Wiscombe weekend

[Marty]

I posted earlier in the year about my intention to run Bioethanol this year. After gathering much information we went for it and set the car up to run on E85 for last weekends Wiscombe event.

Basically, to run with the existing carbs it needed larger jets and some ingnition advance. Not quite that easy but after a day of fiddling and half a day on the rollers it was sorted. We saw a slight gain in torque of about 15% but the main gain was a much snappier throttle response and a general smoothing out of the power curve.

On the day it started well, ran very well and used only a little more fuel than before (we anticipated about 25% but more like 10%). Based on this I think I will keep using it for this year and do some more analysis on the effects.

I should say we started off with a newly built, all steel crossflow which gave about 170bhp running on Dellorto 45s and an Omex mapped ignition. On throttle bodies it would be even easier to control fuelling and set up but we proved it can be done.

When we caught the carbs alight! we also found it burns more than explodes but clearly visible flame unlike methanol.

And although the hill was a little damp and my times were not as fast as in the dry it was good enough for a first in class so generally happy all round.

There may be some issues around MSA regulations for this fuel in road cars but I had no problems. It is pump fuel available from some Morrisons which is all the regs state.

As to the environmental reasons for using it. Too early to say as yet as this time it did involve travel to get fuel and a couple of trips to other rollers so that did not help my carbon footprint. It will be the way forward so if you are thinking of doing it, give it a try.