Detour #270: Turbo Charging in the Stuttgart Hills, Germany
Photos: Porsche
Time to cosplay a Seventies Porsche development driver in the original ‘widowmaking’ 911 Turbo.
Fifty years ago, Porsche helped kickstart a phenomenon. While not the first carmaker to introduce a turbocharged production car, its inaugural 911 Turbo trumpeted the arrival of forced induction in models you or I could actually buy with its bold advertising and fierce reputation. Technology that’d made waves in motorsport was now being unleashed on public roads.
These are some of those roads. Porsche accrued development miles on those early ‘930’ models all over the planet, but it’s safe to assume some of the most committed took place on the doorstep of its Zuffenhausen HQ. An area I’m revisiting five decades on, fittingly in one of those original Seventies cars.
It’s wise to start the trip with some background reading, of course, and the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart is exemplary. It’ll guide you through not only the history of the marque, but cars and motorsport in general. Especially if you tag on a trip around the Mercedes-Benz Museum across town, the carmakers even crossing their usual barricades to offer cheaper joint entry.
Stuttgart lies on the brink of all manner of spectacular roads if you have the time; Lake Constance and the Swiss border lie two hours away. But for a fine afternoon of driving before returning to the city for some delicious Swabian delicacies (spätzle is a personal favourite) then a trip east towards Göppingen will yield not only some spectacular countryside vistas, but an abundance of tight, technical corners.
Stick the twee airfield at Donzdorf into the nav and you can enjoy all of the above. Its on-site restaurant, Die Fliegerhütte, provides the perfect excuse for a prod around an airport geared up for smaller planes and gliders. And some welcome serenity when the sound of a fully stretched flat-six isn’t punctuating the silence…
Initial miles will likely be on motorway, but being Germany, this is an experience of its own if roadworks and traffic are thin enough to light the derestriction signs. Alas, my miles in a museum-grade ’74 Turbo don’t coincide with appropriate conditions to reach even half its 155mph vmax. But when the car at my hands and feet is worth an easy quarter million, that’s just fine.
The hustle and bustle of a busy Autobahn still proves useful for tentatively exploring its archaic power delivery, rumbling around in higher gears to merely tickle the 4,000rpm marker at which its character switches from mild to wild – and the resolution of its ‘widowmaker’ imagery begins to sharpen.
The twists of the L1159 are perfect for flexing its muscles more. Longer, sweeping curves and decent visibility should see your confidence gradually build as you tease out more of its performance. Grip remains strong if you’re mindful to not brake too deeply into corners. The experience is both familiar – thanks to those strong 911 design cues bridging all eight generations – and alien, its offset pedals, springy clutch action and just four forward gears ageing the experience in a handful of key areas.
Inevitably with such prodigious performance, those gears are long. Which does make the more intricate turns and hairpins on the final approach to Donzdorf a little harder to gauge. The lusty 3.0-litre flat-six will happily pull second or third around them, but you must drop right down to first to beat the turbo lag and feel the explosive hit of that old 256bhp engine as you boisterously propel yourself towards a well-earned lunch.
This car takes some learning, but the spaghetti of tarmac draped across the Stuttgart region feels the perfect place to try and get the hang of it, much like its engineers presumably did all those years ago. Just be mindful there might be a few tractors around. As for when Porsche applied its magic to those… well that’s a different story.
Words Stephen Dobie