I think I saw somewhere that some gas is beginning to be sold in NS mixed with ethanol. I also think I saw somewhere on a racing forum that it makes a little more power than regular gas. Are there any rules about using it in Spec Miata?

Also, is there any easy way to tell if someone is using the blend or not? I've got no experience with this stuff at all.

dont know about there andy but here in nb they all except for a few have it,i think it the law that the companies use a certain amount

Nova Scotia is the same. 10% in all reg and mid grade gas. high test is said to have none. Not good for you carbs. lol. If its left to sit, it can eat the metal of cheaper Carbs. Its not going to make anyone any power at the level it is put in the pump fuels around here, and it needs proper tuning and timing to be affective. Seen a few test they did on different Hondas, and they made a bit of power, i think it was around 5-6 HP along the hole curve.

Id be more worried about people using the different boosters out now. like what Torco sells. Or even just running a mix of race gas. Or can SM do that?

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AX-1995 Honda Civic CX FSP
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2009 Canadian Solosprint Champion.
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5-6 hp would be huge in Spec Miata. Any way to tell just by looking at the stuff whether what you get at the pump contains alcohol or not?

Incidentally, I'm not trying to stir up any controversy here (or even look for a performance advantage). GPS data from our car showed some weird hp variations between sessions this past season, and inconsistent fuel quality seemed at least a possibility.

So I started reading up on local variations in pump gas, and here we are.

I heard Aarron ran 3% nitromethane mix all year and thats why he was fast.

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Paul

Did he slip some kind of 'go slow' juice in our gas tank while he was at it? That would explain a lot...

Andy research heat sink on the 1600 miata i think this may lead you to your variations. i know on my dyno with kart race engines the ethanol hurt hp.we found shell v-power worked well. it has none. if the fuel has ethanol it has to be marked on the pump

Every pump I have used in NS says "May contain up to 10% Ethanol" for regular and mid grade. According to Pure-gas.org all premium in NS, NB, PEI and NL are Ethanol free.

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Your variations in power may be due to the humidity and heat difference from one weekend to an other Andy. I know in July the miata was useless. Sept points race decent. Jcm not so much.

I corrected my numbers for temperature and humidity using the SAE dyno correction factor, so I don't think it's that. Our corrected HP was very consistent all day for some events and sagged pretty badly mid-day at others. The pattern most days does look like heat soak, but it started out and stayed bad all day at ARMS #5 (where it was off by 10-12 hp!), and smoothly recovered through the 3 hours of the JCM. Weird.

Anyway, probably not ethanol related. Still curious though, is that stuff legal for us to use/experiment with?

Help me out here Bruce, otherwise I might actually have to read the rule book!

I think you're an order of magnitude low.

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I can chime in here. All this suspension stuff is new to me but not the engine side of things.

Joel is right, reg and mid grade contain 10%. Why ethanol is a big deal in fuel is it reduces the shelf life of gasoline from several years down to 3 months. Ethanol mixed fuels separate with the introduction of water (ethanol absorbs water) and it kills the octane rating. Other processes take place that degrade the fuel over time as well.

On the performance side of things, ethanol is great for knock suppression and allows one to run much more compression, timing, boost etc to make more power. The downfall is you need MORE ethanol per unit of air. This is why you cannot fire up most regular cars on e85,(85%ethanol) as they will run lean and overall make less power.

Now to tackle the fuel quality debate. My FRS sees HUGE variations in power due to fuel quality. I can lose 25hp just because the octane rating isn't as advertised. Long story short, I run an identical 91 octane tune as anyone else with a FRS and my tuner, but my ECU sees knock and pulls timing advance (I usually lose about a third of my timing advance which makes for the big loss in power). As far as I can tell our 91 (Annapolis valley area) is the equivalent of 89 octane in most other parts of north america. If I run an 89 tune with our 91 octane I sometimes lose a little timing advance, but usually I do not. Now whether this happens to a miata is another case, as I don't know how their ECUs react to engine knock.

Back to the Ethanol debate to give some perspective. My FR-S makes ~190WHP, a comparably modified car running e85 and an appropriate tune will make about 210Whp. There is lots to be gained with e85 use. I would absolutely use it if it were available around here.

