.” By that logic, Chevrolet’s two-speed Powerglide, whose torque converter provided additional torque multiplication in both low and high gears, could also be considered a four-speed automatic!)

The Jetfire came standard with the same 3.36:1 axle ratio used on the Cutlass, although the taller 3.08:1 “expressway” axle used on the manually shifted F-85 was theoretically optional, and an anti-spin differential was available for an extra $43.04. Standard tires were 6.50-13, although 7.00-13 and 6.00-15 tires were optional. Suspension and brakes were standard F-85 fare, and unless you talked a dealer into installing the police car chassis parts, the only heavy-duty option available was stiffer rear springs, intended for trailer towing.

Typically for this era, Jetfire buyers paid extra for features like backup lights, two-speed windshield wipers and windshield washer, and outside mirrors. There was also the usual range of options, including power steering, power brakes, power windows, tinted windows (either all around or just the windshield), air conditioning, and radio. A fully loaded Jetfire listed for almost $4,100, about as much as a well-equipped 1962 Chevrolet Impala Super Sport with a 409 cu. in. (6,702 cc) engine.

The Turbo-Rocket Engine

Naturally, the principal attraction of the F-85 Jetfire was not the tinsel, but the “Turbo-Rocket” engine, identified by a “T” suffix in the engine serial number and immediately recognizable thanks to its distinctive side-mounted air cleaner and the turbocharger’s prominent exhaust inlet and outlet pipes.

The Turbo-Rocket engine had the same 10.25:1 compression ratio as the four-barrel Cutlass engine and used the same camshaft as its normally aspirated siblings. However, despite the single-throat carburetor, the turbocharged Jetfire engine claimed 215 gross horsepower (160.3 kW) and 300 lb-ft (406.7 N-m) of torque. This was 30 hp (22.4 kW) more than the Cutlass engine and 65 hp (48.4 kW) more than the Corvair Monza Spyder, which claimed 150 gross horsepower (111.9 kW) and 210 lb-ft (284.7 N-m) of torque, although the Corvair engine had a modest edge in specific output: 1.036 hp/cubic inch (63.24 hp/liter), versus 0.999 hp/cubic inch (60.94 hp/liter) for the Olds.

With a light foot on the accelerator, it was possible to drive the Jetfire with little or no boost. At idle, engine exhaust flow was barely enough to overcome the turbine’s inertia, and at “road load” (i.e., in steady-speed top-gear cruising), the turbocharger loafed at around 3,000 rpm at 30 mph (48 km/h), only exceeding the 10,000-rpm mark above about 50 mph (80 km/h). However, the little turbine responded swiftly to a tap on the loud pedal, accelerating by as much as 30,000 rpm in less than a second. With a more aggressive throttle foot, boost pressure began to build by as little as 1,200 engine rpm. Upon achieving maximum boost — officially 5 psi (0.34 bar), “5 to 6 psi” (0.34 to 0.41 bar) according to the Jetfire service manual — the wastegate would begin to open, holding boost at a more or less constant level until the turbine reached its maximum speed, which corresponded to about 4,000 engine rpm at wide open throttle. If the wastegate controller was disabled (intentionally or not) or the bypass valve failed to open properly, boost pressure exceeding 6.5 to 7.5 psi (0.45 to 0.52 bar) would close the auxiliary throttle valve, restricting airflow to the compressor.

Above 4,000 engine rpm, boost pressure would gradually taper off as engine speed increased, limited by carburetor venturi area. Although the Jetfire engine would rev to 5,000 rpm or more, there was little to be gained by doing so, as power fell off sharply above about 4,600 rpm. This was to some extent by design; the small carburetor’s limited high-rpm breathing made it difficult to overspeed the turbocharger. (The turbine’s normal maximum speed was 96,000 rpm, but the rotating assembly was balanced for up to 100,000 rpm, and its burst speed was 150,000 rpm, providing a greater safety margin than most crankshaft-driven superchargers of the time.)

As we noted earlier, this boost curve was designed to emphasize midrange torque, which it did. Oldsmobile’s published torque curves (which unfortunately we don’t have in reproducible form to include here) indicate that at wide open throttle, the Turbo-Rocket engine’s gross torque output was about equal to that of the normally aspirated Rockette engines just off idle and surpassed them by about 1,400 rpm, cresting in a fat swell from the arrival of maximum boost around 2,100–2,200 rpm to the 3,200 rpm gross torque peak. Even as torque began to decline at higher rpm, the Turbo-Rocket retained a significant torque advantage over both the two-barrel and four-barrel normally aspirated engines. By contrast, the Corvair Monza Spyder engine didn’t reach 1 psi (0.07 bar) boost until 2,500 rpm, and its gross torque peak was a rather lonely spire, climbing sharply to a narrow peak between 3,200 and 3,400 rpm before dropping off almost as precariously. The Corvair engine could rev higher, but the turbocharged Oldsmobile engine had more torque over virtually the entire operating range, meaning more horsepower at all speeds.

Nonetheless, the drop-off in power at higher rpm made clear that the Jetfire’s “1 horsepower per cubic inch” gross output — at 4,600 rpm — was strictly a paper rating. In the April 1963 issue of Motor Trend, editor and engineer Roger Huntington presented the results of a revealing series of tests conducted by drag racer Dick Griffin, using a four-speed 1963 F-85 Jetfire provided by Demmer Tool & Die Company in Lansing (which would later assemble the 1968 Hurst/Olds) and taking not only acceleration times, but also accelerometer readings that enabled Huntington to calculate actual horsepower at the clutch. In stock form, Huntington estimated that the Jetfire engine had an as-installed output of 155 hp (115.6 kW) at 3,800 rpm with 5.5 psi (0.38 bar) maximum boost, the latter confirmed with a calibrated manifold pressure gauge. Griffin and Huntington subsequently learned that Oldsmobile had fitted some early 1963 Jetfires with the 2.00-inch (50.8-mm) tailpipe used with the four-barrel Cutlass engine rather than the 2.25-inch (57.2-mm) exhaust pipe used on the 1962 Jetfire, only to revert to the wider pipe as a running change after realizing that the narrow ones cost too much power. Fitting the wider tailpipe to the Demmer car added what Huntington calculated was an additional 5 hp (3.7 kW).

