Joy stick: celebrating 50 years of the Porsche 911 Turbo in a manual 964

R.U.O.T.B. Five letters that mean nothing more than seven potential points in a game of Scrabble. But if you mix them up, you get... TURBO. And that’s not just a word. It’s the fastest word in the world – the superlative for speed and performance.

Over the years, ‘Turbo’ has been slapped on everything from hairdryers to counter culture movements. But for Porsche, it’s a legacy, a legend and a brand of its own. It’s also just turned 50. So, I thought we’d better have a birthday party and celebrate half a century of Porsche bolting mechanical snails onto engines in the name of speed. Lovely, juicy, usable – and sometimes scary – speed. And what better way to do that than by driving one of the most under-the-radar, rarest turbocharged 911s to one of the coolest events you’ve never heard of – the Super Stick Shift.

For those of you at the back, turbocharging works by using high energy exhaust gases to spin a turbine, which in turn drives a compressor that forces more air into the engine’s combustion chambers. It creates a rather intoxicating and simple equation: more fuel equals more power. 

Photography: Mark Riccioni

It was aviation technology, but the Americans were the first to have the nerve to try it out in cars. In 1962, GM bolted a Garrett AiResearch turbo onto an Oldsmobile F-85 Cutlass to create the excellently named ‘Jetfire’. It was complex and provided a 40 per cent power increase, which also meant it was horrendously unreliable.

The first European marque to hop on the turbo train was BMW, which released the 2002 Turbo in 1973. But Porsche had been experimenting with the technology before that in motorsport. The wildly successful 917/10 and 917/30 race cars were proof of the potential, but the company needed time to tame turbocharging’s tumultuous traits before handing it over to hamfisted buyers.

It was at the 1973 Frankfurt Motor Show that a tartan-clad RSR Turbo concept (which resembled a 911 Carrera RS 3.0) debuted to a slack-jawed crowd. Just over a year later, the production version was unveiled in Paris, with Ferry Porsche presenting the very first car, affectionately dubbed “No. 1”, to his sister Louise Piëch as a 70th birthday gift.

There have been eight generations since and to celebrate this dynasty, I needed to pick one. My choice? One of the most iconic Turbos ever: a yellow over yellow, 3.6-litre 964 Turbo. Or, as it’s better known to those less obsessed with chassis codes, The Bad Boys Car.

This particular 964 is one of the rarest aircooled 911s. The later 3.6-litre variant was Porsche’s response to grumbles that the standard 3.3-litre engine (shared with the previous 930 generation) felt a bit flat. So, it increased the displacement, boosted power to 355bhp, and focused on generating more torque at lower revs. It also featured a 20mm lower chassis, retuned suspension, and some ace 18in three-piece Speedline wheels. 

Now, here’s something you may not know – it was only available for a single year, from 1993 to 1994, with fewer than 1,500 units produced. That makes it even rarer than the hallowed 911 Carrera RS 2.7, and values now crest over £500k. If that’s not a scary enough reminder not to shunt it, mine is also Porsche’s rolling museum piece.

Thumbing the door open provides a sensational mix of haptic and audio feedback. Your nose then gets in on the sensory attack by vacuuming up that distinctive, yet hard to define, old car smell. Lovely. Step inside, and even on the dullest of grey days, you’ll find yourself reaching for sunglasses. They skinned Big Bird for the yellow leather – fantastically vivid and utterly unapologetic. It’s a sensory attack in the best possible way.

You wear the one-piece seats like a shell and peer through a vast steering wheel, over the pillow-sized airbag, to gaze at a bank of huge analogue clocks with sweeping dials and a screaming redline. Down and to your right, there’s a hi-fi nestled alongside a period correct Nokia phone – the ultimate accessory for phoning in your excuses about why you’re inevitably running late.

The flat-six engine is so smooth it’s almost deceptive – turn it over, and there are moments you have to double check it’s actually running. But looking out through the glasshouse, you have two big arches and protruding headlights to help guide your placement of the car. The real treat, though, is what’s in the rearview mirror – the colossal, rubberised whale tail spoiler, home to the whopping intercooler. The clutch is heavy, throttle floor mounted and full of resistance. The gearbox isn’t particularly tight but has extremely tall gearing.

Driving the 964 is hard work – it’s physical and demands concentration. There’s a lot to manage, especially on the wet Alpine roads of Switzerland. But that’s perfect, because today, this isn’t just a car – it’s a ticket. 

