Thursday, July 19, 2012

Today's post is about how motorsports is going to produce the highest quality fuel products.  Motorsports is a natural development process for products because each type of competition, or motorized goal to achieve, has different areas of performance that it stresses more than others.  In a hill climb, MAXIMUM power is key, keeping weight down is also important, but long duration (4 hours) reliability is not a concern at all.  24 hours of Le Mans is 24 hours of high-speed hell on an engine because both power and reliability are important, but reliability being more important forces the teams to build engines to a level of precision and also cleanliness that other engine builders would call absurd.  So many different types of motorsports with so many specific goals to achieve.  By letting teams use a fuel that is "tuneable" and easy to reformulate and try new things with, they will make sure the fuel they create supports whatever type of race they are doing.  When several motorsports are doing this same thing it weeds out the problems.  For example:
Lets say we are going racing at an professional stage rally event with our Bio-diesel Subaru.  Each stage is relatively short, but there are several stages, power is limited by class and it's a two day event with the rule that we must finish with the same engine we start with, and we run in a special eco-class that requires the use of emissions devices.  So, what do we want our fuel to do?  We want it to be Rev. friendly because our 4 cylinder engine revs. to 6500 rpm, and reliability is also very important because if we don't finish we can't win, and we get no engine swap.  Now that i have some of the basic performance key points figured out i can begin tuning my fuel.  I need it to have a higher flash-point, burn faster and absolutely not build up in a DPF that we have retained from the stock setup.  Lubrication in cylinder is also important.

So, this is one area, then you think someone setting it up for a boat race wants different fuel, and a guy doing tractor pulls wants different fuel, and the woman racing Dakar Rally is going to want something different also...then we start combining information from each of these motorsports and the fuels at the pump can benefit from the things they develop at the track.  This is how so many parts are designed and brought to the market already.  Most performance companies actually market it that way..."we use these same shocks on our trophy truck and they get us home every-time..." or some crap like that.  With the bio-diesel Subaru being capable of so many different types of events on it's own, it will do a great job of testing several different ideas for fuel as well as on the engine.  We can make a fuel that works with DPFs and we can also make a fuel that burns so well and so clean it absolutely doesn't need one.  This is just the beginning.  Soon, bio-diesel and E100 will be the main staple of the American fuel diet and soon, for the entire world.  A country like Thailand running on Bio-diesel would be absolutely amazing.


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