Porsche won Le Mans for the first time in June 1970. A victory that, by any reasonable measure, should have been enough for one summer. It wasn’t. Within four weeks, the company had set its sights on the Canadian American Challenge Cup, Can-Am, a North American racing series where the competition was running open-cockpit prototypes with naturally aspirated engines pushing past 790 horsepower.
Porsche’s 917, the same car that had just conquered La Sarthe, made 572 hp from a 4.5-liter flat-twelve. That was a serious deficit, and everyone in Weissach knew it. The solution they landed on wasn’t more displacement or more cylinders. It was a turbine spinning in the exhaust stream, and it would change the company for the next fifty years.
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