I decided to set my car up for e85. All it took was 80lb injectors and a different tune. The baseline 92 octane tune with this pulley made 531/460 rwhp/tq. I had originally planned to use a smaller pulley that made 553/492 on pump gas but my fuel pumps couldn't suppy enough e85 past 5700 rpm with that pulley.

Anyhow final numbers were 575/505. A gain of 44/45. This was with 21 degrees of timing, we weren't at the limit but I decided to call it quits because it's more power than I'd ever planned on making with this motor. The pumps also couldn't supply a safe amount of fuel past 6400 rpms. It will surely put me deep into rollcage territory since I was in the mid/high 11's with 515hp.

FWIW my motor has forged rods and pistons with a 9.5 cr, Comp 127300 cams, FRPP 62mm tb, PMAS HPX maf, 80lb injectors modified by corvetteinjectors.com, an innovators west 10% od balancer, Whipple 2.3 with 3.5 inch pulley and is fed with GT500 fuel pumps.

Please no political comments. This thread is to document what it took to run e85 and the results.

 

Good stuff, the e85 is a nice little kick in the pants for performance!

 

nice! can't wait till I get some nice midrange like that! mine is still down for some reason.

 

thanks for sharing this Bruce. it's nice to know there's another way to squeeze
a few more ponies out of our cars, without breaking the bank. hopefully someday
i'll get a ride in this hot rod of yours.

 

What's the difference in BTU content?

 

E85 has 81,800 BTUs per Gallon.
non-ethanol gasoline has 114,100 BTUs per Gallon.

To get the same explosive force from the combustion in on cylinder, you have to increase your fuel/air ratio, basically, you have to dump in more E85 to make the same explosion.

The benefit though is you can dump more E85 per unit volume of air (run much more richer) and thus get much more force out of the explosion of the combustion in a cylinder. It's just that you will burn through it much more quickly than non-ethanol gasolines.

 

I think a higher compression or boosted motor gets more out of it too. The comparisons aren't all linear with gasoline. It definately uses more fuel. It also burns cooler and allows more timing to be run. This is just a safer way to make power for track use. As soon as I'm done with my experiment it's going back to pump gas until racing season.

When I was researching all the aspects of e85 I found some data from vmp. He got 10/18 hp/tq just by tuning a stock s197 with a cai for e85.

See post #2
http://www.vmptuning.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2113

 

I'm sure that can be arranged. Drop me a line next time you are in town.

 

True, and for the very same reasons you mentioned, E85 has an octane rating that exceeds 110.
He could have done as much as you did with your car and gotten a lot more out of it.

In your car, you will probably might have to go to something as high (if not higher) than 120 lbf/hr injectors to keep up with the fuel demands. That, and a higher capacity fuel pump to feed those hungry things.

 

I would get a dual BAP from KB for fuel issue. You will have no problem maintaining after that.