Ah, the mystique of twin turbos. While still not that prevalent in drag racing, those who've mastered dual "hair dryers" have certainly had tremendous impact, particularly in the realm of Pro Street.

Bob Reiger, Rod Saboury and Chuck Samuel have all shattered records with their rides, but who among you remembers Gene Deputy, the pioneer of this technology? A man who has never taken the path well-traveled, Deputy not only ran the lone turbo set up when the National Muscle Car Association (NMCA) brought the Hot Rod Magazine Top Ten Street Car Shootout to Memphis in 1992, but he was the only one with an EFI-equipped car. On top of that, he drove one of the very few Fords at the event, and it was a small block to boot.

"Everybody originally told me it wouldn't work," Deputy said with a laugh. "Then when I got it to work, everybody outlawed me. But the main thing I was trying to prove was that electronic fuel injection worked; that EFI would always be faster than a carburetor. They never believed that back in the 80s. Other than a factory car, I was the first guy to successfully run EFI in a (drag) race."

Deputy's racing career began in 1960 while he was attending high school in Louisiana. His first car was a 1951 Studebaker powered by a '56 Olds V-8. "We used to go to Hallsville, near Shreveport, to race" he said. "(Back then) it was just an old abandoned road that ran downhill."

It was here that Deputy first met Dave McClelland. In those days the dean of drag race announcing was still a newsman for a local Shreveport TV station. "We all worked together to build a real drag strip in Shreveport called Old Gator Dragway," recalled Deputy. "At that time the state championship drag races were held at the airport in Mansfield, and we had to stop whenever a plane landed."

Unfortunately, Old Gator Dragway didn't last. Escalating real estate values forced closure of the track around 1969, but by then Deputy was running one of the legendary Hemi Dodge Ramchargers in Super Stock while simultaneously earning a degree in electrical and mechanical engineering from Louisiana Tech University. This in turn led to a curiously coincidental career choice.

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"I started out working with large turbines," said Deputy. "I was a development engineer doing research for Westinghouse in Pennsylvania for six years." His subsequent job as an oil company engineer took him all over the world, where he specialized in working with large pumps and turbines. And while this work didn't draw him directly to automotive turbos, his background in designing control systems and knowledge of heat transfer physics came in quite handy.    

Deputy eventually went on to race AFX and Pro Stock, but broke with the NHRA during the 1975 season. Pro Stock weight factoring that year favored the little Chevy Vega, "so a group of us decided to put Hemis into the Dodge Colt, Deputy said. "We spent a lot of money building those cars, but they outlawed them the first week. That was it for me and cars."

For the next nine years Deputy raced Unblown Gas and Blown Fuel drag boats, but he slowly got back into racing cars with a '73 Stage 1 Buick Regal, a car he still has. His first turbo car was a Corvair Monza, which he street raced, but it was after finishing up an engineering job in France that Deputy bought a 1986 Porsche 930 turbo - and he was hooked. "You've got this little 197 cubic-inch motor that puts out 380 horsepower from the factory," he said. "After I made a few tweaks, it was making nearly 500 horsepower."

In 1986 Deputy started Texas Turbo from his new home base in Houston, initially as a turbo repair shop. After working on a customer’s Buick Grand National, however, he quickly realized the performance potential of a domestic small block combined with a turbo and electronic fuel injection. "I started building motors and modifying turbos for the Buicks and went back into racing," he said. "That's how I got to know turbo master Kenny Duttweiler; we used to race each other all the time." Soon he was working exclusively on performance cars, and by 1989 he had switched to the popular 5.0L Mustangs after a rushed experiment at a Super Ford Magazine-sponsored shootout.

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"They had called and said that they were having an event in Columbus, Ohio," Deputy said. "They had invited all these modified Mustangs; supercharged, nitrous, and naturally aspirated. There were no turbo V-8 Mustangs, though, so they asked if I could build one and bring it. I had just four weeks to get the car ready." Borrowing a customer's automatic '89 GT, Deputy installed a Boss 302 block with a set of Windsor heads made by Trick Flow, which he topped with a single turbo manifold he had fabricated himself. Deputy then installed and programmed a Haltech computer to govern the system.

"We couldn't get it to work for the first 5-6 hours," he said. "There were problems with the computer and the MSD ignition system working together, so I had to redo some circuitry." Finally, he had just enough time to make two passes in the 11.60 range, a full second faster than the blown cars in the competition - on street tires.

By 1991 Deputy had purchased the Mustang from his customer and switched to
Cleveland-style SVO heads and twin turbos and began running 8.30s. Shortly thereafter, he heard about the premier NMCA/Hot Rod Top Ten event to be held in Memphis. Because of the twin turbo set-up on his Mustang, he couldn't run over 315 cubic-inches, and he had to add weight to reach the required 3400 lbs. Out of nearly 20 cars, Deputy finished #4 with an engine that displaced close to half the cubic inches of everything else on the property.

Deputy was again in the NMCA's Top Ten for 1993, but a cracked intake manifold benched him in the third round. "(Still,) I was the first Mustang and the first small block car to go into the sevens," he said. Certainly nobody could doubt his accomplishments with a small block; not only did he score well, but the Mustang easily handled the requisite 25 mile cruise. "You've got to remember that I was running 7.5 to 1 compression, so overheating was not a problem," he said. "And because I was running such a small engine I only needed three gallons of gas to make the cruise. The car was basically streetable anyway."  

By 1994 Deputy's quickest E.T. was a 7.72, but by the end of the season he realized that to stay competitive he'd have to build a new car capable of running in the six-second range. "By 1996 I was traveling all over the world again, though, so I didn't have time to race," he said. "The Mustang sat in my shop for three or four years before I took the motor out and sold the car." From that point on, his racing efforts were put on hold.

And while Reiger, Saboury and Samuel would later campaign successful twin turbo setups, the combination is still very rarely seen in competition. Why haven't more people adopted it? "Because it's more complicated and costly for the average hot rodder," Deputy explains. "The control systems are non-linear; it's exponential functions. With a supercharger, you want twice the rpm and you put in twice the fuel. Plus a supercharger uses regular headers. Turbocharging is very reliable when it's done right, but when it's done wrong, it's destructive."

There's also turbocharging's Achilles Heel - turbo lag. Some of the sport compact drivers have resorted to using a little shot of nitrous to assist in powering their cars off the starting line before the turbos have spun up to maximum boost, but that's limited to their own sanctioning body. Deputy first tried this 20 years ago, and it was immediately banned. "In fact I did one car where I shot nitrogen gas right across the turbo," he said. "It worked perfectly."    

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Burn-downs are another weakness. "You can't hold boost very long with a converter," Deputy explains, "because there's no converter that can take that heat. This used to be more of a problem when we ran automatic transmissions, but now we run Lencos. The only way you're going to be competitive is to use a stick."