Based on this data, we would estimate that the net output of a healthy stock Jetfire fresh out of the showroom was between 150 and 160 horsepower (112 and 119 kW) at 3,800 to 4,000 rpm. This was not as much stronger than the Corvair Monza Spyder as the engines’ respective gross ratings would suggest; a Spyder engine in good tune had at least 120 to 125 net horsepower (89.5 to 93.2 kW). However, we would estimate that the Jetfire made at least 15 net hp (11 kW) more than the normally aspirated four-barrel Cutlass engine, and substantially more torque as well.

Huntington unfortunately didn’t calculate net torque curves for the engine in Griffin’s Jetfire, but 155 hp (115.6 kW) at 3,800 rpm would require 214 lb-ft (290 N-m) of torque at that speed, which was probably at least 600 to 800 rpm beyond the turbocharged engine’s torque peak. Our very tentative guess — which we must emphasize is our surmise, not Huntington’s — is that the Turbo-Rocket engine’s net torque curve was approximately the same shape as the gross torque curve, peaking at perhaps 250 lb-ft (340 N-m) at something between 2,800 and 3,000 rpm, which was the operating regime for which the turbocharger was optimized. (As a point of interest, 250 lb-ft (340 N-m) was also the nominal input torque capacity of the light-duty Hydra-Matic transmission used on the F-85, although the units used on Jetfires had a somewhat higher torque capacity.)

Oldsmobile noted that all aluminum Rockette V-8s required a longer-than-usual break-in period (a consequence of the hard iron cylinder liners), and sure enough, Griffin found that about 3,000 miles (4,800 km) of wringing out provided a noticeable increase in engine power. He also tinkered with the boost controller by adding shims to the spring that controlled the wastegate bypass valve, a warranty-voiding modification that raised maximum boost pressure to 6.5 psi (0.45 bar) — as much as the system would permit without disabling all the various boost-limiting features — and increased net output at the flywheel to an estimated 175 hp (130.5 kW) at 4,000 rpm. That output would require 230 lb-ft (312 N-m) of torque at 4,000 rpm, which suggests a higher net torque peak (perhaps as much as 270 to 275 lb-ft (365 to 373 N-m)) and a commensurately fatter torque curve. However, even with that modification and running with open exhausts, the turbocharged engine was still 10 hp (7.4 kW) shy of its gross power rating.

Nevertheless, for 1962, these were quite decent figures for a mildly tuned street engine of this displacement, and the Turbo-Rocket engine remained smooth, quiet, and flexible, displaying almost none of the turbo lag that afflicted the peaky turbocharged Corvair engine. In most respects, the turbocharger installation made a 215 cu. in. (3.5-liter) engine perform like a normally aspirated 300 cu. in. (4.9-liter) V-8, while adding just 36 lb (16.3 kg) — 11 percent — to the weight of the engine. Also, even at its maximum speed, the AiResearch turbocharger consumed only 6 hp (4.4 kW), less than half as much as a Paxton-McCulloch supercharger producing about the same boost.

Turbo-Rocket Fluid Injection

Based on all that, the Jetfire’s Turbo-Rocket engine seemed like a winner, but inevitably, there was a catch.

Compressing air increases its temperature due to adiabatic heating and friction from the compressor. When compressed air is drawn into an engine’s intake valves, the pistons compress it again during the engine’s compression stroke, which heats the air even more. This added heat increases the risk that part of the mixture will explode rather than burning in a controlled manner when the spark plugs fire, an event known as either preignition or detonation, depending on whether it occurs during or after the completion of the compression stroke. The greater the heat, and the greater the danger of preignition or detonation, either of which can cause severe engine damage.

During the period when Oldsmobile developed the Jetfire, the conventional wisdom was that in a supercharged engine, adding boost pressure of 6 psi (0.41 bar) was equivalent to a 2-point increase in compression ratio. Given the octane ratings of contemporary premium fuels, a compression ratio of 11.0:1 was considered the practical upper limit for a normally aspirated street engine running on pump gasoline, so the practical limit for a mildly supercharged street engine was about 9.0:1. Even those limits could be dicey for an engine with too much carbon buildup, requiring adjustments to ignition timing to avoid engine knock. That was why when Studebaker-Packard first offered a McCulloch supercharger as a factory option in 1957–1958, the compression ratio of the Studebaker V-8 was reduced to a mere 7.5:1, making for weak performance at lower engine speeds despite seemingly robust gross ratings of 275 hp (206.1 kW) and 333 lb-ft (451 N-m) of torque.

Nevertheless, Oldsmobile had insisted on a 10.25:1 compression ratio for the Turbo-Rocket engine. One of the goals for the project was that the turbocharged engine’s off-boost performance should be at least as good as that of the regular-fuel two-barrel F-85 engine, and with the single-throat carburetor and the added back pressure and additional frictional and pumping losses created by the impeller, that would have been difficult to achieve without a higher compression ratio. Moreover, even under boost, a lower compression ratio would have involved greater sacrifices in fuel economy and torque than Oldsmobile engineers were prepared to accept. Oldsmobile apparently never actually built any low-compression turbocharged engines for evaluation, but it seems likely that such an engine would have been no more powerful than the four-barrel Cutlass engine, rendering the more complex turbocharger installation somewhat pointless.

The problem was that with such a high compression ratio, detonation became a risk with anything more than minimal boost. At full throttle, the compressor raised the intake charge temperature by up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius), and retarding the ignition timing (as Chevrolet did with the Spyder engine’s boost-operated spark control) and/or enriching the mixture to prevent detonation would have significantly reduced torque and fuel economy. This was a dilemma that had arisen during the development of supercharged aircraft engines prior to World War 2, and the solution Oldsmobile adopted would have been familiar to military flight and maintenance crews of 20 years earlier: fluid injection, using what Oldsmobile dubbed “Turbo-Rocket Fluid.”

Fluid injection, more precisely known as antidetonant injection (ADI), was first tried on aircraft engines prior to and during WW1, and again in the early thirties, but the availability of higher-octane aviation fuels had delayed its widespread adoption until WW2. By 1941, however, fluid injection systems were being hastily added to many military aircraft engines as a way to extract more horsepower for takeoff and in what U.S. armed forces called “war emergency power” mode. After the war, ADI had seen some use in civilian aircraft, and there were a number of attempts to market fluid injection systems for car and truck use, the earliest of which was probably the Thompson Products Vitameter, first advertised in 1945. The GM Research Laboratories’ 1958 experimental Oldsmobile engine had also used fluid injection to control detonation.

