JOY STICK

A road rally along some of the most spectacular Alpine roads celebrating the manual gearbox? We've just the car for the job...

- ROWAN HORNCASTLE

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.

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.