The Secret Ingredient for Super Speed? Ethanol

by John Herath (AgWeb) The headlines were head-turning: an American made supercar had punched through the 300 mph barrier on a seven-mile stretch of empty road outside of Las Vegas. While the 331 mph top speed reported by the SSC Tuatara is now in question, there is no disputing the secret sauce behind the blistering speed according to automotive engineer Dr. Andy Randolph.

“If you are fortunate enough to see the specifications for that engine, you'll see that it is rated at 1,350 peak horsepower running on 91 octane premium, E10 gasoline, but when you run it on E85, that peak power specification increases to 1750 horsepower,” says Randolph, the technical director for ECR Engines. “That’s how they were able to achieve those speeds.”

Randolph should know. He builds high performance engines for NASCAR and other racing circuits. He knows speed and the power of 85% ethanol fuels.

“One significant advantage that ethanol has over gasoline is what's called charge cooling, and that’s [because] when you vaporize ethanol you get about three times the cooling as you do if you vaporize gasoline,” Randolph says. “So what they're doing is they're injecting this E85, and they're using it as just as much to cool the engine as they are to power the engine, and in fact they're injecting a lot more fuel than they need for the amount of air that they're ingesting, because of the cooling properties to cool off things like pistons and valves and the cylinder block.”

These kinds of high performance vehicles rely on the high compression allowed with the high octane of ethanol fuels, according to Randolph.

NASCAR currently runs on a 15% blend of ethanol, road racing runs 25%, but Randolph would like to see more.

“Every chance we get when we're talking to NASCAR, the sanctioning body, we're saying, hey, let us have a little more ethanol in our fuel, because, if you would, we would be able to have our engines last longer and perform better.” READ MORE