ADI is often called “water injection,” but while pure water is effective as an internal coolant, its high freezing point makes it impractical for many ADI applications. Antidetonant fluids generally include least 30 percent ethyl or methyl alcohol, which isn’t as effective as water as a coolant, but usefully lowers the freezing point of the fluid and allows greater detonation-limited power output. During WW2, methanol was preferred over ethanol, although both were used, and it wasn’t uncommon to also add small amounts of soluble lubricants or anti-corrosion additives to help protect rubber hoses and seals from the alcohol’s corrosive effects. Despite its silly name, Oldsmobile’s Turbo-Rocket Fluid was typical of wartime antidetonant fluids: a 50–50 mixture of distilled water and methyl alcohol with a small amount of corrosion inhibitor. (For comparison, the Thompson Vitameter used “Vitol,” later renamed “Vitane,” an 15-85 water-alcohol mixture supplemented with soluble oil and a few cubic centimeters of tetraethyl lead.)

AiResearch was originally supposed to develop the ADI system along with the Jetfire turbocharger, but the initial version was unsatisfactory, so the final system was designed by Rochester along with the special Model RC carburetor. Boost pressure exceeding about 1.0 psi (0.07 bar) would pressurize the antidetonant fluid reservoir and the underside of a float chamber in the fluid control valve assembly. This forced fluid into the float chamber and applied boost pressure to the diaphragm under the float, unseating two diaphragm-operated check balls and allowing intake vacuum to draw a small amount of Turbo-Rocket Fluid through the fluid outlet in the throttle bore, below the primary throttle valve. (Pedants may wish to note that this is technically carburetion rather than injection, and indeed, some sources describe the Jetfire throttle bore as a “water carburetor.”)

Under boost, the metering system added antidetonant fluid to the mixture at a rate of about one-tenth the rate of fuel flow. The fluid acted as a coolant, absorbing heat to prevent detonation. Contrary to what you might assume, diluting the air-fuel mixture in this way actually added 5 or 6 hp (3.7 to 4.4 kW), which more or less equaled the power consumed by the turbocharger’s additional back pressure. Fluid injection also slightly reduced on-boost fuel consumption.

The rate at which the Turbo-Rocket Fluid was consumed varied considerably with driving style. With the 5-quart (4.7-liter) reservoir, even an aggressive driver would likely have enough fluid for at least a tank or two of fuel. In gentler driving, the fluid supply might conceivably last up to 8,000 miles (12,800 km). (By comparison, a turbo-supercharged WW2 fighter engine could consume a 15-gallon (57-liter) supply of antidetonant fluid in just five minutes of war emergency power.) A low-fluid warning light on the otherwise useless console-mounted Turbo-Charger Gauge illuminated when the reservoir fell below about 15 percent of its capacity. There was a bracket in the engine compartment for carrying an extra bottle in case you needed to top up while out of range of an Oldsmobile dealer, as the service manual warned emphatically against using substitute fluids.

If the fluid supply was exhausted, the metering float would drop to the bottom of its chamber, opening the boost limit control valve and closing the auxiliary throttle valve. This didn’t completely block airflow to the compressor, which would have stalled the engine, but it restricted airflow enough to limit boost to no more than 1.0 psi (0.07 bar), at which level Oldsmobile claimed the engine could get by indefinitely without fluid injection. As an additional precaution against overboost, the fluid reservoir pressure cap would pop open if boost pressure exceeded 6.5 to 7.5 psi (0.45 to 0.52 bar); with the pressure cap open, the fluid metering float would drop and the auxiliary throttle valve would open to restrict airflow, just as if the system were out of fluid. (The cap could be closed and reset, but doing so required opening the hood.) If the engine was shut off, a depressure valve in the throttle body was supposed to exhaust any residual pressure in the fluid reservoir within two minutes, to prevent fluid from entering the cylinders in liquid form and causing hydrostatic lock.

This was all very elaborate, but it’s difficult not to see the Turbo-Rocket Fluid system as a serious miscalculation. Even a completely automated ADI system required a reasonably advanced level of knowledge; a driver or pilot didn’t necessarily need to understand the principles involved or the finer points of the system’s operation, but they did need to grasp at least generally what the fluid injection system was for, what would happen if it failed or the fluid supply was exhausted, that the fluid reservoir needed to be periodically checked and replenished, and which reservoir to fill. It was one thing to fit an ADI system to a military aircraft or race car, where the system would be refilled and inspected regularly and crews could be trained in how to properly use and maintain it, but this was a lot to ask of an average passenger car owner of no particular mechanical knowledge or aptitude.

Granted, cars of this era required far more regular maintenance than modern automobiles do, so Oldsmobile may have rationalized the ADI system as no worse than an engine requiring a quart or two of oil between changes, which was considered normal at the time. However, even an owner who had their car regularly serviced by the dealer might still run out of fluid at an unexpected moment, and we doubt the typical service station attendant of the time would have thought to ask, “Top up yer Turbo-Rocket Fluid?” while wiping the windshield and checking the oil.

Given the design parameters for the Jetfire, Oldsmobile would probably have been better off compromising a bit on the compression ratio and adding an air-to-air or air-to-water intercooler to reduce the temperature of the compressed mixture before it entered the intake manifold. Intercoolers were not new technology; they had been used for decades with other types of air compressors, and both Büchi and Rateau had noted that it might be desirable to use an additional radiator to cool the compressed intake charge. Intercoolers had been common on supercharged aircraft engines since the twenties, despite significant penalties in weight and aerodynamic drag, and were an essential feature of WW2 turbo-superchargers. AiResearch was certainly familiar with charge cooling, having built aftercoolers for cabin pressurization systems since the late thirties and intercoolers for aircraft engines since around 1941.

As far as we’ve been able to determine, Oldsmobile either never considered the possibility of intercooling or else dismissed it at an early conceptual stage. Packaging would probably have been a concern, as Olds engineers were very keen to minimize the size and weight of the turbocharger installation (for obvious reasons, given the dimensions of the F-85 engine bay), and they wanted to keep the impeller as close as possible to the intake manifold to reduce lag. The ADI setup scored well in those respects, but for the kind of car the Jetfire was intended to be and the kind of performance it offered, the fluid injection system was a mistake — both too much of a gimmick and not enough of one. It would become the Jetfire’s Achilles’ heel.