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Dev, if you're losing that much timing on 91 we should send some to a lab. We're all getting ripped off! Also our 89 should mostly only be E5 not E10 cause most stations only have 2 tanks and blend at pumps. I wonder if we are getting CA style bad fuel. Lower emissions crap power.

I'm surprised your stock fuel system will flow enough to get that power increase on E85. That's pretty neat.

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Yeah it was quite interesting actually. After I dyno'd 165hp at the VW event a few of us went to at Kraftwerx (15 less than a previious dyno I had done with fewer mods) I called the tuner manufacturer. I did a datalog and sent it to them and they claim it was obvious right away. I was running a 91 octane tune where 500 customers elsewhere have no knock and I had enough to lose a lot of my timing advance. He then got me to run a 89 octane tune on the same fuel and I still logged a little. I have tried different fuels and I found about 1 in 4 tanks from Shell in new minas was good enough for me to run my 91 tune on. Running a decent brand octane booster fixes my issues though. I have been told some premium fuel has ethanol content despite there being no requirement to. Shell Vpower is one which everyone says has none. I will be sending an oil analysis to blackstone labs in the spring to see how my engine is doing. Maybe they do fuel too? I'd be interested in doing some testing.

The FR-Ss fuel system is surprisingly stout. The stock fueling system run out of of juice at about 290whp (after going forced induction) on gas .

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Hmmm... interesting. Especially the comment about variable fuel quality.

Regarding ethanol: There's no knock sensor on a 1990 Miata, so I suspect that putting E10 in the tank without a re-tune probably wouldn't make much of a difference. Miatas run pretty rich at stock injection pressures pressures though, so maybe you could get away with a bit more ignition timing on E10 if you tuned for it. Still wondering if running on this stuff is legal or not, though.

Also, for anyone who thought Paul's nitromethane comment was an innocent joke, all I can say is whoa! , start googling. There's a ton of exotic fuels and additives out there. Makes our current Tech a bit of a joke, as nobody even pretends to look for this kind of stuff.

Edit: That's not a knock on our tech guys! I really appreciate their efforts, and they are A-OK on all the safety stuff. It's just an observation that we really race on the honor system at AMP, and anyone that wanted to cheat for extra performance could probably do it pretty easily.

Yeah

Yeah! I always hear a lot of people saying they can "feel" their car has more power on a given brand of gas. I thought it was all BS until I realized how much power can be lost with crappy fuel. Keep in mind this is recorded ecu / dyno data, not my perception. Mind you given some modern 2.0L engines have 12.5:1 compression ratios trying to squeeze every pony they can out, it makes sense.

Without the knock sensor it wouldn't pull timing, but would be slightly leaner. Perhaps not even measurably so however. Does anyone run a wideband A/F gauge in their car? I can't see e10 making any difference more than natural power variation due to things like humidity, but it would be neat to find out in a series where 6hp could make a difference.

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Yeah, we've got a wideband gauge in the car, but it isn't datalogged. We just set the FP, checked the A/F a few times on the fly to make sure it looked OK and forgot about the whole thing. I'll record data and pay more attention next year.

Very technical stuff. I have found without a doubt that it makes a huge difference where you buy your gas. Station to station makes a difference. Storage tank age and configuration contributes to that difference as well as the fact that the bulk supplier has just pulled in blasting huge volumes of fuel in the tanks stirring everything up. Then you pull in, fill your car or gas can up with not only what is floating around in the storage tank but the low test gas that remained in the hose from the guy before as well. I always fill the truck up first before the race car. Not technical but hopefully helpful. Probably something you already thought of.

There is good reason behind why we run the torco fuel booster. We only mix to 96 octain, but since the motor is 11.1:1 I like the extra insurance. NS fuel is horrible, kristas SRT-4 is tuned and has the boost turned up a few pounds. Hot day, crap gas, I'd say it's less then stock HP. Good gas noticiable power jump, little booster around 95 octane major power jump. My best guess is the car makes 300whp on good gas, as it sits. Her father 440 69 roadrunner picks up a full throttle ping, pending on were you get gas. Petro-can near brooklin has roadrunner safe fuel. Sure does suck running less then stock timing. No ecu to assist when it starts, just lift off and accept defeat. Lol.

