Quote:
Originally Posted by Win
I'm pretty sure your car has to be designated flex fuel to use that gas (yellow pump)
You can find "race gas" 98-100 octane at the rare station
Canada offers higher octane at almost every station than the US offers. Read there's legislation in the states to do similar because it's a win-win for all sides.
And yes, US gas is crap quality. I remember 60 Minutes covered a study taking random samples of gas at stations across all states and the results were shocking... some pumps even had gas that wasn't even the right color, like brown. Scary.
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Yes, I looked up to see if I could find about gas stations putting the remainder of their regular in premium and it says that sometimes the gas station doesn't even know. The distributor car rip them off and put regular in premium. But what I found out was that contamination and degradation is probably more common. Here is a NBC report on contamination and lack of government checks on fuel quality.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/con...-think-n776016
As I said above, 91 octane of good quality should be equivalent to euro 94 octane since the rating methods are different. This also applies to fuel. When comparing octane ratings, check to see which rating it is. RON, MON or AKI. They are not all the same.
Finally, octane rating is not necessarily better. Ethanol fuel can have a higher octane rating but might not play well with your car. It burns with less energy than petrol which means you end up pushing the gas pedal more and end up using more gas in some cases.
Finally, when I worked for Nissan's GTP program in the 90s, we used race fuel that worked great on 3 hour races. We won 4 IMSA manufacturer championships but we experienced quick fuel injector degradation. We researched it and found Techron to help clean the injectors after every race but we always wondered why the clogged so quickly. Then we went to Le Mans and our cars were leading for a long time only to DNF when the fuel cells disintegrated on us. I don't recall if they just blamed the fuel cell manufacturer but they basically fell apart with the glue that holds the bladder coming apart. Our "race" fuel had high levels on Toluene which is what old school model airplane glue that melted plastic is made of so just think twice before putting "Race" fuel in your BMW that BMW says can't even handle american Sulfur content.