F-85 Jetfire Performance

Published performance figures for the F-85 Jetfire fell into two general categories: preview drives of early factory demonstration cars on the GM Proving Grounds in Milford, Michigan, which were encouraging, and independent tests conducted in the real world, which tended to be disappointing.

Preview tests consistently reported 0–60 mph (0–97 km/h) times of about 8.5 seconds, which was brisk for this era, if not in the same league as the hottest big-engine full-size cars of the time. Probably the most complete summation of these preview drives was presented in the June 1962 issue of Car Life, whose results included the following figures for a 1962 Jetfire with Hydra-Matic, the standard 3.36:1 axle and 6.50-13 tires, a curb weight of 2,860 lb (1,297 kg), and a test weight of 3,160 lb (1,433 kg):

• 0–30 mph [0–48 km/h]: 2.9 seconds
• 0–60 mph [0–97 km/h]: 8.5 seconds
• 0–100 mph [0–160 km/h]: 28.2 seconds
• Standing quarter mile, elapsed time: 16.5 seconds
• Standing quarter mile, trap speed: 80 mph [129 km/h]

Those figures made the Jetfire substantially quicker than the regular Oldsmobile F-85 Cutlass with its normally aspirated four-barrel V-8, examples of which Oldsmobile helpfully provided for comparison. The Cutlass, which had the same transmission, gearing, and tires as the Jetfire and weighed 40 lb (18.1 kg) less, needed 10.9 seconds to reach 60 mph (97 km/h) and 37.0 seconds to reach 100 mph (160 km/h).

The Car Life editors didn’t record an observed top speed for the Jetfire, but asserted that it would reach 107 mph (172 km/h) “under favorable circumstances.” Unless “favorable circumstances” included different gearing, we’re skeptical, since reaching that speed with the 3.36:1 axle would have required the engine to pull to 5,100 rpm in high. Most contemporary performance tests found the Turbo-Rocket engine ran out of breath in top gear at approximately the same point as the normally aspirated Cutlass (if not sooner, given the smaller carburetor), giving the Jetfire a similar top speed: around 103–104 mph (165–167 km/h).

Subsequent tests of the production Jetfire, farther away from the ministrations of Oldsmobile engineers, found its acceleration notably less impressive, as summarized in the following table. (Note that all metric equivalencies in brackets are our calculations, not included in the original test results.)

Selected 1962–1963 Oldsmobile F-85 Jetfire Performance Figures

Magazine	Issue	Transmission	Axle Ratio	Curb Weight	Test Weight	0–30 mph [0–48 km/h]	0–60 mph [0–97 km/h]	Quarter Mile [400 m] Elapsed Time	Quarter Mile [400 m] Trap Speed
Motor Trend	Sep. 1962	Hydra-Matic	3.36:1	2,856 lb [1,295 kg]	3,250 lb [1,474 kg]	3.7 seconds	10.2 seconds	18.7 seconds	80 mph [129 km/h]
Car Life	April 1963	4-speed	3.36:1 (see Note 1)	2,930 lb [1,329 kg]	3,290 lb [1,492 kg]	3.2 seconds	9.8 seconds	17.1 seconds	80 mph [129 km/h]
Motor Trend	April 1963	4-speed	3.36:1 (see Note 2)	2,880 lb [1,306 kg] (see Note 2)	3,050 lb [1,384 kg] (see Note 2)	3.5 seconds	9.1 seconds	17.0 seconds	83 mph [134 km/h]

• Note 1: This second Car Life test car had 6.50-14 tires, a $13.45 option on 1963 Jetfires without air conditioning, which should have slightly reduced (numerically) its overall gearing compared to the standard 6.50-13 tires, although that difference wasn’t reflected in the spec sheet’s calculated data.
• Note 2: Dick Griffin tested this car with non-stock 7.00-14 tires (which also would have slightly reduced overall gearing compared to the standard 6.50-13 tires), and with only a half-tank of fuel; weights with a full tank would have been about 50 lb (22.7 kg) greater. The listed acceleration figures are for his initial test run, without additional break-in miles or the subsequent “adjustments” to the boost controller.

Both the 1962 Motor Trend and 1963 Car Life reviews complained about the disappointing acceleration and wondered if their Jetfire test cars weren’t producing their full rated power. However, it’s interesting to note that their quarter mile trap speeds (the speed at which the car crossed the quarter mile line) were identical to the earlier preview drive, which, given the cars’ similar weight and gearing, suggests that their actual horsepower was probably about the same. (Griffin’s car was 3 mph (5 km/h) faster through the quarter, but its test weight was about 200 lb (90 kg) lighter, which likely accounted for most of the difference.)

Why were the preview cars quicker? They clearly had the benefit of more thorough break-in — the subsequent road test cars all had significantly less mileage — but it’s also possible the Oldsmobile press preview cars had had some of the same kind of boost controller fiddling Dick Griffin’s car later received, which would have provided a noticeable increase in torque (and thus stronger acceleration) through most of the rev range. Any such adjustment might have still technically been within allowable specification, and in any case wouldn’t have been detectable without installing a proper manifold pressure gauge, so it would rate at least a B+ in the realm of creative road test preparation, a minor art form in this period.

Even with the preview cars, testers complained that performance was hampered by the lethargy of the optional Hydra-Matic transmission, which was fitted to more than 80 percent of F-85 Jetfire production. The units fitted to Jetfires were supposed to be recalibrated to suit the turbocharged engine, with different shift points, higher line pressure, and a different band servo, but the results don’t appear to have been any better than the standard Hydra-Matic, whose slow shifts and sluggish response were a frequent complaint among F-85 owners as well as contemporary road testers, who preferred the four-speed manual. In practice, the latter didn’t make a dramatic difference in overall performance, although it did provide better quarter mile elapsed times than did the automatic.

With either the four-speed or Hydra-Matic, the F-85 Jetfire was quicker than the Corvair Monza Spyder at most legal speeds and much easier to drive. Despite a 300 lb (135 kg) weight advantage and shorter gearing, the Spyder engine’s turbo lag and narrow power band put it at a significant disadvantage at lower speeds, although a well-tuned, competently driven stock Spyder might conceivably edge out the bigger, more powerful Jetfire through the quarter mile. The turbocharged Corvair also had a higher top speed than the Jetfire, thanks to superior aerodynamics and a higher rev limit. A 1963 Motor Trend road test of a Monza Spyder convertible found it needed 4.5 seconds to reach 30 mph (48 km/h) and 11.1 seconds to hit 60 mph (97 km/h), but went on to an observed maximum speed of 110 mph (177 km/h) at 5,500 rpm.