Any boosted car or higher comp car tuned even from just the factory really shows the poor quality of our fuels. Lots of VWs are boosted, and customers have told us, trips stateside have givin them the best MPG they have ever seen, and the car just flat-out worked better. Do I think running E10 will gain you anything, no I don't. I think av-gas or torco booster will do more. Torco says 1 can per tank will put you somewear in the 111-114 octane area.

As Andy asked, is it legal to run a booster, or a cocktail mix in your fuel? How about flatout c10?

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AX-1995 Honda Civic CX FSP
RR-1995 Honda DelSol VTEC GT4
2009 Canadian Solosprint Champion.
ARMS Race Director. Race@armsinc.ca

Or gas is definitely terrible. Take any sort of modern high compression/turbo vehicle west or south and you absolutely immediately notice the difference filling up in Quebec or past Maine both in power and Mileage.

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An update: I read the rules, and Appendix 'C', page 12 says E10 is legal.

It's not exactly clear to me that this is the final word, though. There are contradictory rules in some cases between the various documents posted, and it's possible I missed something. It happens with tires: The main ARMS SM document specifies a size but says tire brand is unrestricted, appendix 'A' says Toyo tires with Canada stamps, and appendix 'B' requires Hoosier SM7's. I know appendix 'A' wins in this little tug of war, but it's not exactly easy to figure out just by reading.

Dev: This little box just came up on a friend's Facebook feed specifically designed to let you use E85/non-E85 at the flip of a switch. Looks like a nice little box! Looks like it would work on my FXT, too! Not that we have E85 around here at all.

https://www.facebook.com/DeliciousTunin ... nref=story

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Check out: Rally East, The Ledwidge Lookoff Rally

Glad you added that Andy, you were going to make Trevor cry. Yeah, as said elsewhere tech was just making sure you are safe. You could have dropped an LS1 in there and you would have still passed tech.

There are portable fuel analyzers that will give octane and ethanol levels, but pricing is rumoured to be in the 5 figure range (not good when you have to request a quote to get a price). Other than checking fuel the only other way is to have a fuel supply at the track, but that's has it's own problems, and still wouldn't prevent someone from slipping some additives into the tank/jug.

The SM GCRs require a fuel test port but anyone know if fuel testing is common in other SM series? This suggests it isn't:
http://treasurecoastmiata.com/i-10299524-fuel-test-port-and-drain-kit.html

I'm no engine guru but my understanding was that higher octane didn't necessarily give more power in a engine unless the engine was tuned for it. That is higher octane would allow for more advance timing and higher compression without getting predetonation, but throwing higher octane in an ordinary street engine without making any changes to it wouldn't yield any performance gains.

I was kind of surprised/interested at the doodad I posted above showing on its feature list is a realtime analysis of fuel ethanol content. Certainly not the only thing you could 'spike' fuel with, but it shows that for ethanol at least the cost of detection has come down.

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Check out: Rally East, The Ledwidge Lookoff Rally

It's funny I was on Delicious Tuning's website not ten minutes before I read this. Yep those are very prevalent in the high powered FR-S crowd. They can be set up just for informational purposes or to automatically adjust tuning on the fly.




Ethanol test kits are available for purchase in a link I provided earlier for ~50$. I think you get couple hundred tests out of them.

You're right on the performance side of things so long as your car's performance isn't already being lessened by the effects of poor fuel quality. If your engine is running as it should on regular old 91 octane you will on average see a performance decrease with a rise in octane level.

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Glad the clarification was OK! Amazing how sometimes on-line comments come out as hurtful in ways they were never intended to be. I realized about the original 'tech' comment almost as soon as I had hit send... so I tried to fix it.

And just to make sure: I very, very much appreciate all the volunteer work everyone puts in to make race events possible (including the guys in tech). We owe you all big time, and none of my ramblings have ever been intended to disparage your efforts.

Besides, I can't afford to get Trevor mad at me - he'd probably stop timing our pit stops in the 1-hour, and then we'd be screwed!

Not only do we have lousy gas in NS, but the diesel available leaves a lot to be desired and we are paying a much high price per gallon (I know, old school) than in the US
Mileage- 13.2 in NS and 15.5 To 18.3 in the US. The further south you go the better the mileage
Cost- around 6.00 per gallon in NS and under $4.00 per gallon in Florida.
Gerald Elliott
Elliott Racing