Turbonique, as you will no doubt remember, was essentially mail-order death and dismemberment. Never have such horrible ideas been readily available to anyone with a postage address, and they certainly won’t be again. Probably. Hopefully.
Rocket-fuel-fed superchargers and drive axles that you could buy and bolt-on to anything from a Volkswagen Beetle to a muscle car – what could possibly be crazier? Well, they did also sell a rocket-propelled go-kart…
And here it is. This little machine looks innocuous enough, but when fed by ethylene oxide, it blitzed through the quarter-mile in 9.7 seconds at a speed of 240 km/h. Ordered from the back pages of Hot Rod magazine, the cart cost $2,700 air-freighted to Alberta.
Steve Buffel of Wetaskwin had a couple of connections that were necessary to get the Turbonique cart operational; he and a friend bought the cart with money fronted by a local Chevy dealership, and talked a local speedway into doing paid demonstration runs – that’d cover the cost of the thing. He also had a friend working at Dow Chemical. The cart showed up without fuel (turns out shipping rocket fuel through the mail is reasonably tricky – who knew?), but Buffel was able to get his hands on a few gallons of ethylene oxide, a volatile compound.
The Turbonique runs on rocket fuel.
Steve Buffel, Driving
A monopropellant, ethylene oxide doesn’t require oxygen to burn, just a spark to ignite it. And don’t let off the throttle once you light that candle, because if the fuel pools in the combustion chamber, it’ll explode.
After some disagreement over whether he’d be allowed to run or not – even though the speedway had heavily advertised the rocket-kart to bump attendance – Buffel lined up on the dragstrip next to a Hemi-powered Dodge Charger, and let her rip. With so little weight, the kart just blitzed down the track instantly.
Turning around at the end and heading back, Buffel nearly got run over by the Charger, which had changed lanes to get out of his rocket-cart’s contrail. It was barreling towards him at 150+km/h, but he had just enough rolling momentum on the cart to dodge back into the other lane.
“That would have been a sad way to go after surviving a quarter mile run on the cart,” he says in a forum post detailing the run. That’s putting it mildly.
The Turbonique’s use of rocket fuel made for some interesting power.
Steve Buffel, Driving
That was the first and last time the cart ran, and without the advertising money behind it, it was locked up in a shed on the dealership lot and forgotten. Buffel found it again through talking to the manager, and bought it back. It’s entirely unrestored, but in good overall condition.
As a relic of a devil-may-care age, the value is hard to assess. Buffel had intended to donate it to the Wetaskiwin museum, but private individuals and museums like the Petersen have come calling, so he’s weighing his options.
Hopefully, the rocket-cart will be restored to its former glory, and then put somewhere behind a velvet rope, with a large sign saying: “DANGER! DO NOT TOUCH.” It’s wonderful and horrifying all at once – that’s the Turbonique way.
Steve Buffel’s Turbonique had been left in a shed for years.
Steve Buffel, Driving