Disappointingly, while contemporary Jetfire reviews explained how the fluid injection system was designed to restrict boost if the Turbo-Rocket Fluid tank was empty, we didn’t find any published tests describing the engine’s real-world performance in that state, which seems like it would have been easy enough to arrange. Oldsmobile claimed that performance with the auxiliary throttle valve closed was similar to that of the F-85’s two-barrel regular-fuel V-8, which was adequate but uninspired. (A standard F-85 with Hydra-Matic needed 14.0 to 14.5 seconds to reach 60 mph (97 km/h), with the standing quarter mile coming up in the mid-19-second range with quarter mile trap speeds between 68 and 70 mph (110 and 113 km/h).)

As far as we could determine, only Motor Trend bothered to measure the Jetfire’s fuel economy, reporting an average of 14.1 mpg (16.7 L/100 km), compared to the 15.8 mpg (14.9 L/100 km) they recorded for an automatic Cutlass a year later. A well-broken-in four-speed car, driven with fewer attempts to test the limits of available boost, would probably do a bit better, but the F-85 Jetfire was not outstandingly thrifty, and premium fuel was required, to say nothing of the need for Turbo-Rocket Fluid. We assume that running the engine without Turbo-Rocket Fluid would return somewhat poorer fuel economy than an F-85 with the normally aspirated two-barrel engine, due to the added back pressure of the turbocharger and the additional pumping losses imposed by the auxiliary throttle valve.

Because the Jetfire package did not include any upgrades to the steering, suspension, brakes, or tires, the F-85 Jetfire handled and stopped no better than did any other F-85 or Cutlass. Unlike the swing-axle Pontiac Tempest, the F-85 was unlikely to make any unexpected moves, and it benefited from having less weight on the nose than some of its contemporaries did. However, steering was slow and vague, and the spring and damping rates were chosen for a plush ride on smooth pavement, so there just wasn’t enough body control for anything other than fairly sedate cruising. Brakes were another dynamic sore point: Y-body Oldsmobiles made do with a mere 127 square inches (819 square centimeters) of effective brake lining area, and pronounced nose dive in hard stops made it difficult for the rear brakes to do their share, resulting in long stopping distances and heavy fade even by contemporary standards.

In these respects, the F-85 Jetfire wasn’t any worse than any other F-85 or Cutlass (or for that matter the Buick Special or Skylark), but it wasn’t any better either, disappointing for an ostensibly sporty car. This was a common problem for American Supercars, whose acceleration frequently outstripped their cornering and stopping ability. Oldsmobile would do better with the subsequent A-body 4-4-2, which had a much better-sorted chassis, though not necessarily better brakes.

Turbocharged and Trouble Prone

By most accounts, the principal service complaints about the Oldsmobile F-85 Jetfire involved running out of antidetonant fluid and complaining that the engine suddenly lost power, which was easily rectified, but spoke to the dubious wisdom of using the fluid injection system in the first place. As an ultra-performance option on a fuel-injected Corvette or other high-performance sports car, it might have added to the mystique, but Oldsmobile had been clear the Jetfire wasn’t supposed to be that kind of car. Fluid injection was just too much hassle for a softly sprung compact sedan that wasn’t ultimately that much quicker than a regular four-barrel Cutlass or Buick Skylark.

Even for owners who understood how it worked, the ADI system was a frequent source of headaches. It could leak at various points, and even if there was fluid in the reservoir, various maladies could leave you without boost: a clogged fluid filter, a stuck check ball, a blocked valve, or a broken or defective pressure cap. Also, the depressure valve didn’t always do its job, which could have expensive consequences if the engine were shut off with the fluid reservoir still pressurized; Oldsmobile issued a service bulletin in June 1964 calling for the installation of a more effective external depressurization valve.

There were other weaknesses as well. Oiling was marginal for a turbocharged engine, which depended on oil flow for cooling as well as lubrication. The shaft seals didn’t always do a great job of keeping contaminants out of the shaft housing between the compressor and turbine housings, and on startup, it could take a while for engine oil to reach the turbocharger shaft. Inadequate oil flow, oil contamination, infrequent use, and disuse could all take a toll on the shaft bearings, which were designed to float on a film of oil while spinning both on the shaft and in their housings. Also, like many early turbo engines, a combination of localized high temperatures and inadequate oil circulation could cause coking, where thermal breakdown of the oil created carbon deposits in high-temperature areas. Moreover, even the normally aspirated aluminum V-8 was still not the world’s most reliable engine, particularly with regard to cooling. In that regard, the Jetfire’s higher-capacity radiator gave it at least a slight advantage over a standard F-85 or Cutlass, although coolant aeration was still a common problem, and using an incompatible antifreeze could raise all kinds of hell.

It undoubtedly didn’t help that Oldsmobile dealer service technicians weren’t necessarily any more familiar with the Turbo-Rocket engine than were Jetfire buyers. Although the Jetfire went on sale in April 1962, the factory didn’t get around to publishing a service manual supplement describing the turbocharger, fluid injection system, and Model RC carburetor until June.

Missteps like that make it easier to understand why Oldsmobile’s eventual response to many Jetfire problems was to simply remove all the turbocharger equipment and install the standard Cutlass manifolds and four-barrel carburetor — a blow to historians, but a pragmatic solution that involved only a modest sacrifice of performance. (At least a few of those cars have since reacquired turbochargers in collector hands.)

A Limited Engagement

The F-85 Jetfire was a late introduction for 1962, so production was limited, with only 3,765 units built. It returned for 1963, restyled, like the rest of the F-85, with somewhat blockier lines and larger dimensions, though it still looked a lot like a scaled-down Starfire. The 4-inch (101.6-mm) increase in overall length and 2.1-inch (53.4-mm) increase in overall width added about 70 lb (32 kg) to the curb weight, but the only mechanical changes of any note were the use of an alternator rather than the previous generator and newly optional 14-inch wheels with 6.50-14 tires. The latter didn’t do much for handling or braking grip, but increased the Jetfire’s somewhat precarious tire capacity by a useful 180 lb (81.7 kg). List price for the 1963 F-85 Jetfire dropped by $1, to $3,048.

