In the early 1970s, turbocharging in racing was still a hard mechanical lesson. The hardware being pushed into competition was often based on diesel and farm-tractor turbochargers, and once racers started running them through surge, choke, and violent throttle transitions, parts broke fast. Shafts snapped, thrust bearings burned up, and the center section took loads it was never designed to survive. The real fix was not just picking a bigger compressor or turbine. The job was getting the aerodynamics, thermodynamics, and mechanical integrity to work together. Pressure balance across the turbo mattered. Throttle placement mattered. If you throttled before the compressor, response suffered and turbo lag got worse because the system had to rebuild air density all the way to the engine. That 1970s learning curve is why modern turbo systems are about the whole package. Compressor map, turbine match, bearing load, materials, and control strategy all have to agree. If they do not, the turbo becomes the fuse in the system.
Gale Banks opens by tracing an early performance-engineering lineage through Hudson, Vince Piggins, and Smokey Yunick. In the early 1950s, Piggins was Hudson's racing engineer, while Smokey fielded the cars and built the engines. Banks uses one of Smokey's own stories to illustrate how far race engineers would go when rules blocked an obvious solution.
At the time, NASCAR required the wrist pin to be centered in the piston, so offset wrist pins were not allowed. Smokey wanted the torque benefit of pin offset for Daytona's original beach-and-highway course, where cars had to lug through sand, especially in the turns. Since an offset wrist pin would be easy to detect during teardown, he found another route: he obtained Hudson blocks and shifted the crankshaft centerline relative to the bores. In Banks's words, Smokey "cheated from the centerline of the crankshaft out." That anecdote sets up the larger point: Piggins and Smokey were deeply inventive, and when General Motors, specifically Chevrolet, later brought in Piggins, Smokey followed. That relationship between Chevrolet, Piggins, and Smokey would continue for decades.
The story then moves to John DeLorean, who had already built a performance reputation at Pontiac before becoming general manager of Chevrolet. In the early 1970s, with Chevrolet struggling in the marketplace, DeLorean wanted a halo project: winning the Indianapolis 500 with a small-block Chevrolet. The target event was the 1972 Indy 500.
Indy rules allowed a pushrod, stock-block, two-valve-per-cylinder engine of 209 cubic inches. That meant shrinking a small-block Chevy to an unusually small displacement through sleeving and destroking. Walt Ware was working under Vince Piggins at the time, while Herb Fishel was also in that orbit. Ware notes that there was no love lost between Piggins and Fishel, and Banks confirms he had seen that tension firsthand.
Although Ware's official work at Garrett centered on Caterpillar and diesel turbocharging, Chevrolet's Indy effort kept escalating through corporate channels because Smokey Yunick was destroying turbochargers on the dyno in Daytona. Smokey complained to DeLorean, DeLorean called Garrett chairman Curt Teske, and Teske called Garrett turbo-business president John Kaziar. Kaziar then gave Ware a confidential assignment: keep doing his real job, tell no one, and make sure Garrett's chairman never again received a complaint from DeLorean about Smokey's failed turbos.
When Ware arrived in Daytona, he found that Smokey was operating the turbochargers far outside their intended range. The units were essentially tractor turbos, Garrett T04s and later T04Bs, originally developed for diesel farm tractors of roughly 100 horsepower and up. Smokey was using them in a racing environment with throttle behavior and transient loading they had never been designed to survive.
The failures were not subtle. Smokey was breaking shafts, burning up thrust bearings, and physically destroying turbochargers. Ware describes receiving baskets full of broken parts. The problem was not primarily turbine-wheel or compressor-wheel metallurgy; Garrett already had access to aircraft-grade high-temperature materials and could solve those issues. Nor was the basic compressor and turbine matching especially mysterious. The real challenge was structural durability under violent loading and unloading.
Banks and Ware discuss one major cause of early turbo lag and turbo distress in racing: throttle placement. If the throttle is placed before the compressor, then on a throttle tip-in the compressor must first ingest ambient-density air, compress it, and refill all downstream piping before dense charge reaches the valves. That creates lag and unstable compressor operation. By contrast, throttling after the compressor, or even at the ram tubes as Cosworth later did, preserves charge density closer to the intake valves. Ware does not fully recall Smokey's exact throttle arrangement, but it was clear that the system was surging, choking, overspeeding the shaft, and repeatedly overloading the thrust system. Pressure imbalance between the turbine and compressor sides also contributed to thrust loading in both directions, depending on operating condition.