The Super Stick Shift is a road rally with an extremely strict dress code. Cars have to be built between 1974 and 1995, be top of the range sports or supercars, have manual transmissions, two doors and no electronic assistance. It’s purposely designed as a pilgrimage for those who still worship the mechanical purity of driving. And the eligible car list is a droolworthy PDF of esoteric exotica. There’s everything from hen’s teeth Alpinas to Cizetas and Isdera Spiders. Luckily, the 964 is on the guest list, so I can slip behind the velvet stanchion.    

Arriving at the start line in St Moritz is like driving into a pack of vintage Top Trumps. There’s a chain of wonderfully wedgy, tricky to see out of, even harder to drive supercars – Ferrari Testarossas, multiple Lamborghini Diablos, BMW M1s, a Jaguar XJ220, a white winged Countach, and a De Tomaso Pantera. There’s even another 3.6 Turbo, albeit fitted with the even rarer X-pack. Turns out, he’s the previous owner of the car I’m driving. Small world.

The symphony of six, eight and 12 cylinders ricochets off the mountain side

Ahead of us lies a 450-mile route along some of the most spectacular Alpine roads that splinter and spiderweb their way around St Moritz and its incredible topography: the Julier, Albula and Flüela passes, just to name a few. Another fun variable thrown into the mix is that it’s unseasonably cold, wet, and, the higher we climb, increasingly snowy.

We head straight into a set of Swiss roadworks. Well, that’s what they call them. It’s more like driving through a World War One trench. At this point, some owners might turn around and tuck their cars back into humidified garages. Not this lot. They don’t collect cars – they drive them... and drive them hard. Which is perfect, because as I find out, the 964 Turbo isn’t a car for pussyfooting around.

Being an old school turbocharged car, you’ve got a wave of boost to be constantly mindful of. The turbo lag – that moment of quiet before the storm – feels like a comedic pause before a punchline that comes in at 3,500rpm. With tall gears and tight roads, you’ve got to keep busy and on boost. It’s easy enough to manage on a track, but on winding Swiss mountain roads, it’s a challenge. You have to drive the 964 aggressively, with precise and deliberate inputs to get the best out of it.

Famously, early Turbos earned the nickname ‘widowmakers’, but the 964 doesn’t seem as capricious or spiky as I’d been led to believe. Yes, you can’t cheat physics – that big, heavy engine behind the rear axle can easily become a pendulum – but as long as you understand momentum and weight transfer, you’re fine. Throughout the day cockpits slowly clog up with condensation (these are 1980s and 1990s supercars after all), which adds to the fun as the landscape gets bigger and so aggressively pretty that Instagram tags it with an AI warning. And that’s before you add the cars into the mix.

Unrestricted and from eras of excess, the symphony of six, eight, and 12 cylinders of varying layouts ricochets off the mountainside in joyous glory. The Turbo can achieve extraordinary speed for its age, but it’s all done with subtle elegance. After all, Turbos have always been about sophisticated understatement and unprecedented everyday usability.

The Albula Pass is a masterpiece of tight hairpins, steep drops and sweeping corners. Throw in a trainline that weaves its way both around and through the landscape, and you’ve got a road that would send Francis Bourgeois into a seizure. But it’s here that it hits me – this rally exemplifies the horseriding analogy everyone’s been going on about with rise of the EV. 

If you haven’t heard, the gist is that, in the future, analogue internal combustion cars will be used in the same way people now use horses. After all, we once used horses as our primary mode of transport, but they were eventually replaced by cars. Yet, there’s a certain type of person who still seeks the thrill of a gallop for pure adrenaline.

The same, they say, will happen with internal combustion cars when the world inevitably turns electric. People like us will use them as instruments of passion. And after experiencing the Super Stick Shift, I’m inclined to agree. The cars in this incredible, poster worthy rally are a snapshot of a time when driving was all about feel, skill, and that raw connection between human and machine. It’s infectious, it’s undeniable, and it’s something everyone should experience before it’s lost to history or the next EU mandate.

I round off the day by meeting the latest heir to the Turbo throne, the 992 ‘Turbo 50’ – Porsche’s £200k gift to itself. Slathered with vinyl inspired by the Porsche 911 RSR Turbo and wearing lusciously metallic Turbonite paint, it’s tasteful with a bit of tart. But let’s not kid ourselves – it’s essentially a posh Turbo S. Driving it is a world away from the 964, far easier, more polished. Yet, in spite of that, the similarities are unmistakable – the power delivery, the boost, that effortless surge of performance – it’s clear they’re cut from the same Mackenzie tartan cloth.

So, raise a stein to 50 years of turbocharged Porsches. It’s just a shame that Porsche is now slapping the Turbo badge on cars that don’t even have a turbocharger. Still, I suppose it means Turbos could be around for 50 more. After all, it’s the fastest word in the world.