1963 was the best year for Y-body F-85 sales, which reached 121,879 units, up 25 percent from 1962. The Cutlass, which now boasted 195 gross horsepower (145.4 kW) with Hydra-Matic, was the bestseller of the line, accounting for 53,492 units. However, Jetfire sales weren’t much greater than in the abbreviated 1962 season, totaling just 5,842 units.

Sales of the turbocharged Corvair were significantly better: The Spyder option was specified by 9,468 buyers in 1962 and 19,099 in 1963. The Monza Spyder returned for 1964, promoted from option package to model series, and sold a further 10,962 units before first-generation Corvair production came to an end in mid-1964. By that time, Corvair sales were starting to skid as buyers interested in compact sporty cars turned their attention to the new Ford Mustang, a trend the attractive second-generation Corvair, introduced for 1965, failed to reverse. However, 39,529 cars in two and a half years wasn’t bad for an expensive and high-strung package that, unlike the Jetfire, wasn’t available with automatic transmission.

The F-85 Jetfire is often characterized as a commercial debacle, but we’re not sure how many cars Olds could have built if demand had been greater. Oldsmobile didn’t represent the Jetfire as a limited edition, but we suspect that turbocharger availability effectively made it one. The AiResearch Industrial Division had built just 22,000 turbochargers between 1955 and 1960, and in 1965, after the Olds deal had wound down, the division’s total turbocharger production (for all applications) was only about 3,000 units a month, which would have supplied only a modest fraction of F-85 production.

Admittedly, with only 9,607 cars sold in a year and a half, the Jetfire would probably have been considered a sales disappointment even if the target had been only 10,000 units a year. On the other hand, the Jetfire did have considerable publicity value, and it brought Oldsmobile more attention from the enthusiast press than the division had gotten in years, so it wasn’t a total rout.

AiResearch likely didn’t make much of a profit from the Jetfire project, as Wilton Parker had feared, but the indirect benefits of the Olds deal were substantial. Aside from providing valuable experience in dealing with Detroit, the cost analysis GM had funded, which Parker said Garrett probably wouldn’t have undertaken otherwise, enabled the division to completely overhaul its accounting practices and implement much more effective cost controls, which would make AiResearch significantly more competitive in the turbocharging renaissance to come.

From Turbocharger to Turnpike Cruiser

Whatever the pros and cons of the Oldsmobile Turbo-Rocket engine, it’s very likely that the F-85 Jetfire and its turbocharged aluminum V-8 were actually doomed from the start. By the time the Jetfire made its public debut in April 1962, the Y-body senior compacts were already slated to be replaced by the bigger body-on-frame A-body intermediates, and the aluminum V-8’s days were numbered (at least in the U.S.). The lightweight V-8 had proven to be vastly more expensive than originally anticipated, and while some of the early production problems had been resolved, it remained a source of warranty and service headaches, even without the turbocharger and ADI system. Worse, from Oldsmobile’s perspective, the aluminum V-8 was still fundamentally a Buick engine, which meant less control and higher costs. By mid-1962, Oldsmobile engineers were hard at work on the “654” engine, an in-house design that was to power the second-generation F-85 and Cutlass.

All versions of the aluminum V-8 were dropped at the end of the 1963 model year, although Buick continued to produce the 90-degree Fireball V-6, which was a bored-and-stroked six-cylinder derivative of the small V-8, using thinwall iron castings rather than aluminum. Both Buick and Oldsmobile would offer the 90-degree V-6, bored and stroked to 225 cu. in. (3,692 cc), as the base engine for their cheapest models in 1964 and 1965; Oldsmobile then switched to the 250 cu. in. (4,095 cc) Chevrolet six, but Buick continued to use the V-6 through 1967, after which the engine and its tooling were sold to Kaiser Jeep. The divisions parted ways on V-8s: For 1964, Buick replaced the 215 cu. in. (3,528 cc) aluminum engine with a new iron-block 300 cu. in. (4,923 cc) V-8, essentially an eight-cylinder version of the cast iron V-6, while Oldsmobile offered its new cast iron V-8, initially displacing 330 cu. in. (5,404 cc).

Although Olds advertised it as the “Jetfire Rocket V-8,” the new Oldsmobile 330 had little in common with the turbocharged aluminum engine other than the number of cylinders. Constrained by the need to share basic tooling and transfer equipment with Oldsmobile’s “big” Rocket V-8, the 330 was essentially a modernized version of that engine; a tall-deck version of the 330, code-named the “657” engine during development and initially offered in 400 cu. in. (6,548 cc) and 425 cu. in. (6,946 cc) versions, would replace the “big” Rocket engine for 1965. Somewhat ironically, the 654 and 657 engines adopted a modified wedge combustion chamber layout similar to the “slanted saucer” chamber design of the Buick 215, which Oldsmobile had eschewed for its version of the aluminum V-8. Unlike Buick’s iron-block 300, which took advantage of the latest “thinwall” casting techniques and consequently was one of the lightest cast iron engines in Detroit, Oldsmobile made only limited use of hot box core casting for the new engine, which made it substantially heavier than the aluminum Rockette V-8. The new engines were much cheaper than the aluminum Rockette V-8, however, and had better breathing and features like a forged crankshaft. Even the regular-fuel two-barrel 330 was nearly as powerful as the outgoing Turbo-Rocket, with a gross output of 210 hp and 325 lb-ft of torque (equivalent to about 156.6 kW and 440.6 N-m).

Writing in Motor Trend in December 1963, Roger Huntington suggested hopefully that a turbocharged version of the 330 might soon follow, but it was not to be. The considerations that had led Oldsmobile to develop the Turbo-Rocket engine no longer existed: Oldsmobile now had its own modern V-8 with plenty of growth potential, and the new A-body could accommodate any version of that engine the division cared to offer, limited only by corporate policy (and the subsequent Hurst/Olds demonstrated that there were ways around that as well). Oldsmobile could have turbocharged those engines, or for that matter the 90-degree V-6, but there was longer any no compelling reason to do so.

