The control fuel for my local club is a crappy, no name gas station down the road. It’s somewhat of an open secret that nobody uses it. People who are highly respected openly say it’s rubbish and to not use it.
The mornings of the few race meetings I’ve done, rocking up to said gas station to get my fuel, there is barely a karter in sight, even though the meeting gets 200+ racers.
I’ve seen them test the fuel, but from all reports it’s for additives and NOT comparing the fuel to the control fuel. Is there even a test that would definitively compare one brand of 98 octane fuel to another?
Reliably distinguishing 2 pump gasolines apart? Not likely. A really sensitive scale and a full liter sample might be able to tell apart specific gravities - and if those two stations are supplied by the same distributor they might just be the same anyway.
Reliably determining whether someone’s using pump gas? Yes. Water test for ethanol quantity, Digatron test for total polarity, iodine test for lead just to make sure it’s absent.
Receipt test for having bought fuel at that station that day? Of course!
If they where half decent in trying to enforce it, and had the equipment they should be able to verify that it at least wasthe same “kind” of fuel. (Octane, ethanol content, oxygen ect).
But it would be kind ofhard to see the difference between two brands of pump 98, without lab tests.
@Kakarot Trust me, if they have the correct meter and check the fuel, it can bite you. But the question is, do they?
The club we started at is super anal about LO206 fuel checks. We could only get fuel from a single pump at a large Bucees station. There were ethanol free pumps with 92 and 87 octane, the wrong one would fail you. Also, they would have enough variation truckload to truckload to make an issue. If you got your fuel the night before and then a truck showed up Saturday morning before the grab sample was collected, you would fail. Saw it more than once…
Thanks for the replies. What would be better to run in an X30; unleaded 91 octane “with up to 10% renewable ethanol”, or just premium unleaded 98 octane with no ethanol? Is it right that lower octane and high ethanol is superior for X30’s?