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"The practice of turbocharging racecars started in the 1950s at Indianapolis, returned to the 500 in the 1960s in a more conventional form, reached Formula One on a limited basis in the 1970s, took F1 into absolutely wild territories for most of the 1980s and is making a comeback next year on the Grand Prix circuit, completing an evolutionary cycle that has had its share of peaks and valleys over the years. Thanks to the use of superchargers in fighter planes World War I, the brand-new form of forced induction engine technology quickly made the leap from aviation to motor racing, but the practice of using exhaust gasses to compress air and boost power outputs would take more time to incubate. Stateside, that barrier was broken at the 1952 Indy 500 with the Cummins Diesel entry driven by Fred Agabashian who claimed pole position for the great race using the 400 hp offered by the six-cylinder turbodiesel, but rather than set off a wave of copycat powerplants, turbocharging would remain dormant until the 1966 Indy 500 when three (formerly) naturally-aspirated, gasoline-powered Offenhauser four-cylinder engines arrived at the Brickyard with massive turbos hanging over the rear axle. Cummins might have been first to the party in &amp;#039;52, but the widespread use of turbocharging\u2014in Indy car, F1, sports cars and tin tops\u2014can be traced back to the Speedway in &amp;#039;66.  Indy cars would soon become almost exclusively turbocharged. Excluding a few holdouts, like Dan Gurney&amp;#039;s stock block V8-powered Eagles that ran through the early 1980s, turbocharging dominated America&amp;#039;s premier open-wheel series in the CART and Champ Car eras that ran through 2008. The splinter Indy Racing League series, now the IZOD IndyCar Series, went the naturally-aspirated route from 1997-2011, but returned to turbos in 2012 with direct-injected 2.2-liter V6s. During its craziest days, CART&amp;#039;s 2.65-liter turbo V8s made more than 1000 hp and helped to set the closed-course record of 241.428 mph on the 2.0-mile oval in Fontana with Gil de Ferran&amp;#039;s Honda-powered Team Penske car wound to its limits.      With Indy car racing adopting turbocharging en masse to start the 1970s, F1 might have been the most logical form of racing to follow suit, but it would take until 1977 for Renault to introduce its 1.5-liter turbo V6 to the international series. Recognizing the fearsome power they produce, it was actually within sports car racing where the extremes of turbocharging were first explored, stepping in after Indy cars on the evolutionary chart. Porsche exploited turbocharging with its famed Can-Am cars, pushing its flat-12 engines to well north of the magic 1000 hp mark, and it wasn&amp;#039;t long before turbos became a standard component on the marque&amp;#039;s Le Mans GT and silhouette cars. BMW joined in, as did others, including specialist engine tuners, as the IMSA GT series exploded in popularity and innovation during the 1970s. But the most notable era of turbos in racing came in F1 during the 1980s as Ferrari, Porsche, BMW, Renault, Honda, Ford/Cosworth, Alfa Romeo, Kart, Motori Moderni and Zakspeed worked the 1.5-liter formula for all it was worth. Turbocharged inline-4s, V6s and V8s were tried, with the V6 configuration proving the most successful, and with weapons-grade fuel being supplied by several vendors, the 1000 hp figure was routinely met and exceeded with qualifying engines built to last only a handful of laps. In what has become a legendary tale of turbo excess, Gerhard Berger&amp;#039;s BMW-powered Benetton qualifying run at Monza in 1986 was aided by a stuck wastegate which BMW engineers reckon took the miniature mill, codenamed the M12/13, to approximately 1440 hp during the Austrian&amp;#039;s brief run. The little 4-banger was then removed from the B186 chassis, permanently spent and replaced with a lower boost race-spec unit.      Turbos became the norm with rallying during the 1980s as well and unlike most series, the World Rally Championship has never gone away from them while F1 abandoned forced induction after 1988. Just as Indy cars came back to small displacement turbos last year\u2014mostly in the name of providing greater road car relevance for its engine manufacturers\u2014F1 will follow suit in 2014, ditching the 2.4-liter V8s currently in use for 1.6-liter direct-injected V6s. This piece of auto racing technology has been somewhat cyclical, but with petroleum resources declining, its&amp;#039; hard to envision manufacturers using larger, non-turbo powerplants to promote their brands as being modern or forward-thinking. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a4685/the-road-ahead-evolution-of-racing-turbos/>