So far as Oldsmobile was concerned, we think the spiritual successor of the F-85 Jetfire was RPO L66, the Turnpike Cruising Option offered on the 1967 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Listing for $142.18 (plus an extra $236.97 for the mandatory Turbo Hydra-Matic transmission), it featured a special version of the tall-deck 400 cu. in. (6,548 cc) V-8, with a high-compression head, dual exhausts, a two-throat carburetor, a 2.56:1 axle ratio, and a short-duration camshaft (using the same valve timing as the base 330 cu. in. (5,404 cc) engine, but with more lift). While one might balk at the idea that the normally aspirated Turnpike Cruising package was any kind of successor to the old turbocharged Jetfire engine, the design objectives were quite similar: deemphasizing peak horsepower in favor of plentiful torque at the lower engine speeds used in daily driving, in pursuit of that elusive combination of performance and fuel economy.

The sleepy cam limited the big engine’s gross output to 300 hp (223.7 kW), nothing special for an American car in 1967 and actually 10 to 20 horsepower less than the standard 330 cu. in. (5,404 cc) Cutlass Supreme engine, but gross torque was 425 lb-ft (576.2 N-m) at 2,600 rpm, with over 90 percent of that available from as low as 1,200 rpm. Of course, the RPO L66 engine had no turbocharger or fluid injection, but it had its own trick engine air-induction system, “Climatic Combustion Control,” which enclosed the carburetor and air cleaner in a temperature-controlled tub for more consistent fuel metering.

A Cutlass Supreme with the Turnpike Cruising Option matched the old F-85 Jetfire in acceleration, and its 16 to 19 mpg (12.4 to 14.7 L/100 km) fuel economy was at least as good if not better, despite the substantially greater engine displacement and over 700 lb (317 kg) of additional curb weight. The hefty lump of iron under the hood meant weight distribution was an unimpressive 57/43, but the Turnpike Cruising package included all the 4-4-2 chassis equipment, with stiffer springs and shocks and both front and rear anti-roll bars, so an L66 Cutlass Supreme handled better than its turbocharged predecessor did, and the optional front disc brakes provided much more dependable stopping power.

For all its virtues, the Turnpike Cruising package was too esoteric for most buyers in 1967, too much of an engineer’s car. It didn’t have the raw horsepower needed to attract Supercar-hungry Baby Boomers, and the prospect of up to 19 mpg (12.4 L/100 km) on the highway — on leaded premium — wasn’t likely to dissuade anyone from buying a Volkswagen or Datsun. The L66 package lasted only a single year, although Oldsmobile subsequently applied its basic principles to the rest of the line, which was more than could be said for the Turbo-Rocket engine in the F-85 Jetfire.

The End of One Turbocharged Era and the Beginning of Another

At Chevrolet, the turbocharged Corvair returned for an encore among the all-new 1965 models. The turbo engine was now an option on the new top-of-the-line Corsa series, using the same TRW turbocharger as the outgoing Spyder, but with wilder valve timing and other minor changes. Chevrolet now claimed 180 gross horsepower and 265 lb-ft of torque (134.2 kW and 359.2 N-m), although this still seemed a little anemic when even the most basic two-barrel 289 cu. in. (4,728) V-8 offered on the Ford Mustang boasted 200 hp (147.1 kW).

The Corsa sold only 28,644 units for 1965, of which only 7,206 had the turbocharged engine, and an additional 10,472 units for 1966, of which just 1,951 were turbocharged. Both the Corsa series and the turbo engine were dropped for 1967. Chevrolet would experiment with turbocharging on and off through the seventies, but Chevrolet wouldn’t offer another turbocharged gasoline engine as a regular production option until 1980.

Around the same time the second-generation Corvair debuted, the International Harvester Company introduced an optional turbocharger for the 4-152 (2,488 cc) Comanche slant four that powered the International Harvester Scout. The Thompson turbo increased the four’s output from 93.4 hp to 111.3 hp (69.6 to 83.0 kW), although low-speed response was sluggish despite a seemingly respectable rated torque output of 166.5 lb-ft (225.7 N-m) at 3,200 rpm. Few 4-152T engines were sold, and International discontinued the option in 1967 in favor of a less-troublesome normally aspirated 196 cu. in. (3,203 cc) slant four and an available 266 cu. in. (4,355 cc) V-8.

An observer in 1967 might well have concluded that automotive turbocharging was merely a fad that had run its course, but in fact it was gearing up for Round Two.

By the late sixties, turbocharging was beginning to find wider acceptance for racing use. The first Offenhauser turbos arrived for 1968, and in 1969, BMW entered a turbocharged version of its 2002 sedan in European Touring Car Challenge (ETCC) competition. In 1972, Porsche launched its first turbocharged competition engine, for the 12-cylinder 917, and the following autumn, the 1973 Frankfurt auto show saw the debut of a limited-production BMW 2002 Turbo for the street. (Many sources, including BMW, continue to erroneously assert that the rare 2002 Turbo was the first turbocharged production car, but the Corvair Monza Spyder and F-85 Jetfire beat it to market by over a decade and outsold it by a substantial margin, although the 2002 Turbo was never officially exported to the U.S.). The turbocharged 2002 was short-lived, but it was followed in 1975 by the first Porsche 911 Turbo (930), whose turbocharged 2,994 cc (183 cu. in.) flat-six made it one of the fastest and hairiest production cars of its era.

Perhaps the most important turbocharging-related developments of this period, however, came in 1978, and reflected the more immediate automotive preoccupations of the day: exhaust emissions and fuel economy. 1978 saw the introduction of the Mercedes-Benz 300SD, the world’s first production turbodiesel passenger car; the Saab 99 Turbo, which combined turbocharging and Bosch K-Jetronic fuel injection with a three-way catalytic converter and feedback control, perhaps the two most vitally important advances in reconciling emissions performance and driveability; and the first Buick production cars powered by the turbocharged version of the division’s reborn 90-degree V-6. (All of these cars, it’s worth noting, used AiResearch turbochargers, as did the subsequent turbocharged versions of the Ford Lima four.)

Development of the Buick turbo V-6 had begun in the fall of 1975, less than 18 months after GM had arranged to buy back the tooling for the old V-6. As we’ve previously recounted, less than three years after Kaiser Jeep bought the V-6 engine, it became one of the assets included in the sale of Jeep to American Motors, which had no need for the 90-degree V-6 and sold the tooling back to GM in 1974. Buick almost immediately put the V-6 back into production, boring it to 231 cu. in. (3,791 cc), and the reborn “3.8 Litre” V-6 quickly became one of GM’s most important corporate engines: a compact, relatively lightweight six offering acceptable power and decent fuel economy. Turbocharging was intended to improve the former quality without compromising the latter, helping Buick to meet the new federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) requirements that took effect for 1978.