Ware's task was to make the turbo system durable enough for Smokey's use. He emphasizes that the aerodynamic and thermodynamic matching was comparatively straightforward. The harder part was creating a mechanically robust package that could survive abuse well beyond the original design envelope. He recalls working through compressor and turbine trim combinations, likely ending up around a V3 compressor specification, though he notes that memory from that era is imperfect.
Once the turbochargers were properly matched and made durable, the team returned to dyno work and then track testing. At that point, the turbo problem itself was solved: Smokey had turbochargers that worked. The remaining challenge was making the entire car package work. This was not Smokey's earlier sidecar-style "capsule" concept, but a conventional contemporary Indy chassis, car number 30.
The car qualified surprisingly well at Indianapolis, especially considering that driver Jerry Karl was not regarded as one of the top stars in the field. Ware recalls a qualifying position around 13th, though he cautions that the exact number should be verified. After qualifying, Smokey wanted to disassemble and tweak the car further, so the crew worked through the night before the race. The car ran well for a number of laps, but eventually something unrelated to the turbo system came loose and ended the effort. Ware remembers urging Smokey to leave well enough alone after the strong qualifying performance, but Smokey's philosophy was that racing required pushing all the way. The car carried the name Oriente Express, which Ware later learned was not a conventional sponsor at all, but the name of a hotel of questionable reputation in Quito, Ecuador, from one of Smokey's earlier adventures.
Banks briefly follows DeLorean's career beyond Chevrolet. After leaving GM, DeLorean entered the period that eventually led to the DeLorean sports car, with its stainless-steel body and gullwing doors. Ware says DeLorean approached him about becoming chief engineer, or at least engine engineer, to improve the car's performance.
Smokey Yunick, however, privately advised Ware not to take the job. Ware considers that one of the best pieces of advice Smokey ever gave him. Looking back, he believes that decision may have saved him from becoming entangled in the legal and financial chaos that later surrounded DeLorean.
The conversation then shifts to McLaren's Can-Am turbo program. McLaren's earlier M8 cars had been naturally aspirated big-block Chevrolets with Lucas injection and were highly competitive. But once Penske and Porsche arrived with the turbocharged 917 program, producing roughly 1,100 horsepower and capable of more, anyone hoping to win needed a major power increase.
McLaren's answer was the M20, first in naturally aspirated form and then as a turbo program using an experimental all-aluminum 494 cubic-inch big-block Chevrolet. Ware notes that Chevrolet had little meaningful experience at that point with either turbocharging or all-aluminum blocks in such an extreme racing application. The package initially used T06 turbochargers, but it never became fully competitive. Charlie Kemp's Commander Motor Homes-backed effort bought multiple cars, and Mario Andretti was contracted to drive when available, though his Firestone commitments limited his schedule. Andretti disliked the first two cars enough that a revised M20 chassis was built to his preferences.
Ware became involved late, during testing at Riverside. Pete Weismann was there because the transmission was also problematic; the car used a crashbox-style gearbox that was difficult to shift. Ware arrived with instrumentation and a box of alternate turbochargers. To gather data, he rode in the car with Andretti while reading gauges, wedged into the chassis without a seat belt. Starting from the T06 baseline, he worked through T04 variants and eventually settled on T04S01 units better suited to road-race response. The T06s made huge top-end power down Riverside's long back straight, where speeds exceeded 220 mph, but they were too laggy through the esses. With the smaller, quicker-responding T04S01 setup, the car became dramatically more usable. Ware recalls that John Cannon took one ride in the car and became sick enough that he did not want to drive it again that day.
The McLaren discussion leads into a broader lesson Ware learned repeatedly in racing: when a turbocharged car has a problem, people often blame the turbo system first, even when the real fault lies elsewhere. He illustrates that with Roy Woods's DeKon Monza Trans Am car, a former Al Holbert championship-winning machine. In naturally aspirated form, its 358 cubic-inch Weber-carbureted small-block made about 585 horsepower. Ware converted it to a five-liter turbo setup using the proper T04S-series hardware, producing roughly 930 horsepower.
At Portland's GI Joe Grand Prix, the engine went lean and popped at the end of the long straight, and the turbo system was blamed. Ware checked the fuel system and found the real issue: three Holley electric fuel pumps had been installed upside down, despite instructions specifying the correct orientation. Fuel could migrate into the motor section and damage the pumps. Worse, only two of the three pumps were actually connected; the third was merely a backup to be switched in during a pit stop if one failed. Ware's point was blunt: if the engine is leaning out, that is not a turbo problem.
