Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Dyno and Drag running different 1/4 times in different states?

At Cecil County I ran a 15.2 on a bone stock SVT with a K+N drop in filter. I moved to AZ and I consistantly ran 15.90's at both Firebird and Speedworld. I actually ran slower with more mods. I know that the mods were suspect (i.e. C+L MAF and BAT pipe) but I think that it was the elevation of 1200' and the temperature. In the summer it can be 110 at night. I took my car to SanDiego a few weeks ago and I should have ran it htere. I have never felt it pull harder. Of course the S/C has something to do with it too.

Haven't been to MAUI, Hawaii lately haven't you folks

The track there is extremely good, in fact the best in our State. I would say very comparable to some of the best Mainland tracks as for as weather conditions, wind direction, track surface and launch pad.

O'ahu has almost a Million people, you would think we would have a some what decent track

Here there's no such thing as trying out different tracks, you folks are lucky in the states...

You all have very interesting theories and I'm sure they are all correct in one way or another.

But there is one thing that is a variable everywhere you go that no one has mentioned.

The fuel.

There are very few federal quality control guidlines for the composition of automotive gasoline. So the quality of the fuel suffers in both composition and level of contaminates suspended in the fuel. The quality of the distilate as a fuel also depends on the crude oil's origin and the refinery that produced it. The crude oil from one area of te world is different than the oil from another area and will yeild a slightly different fuel, so refineries import crude stock from several points of origin to help maintain a higher level of consistency in their product. But still, consistency from each of the refineries is differnt and you can notice it in the way it performs in your viehicle.

There are 2 major methods of refining gasoline, distilation and fractionalization. The distilation is just like the distiling process used to make drinking alcohol. Distilation yeilds the purest fuels, however, this process on average only yeilds a specific ammount of each of these chemicals from a given ammount of crude and is rather expensive compared to fractionalization through which the refinery can control, somewhat, the ammount of any one of the distilates removed from the crude. Although less expensive this process yeilds a product lower in purity than distilation and with differnt burn characteristicts.

In some states the gasoline is mixed with some kind of alcohol such as methanol or ethanol to help reduce emissions. The problem lies in the fact that alcohols, although they burn very clean, do not have the same energy content as gasoline, so with reduced energy content per unit of measure the engine will generate less power for each unit of measure consumed.

Other states use a chemical known as MTBE (Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether) Which has similar characteristicts as gasoline and helps the fuel burn cleaner but is toxic and has been linked to ground water pollution. This chemical also has the same effect on power output of the engine as alcohols.

Still other states have no guidelines for making blended fuels so straight gasoline is used, this will generate the highest power output.