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The company you may be thinking of is Turbonique. They built rocket and turbine-powered cars, karts and dragsters in the 60s. Many of the turbines were military surplus "APU" units (auxiliary power units) from the gen-sets of military aircraft.
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Nial, close - but I remember that someone had a front-engined dragster with 2 or 4 of these units. I thought they were starter units for jet engines but could be wrong about that, of course.
We had a couple at one time. There's one shown in the picture below way over at the right - it's the black thing.
It's sitting "shaft-up" on the floor. You might be able to make out an air inlet or outlet on the side - it has a rag in it and was about 4 inches in diameter. The "impeller" was very much like half a turbocharger. There was another inlet or outlet on the bottom, about 7 inches in diameter. There were planetary gears connecting the wheel to the splined shaft. I'd guess it was about a 30-1 ratio.
Do you recognize this as an APU?
Like so many things in those days we ended up tossing it. I removed the fasteners for possible future use & still have quite a few bolts - all drilled for safety wire and very light. I'll need 'em someday....