He later used one of those engines in Geisler's 1953 Studebaker at Bonneville, where it set a record at 217 mph. The car became unstable above roughly 205 mph because the stock-bodied Studebaker shape wanted to lift at the rear, and eventually a rear wheel failed at speed. Banks notes that this became the fastest door-slammer at Bonneville until his own later 1968 Corvette, Sundowner, reached 240 mph with a big-block Chevy and twin T06 91 turbochargers.
Ware and Banks also touch on turbocharged marine work and one of Banks's earliest street experiments. Banks says his first forced-induction system dates back to 1960 on a nailhead Buick marine engine used at Big Bear's high altitude. By the late 1960s, after turbochargers became available, he prototyped a turbo marine engine in 1969. In the 1970s he campaigned both a naturally aspirated injected-fuel Hemi drag boat called Crucifier, which won national championships in APBA and NJBA competition, and a circle-boat project called Hurry Round Hondo.
Hurry Round Hondo used an injected methanol-burning big-block Chevy with twin T06 91 turbochargers, similar in airflow capability to the Can-Am hardware. On methanol, the engine could tolerate substantial boost without charge-air cooling, at least to a point. The boat had all the power it needed and would dominate when it stayed together, but it repeatedly destroyed jet drives; the first one lasted only about a mile and a quarter.
The discussion then turns to Banks's turbo Vega, built after he needed a practical daily driver when his first child was born and the family could no longer rely on a 1969 427 Corvette. He bought a wrecked 1972 Vega from a junkyard, sleeved the engine with cast-iron liners, lowered compression to roughly 6.5:1, and fitted a T04BS01 turbocharger. The setup ran about 60 psi of boost. Because Banks had already been working with marine turbocharging, he adapted a marine intercooler concept by using a separate radiator and pump as a liquid heat exchanger. The engine also used water-methanol injection. Fueling came through a large straight-through European side-draft carburetor matched closely to the compressor inducer, enabled by a carbon face seal in the compressor that allowed draw-through operation. The Vega was brutally fast but mechanically crude; the stock four-cylinder's vibration was so severe that it regularly destroyed alternators.
The final major topic is Ware's move to England in 1978 to rescue Garrett's diesel turbo business there. By then he had been promoted to run all North American diesel turbo business, including Caterpillar, John Deere, Mack, and Detroit Diesel, with Switzer as the primary competitor. Garrett's British operation, located in Skelmersdale between Liverpool and Manchester, had existed for 13 years without ever making a profit. It supplied major European customers including Volvo, Scania, Saab, BMW, Fiat Iveco, DAF, MAN, and Volkswagen, yet quality was poor and customers were unhappy.
Ware explains the local context in unusual detail. The plant had been built with British government incentives intended to create jobs near Liverpool after containerization devastated the old dock economy. The workforce environment was heavily unionized, with three unions in the plant, and the broader region was shaped by labor militancy during the Margaret Thatcher era. Before leaving the United States, Ware was warned not to provoke a strike, because corporate leadership viewed that as potentially career-ending.
His first step was to visit every major customer and hear the complaints directly. At Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, procurement chief Dr. Busch told him bluntly that he had written Garrett's chairman, gotten Ware's predecessor fired, and was giving Ware 100 days to fix the situation. Volkswagen had baskets full of rejected turbochargers waiting to be returned. Back at the plant, workers told Ware that when Garrett originally established the British operation, it had sent over worn-out machine tools from the United States instead of new equipment. The machines could not hold tolerance, so large groups of workers were hand-correcting parts with grinders in an attempt to make them acceptable.
Ware's response was to rebuild the manufacturing base. He insisted on sending machine tools back to the original builders for proper remanufacture rather than attempting partial in-house fixes. He worked directly with employees on all shifts, walked the plant at night, attended union meetings, and tried to understand both labor and management complaints. Over time, the operation improved dramatically. Garrett also gained better control over castings through its own foundry in Ireland. The Skelmersdale plant eventually won Queen's Awards for export in 1984, with about 85 percent of production exported out of England. Ware did endure two strikes, but both ended without him surrendering core principles.
Just as the British operation stabilized and a new French plant was being launched, Ware received another abrupt call from John Kaziar: return to the United States immediately and take over a much larger North American leadership role. He did not want to leave, and neither did his family, but by the following Monday he was back in Los Angeles, sitting in the chair. Banks closes the episode there, setting up the next installment to cover the corporate mess he returned to and the performance projects that followed in the 1980s, including Buick.