In turbocharging the 90-degree V-6, Buick engineer Tom Wallace essentially combined the better features of the old F-85 Jetfire and Corvair Spyder engines. Like the Olds Turbo-Rocket V-8 (of which the V-6 was a first cousin), the turbo V-6 had a mild cam profile and a small wastegate-controlled turbocharger (with a 2.56-inch (65-mm) turbine driving a 2.36-inch (60-mm) impeller), designed to minimize turbo lag and reach peak boost as early as possible. Like the Spyder engine, the Buick turbo used the same relatively low compression ratio as the normally aspirated base engine (8.0:1) and relied on spark management rather than fluid injection to prevent detonation, although the electronic spark control system and electromagnetic knock sensor were considerably more sophisticated than the boost-controlled spark advance unit in the Spyder. (Buick later added an intercooler, but not until 1986.)

Even with its new split-pin “Even Fire” crankshaft, the Buick turbo V-6 was not nearly as smooth as its departed Oldsmobile cousin, but net output was similar: 150 hp (111.9 kW) and 245 lb-ft (332.2 N-m) of torque with a two-barrel carburetor, 165 hp (123.0 kW) and 265 lb-ft (359.3 N-m) with a four-barrel, not bad for 1978. Rated at 19 to 21 mpg (11.2 to 12.4 L/100 km) on the old EPA combined scale, depending on model, turbocharged Buicks were thriftier than the long-departed Olds Turnpike Cruising package and, unlike the Jetfire and Spyder, could run on 91 RON (87 pump octane) regular gasoline. The turbo V-6 wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough to enjoy a 10-year career under Buick hoods, with a spectacular send-off in the form of the Regal GNX.

These were just the first rumblings of the avalanche of turbocharged cars to come. Not all were successful, and the popularity of turbocharging (at least for gasoline engines) waxed and waned over the next 30 years, but turbos never entirely went away, and each resurgence brought worthwhile improvements. (In the eighties and nineties, there was also a minor renaissance in crankshaft-driven supercharging, in larger part as a response to the limitations of contemporary turbochargers.)

Today, approximately one-third of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. are turbocharged. Automotive water injection systems have popped up now and then as well: Throughout the eighties, Saab offered a dealer-installed kit for its turbo engines, which was standard equipment on a few limited-edition models, and in 2016 Bosch announced its new “WaterBoost” system, which made its production debut on the GTS version of the previous-generation (F82) BMW M4. Fluid injection has some potential emissions benefits (reduced carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions) as well as from preventing detonation in high-performance applications, but the inconvenience of needing to regularly replenish an additional fluid supply means that such systems are likely to remain specialist equipment. (Most modern turbocharged gasoline engines use direct fuel injection, whose charge-cooling effect helps to reduce knock even with surprisingly high compression ratios.)

Jetfire Revisited

With turbocharging now so common, it’s tempting to look at the Oldsmobile Jetfire and turbocharged Corvair as cars ahead of their time, and ask whether their early demise was a mistake.

In the short term, the turbocharged Corvair was probably the more prescient of the two, foreshadowing the host of modestly priced turbocharged four- and six-cylinder coupes that appeared in the eighties, many of which were almost as crude and just as peaky. That it didn’t survive that long was due more to the failure of the second-generation Corvair to effectively compete with the Mustang than with the merits of the turbocharged engine itself. Had the Corvair survived into the seventies, it’s not unlikely that a turbocharged version would have resurfaced eventually, even if it had been dropped for a time in the late sixties.

Evaluating the F-85 Jetfire in this light is more difficult. In concept, the Jetfire wasn’t far removed from modern turbocharged cars — not high-performance models, but family cars and luxury sedans using turbochargers to make smaller engines do the work of larger ones. However, we don’t believe it would have ever really succeeded in that role. Its complex fluid injection system would likely have been an insuperable handicap even if it had worked flawlessly, and the obvious alternatives would either have been too costly or would have sacrificed too much performance for Oldsmobile to consider them worthwhile.

Was Oldsmobile wrong to drop the turbocharged engine rather than continuing to develop it? Perhaps, but in the early sixties, the factors have since driven the move to downsized turbocharged engines had only begun to emerge. California imposed the first automotive emissions requirements (for the recirculation of crankcase vapor) beginning with the 1963 model year, subsequently adding limits for hydrocarbon and carbon monoxide emissions that took effect three years after that, but the first federal emissions standards didn’t take effect until 1968, and those early standards (measured in parts per million or percentage of exhaust volume) didn’t necessarily favor smaller engines. Concern about carbon dioxide emissions did not enter the public consciousness until many years later, and as for fuel economy, even the most tight-fisted American consumers of this era had rather generous ideas of what constituted “good gas mileage.” Moreover, U.S. buyers, unlike their counterparts in many other markets, didn’t have (and still don’t have) any overriding financial reason to prefer smaller-displacement engines. In other words, Oldsmobile had no obvious reason to continue refining its turbocharger technology past the 1963 model year. The division’s normally aspirated cast iron V-8s better suited Oldsmobile’s contemporary priorities in nearly every respect, including fuel economy.

Although Oldsmobile didn’t try to revive the turbocharged Jetfire in the seventies, instead betting on its ill-fated diesel V-8 to boost its fleet average fuel economy, the turbocharged Buick V-6 could reasonably be regarded as a Jetfire successor. If it wasn’t exactly a direct descendant, the turbo V-6 did clearly take some worthwhile lessons from the earlier Oldsmobile and Chevrolet turbos, a rare example (like the V-6 itself) of GM promptly reviving a previously discarded innovation as soon as it had a stronger use case.

Thus, while the Jetfire was a failure in its own time and on its own terms — a technological novelty item, simultaneously over-elaborate and undercooked, and too expensive relative to its benefits — it was not an entirely Pyrrhic effort. Rather, it was an early, imperfect, slightly off-kilter rough draft of a more practical (if no less complicated) future.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

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Please note that any exchange rate equivalencies or inflation estimates cited in this article are approximate and are provided solely for the reader’s general reference — this is an automotive history, not a treatise on currency trading or the value of money, and nothing in this article should be taken as financial advice of any kind!

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