It’s almost a done deal for the Indy Racing League (runners of the popular Indianapolis 500 race) to use 100% Ethanol for their cars, as there is only one final test remaining. By adopting Ethanol, the Indy Racing League will be the first motorsport to use this fuel for it’s races. In 2006 the IRL was using a 10% Ethanol blend in their engines as a precursor to 100% adoption.
Technically Indy Car’s have never used Gasoline as their engines are Methanol based. The use of Methanol was for safety reasons as Methanol Fires can be easily put out by water. The engines that they will be using for the 2007 season are 3.5 Liter V8’s from Honda.
As with their testing results, no noticeable drop in engine performance was noticed when running on Ethanol compared to when it is running on Methanol.
Category: Bioethanol, Automotive
April 17th, 2007 at 2:44 am
[…] Last year, Indy Car Racing also announced that they are using biofuels to power their race engines. The added media mileage of seeing the performance of biofuels in competitive racing could do well to promote the use of this fuel for mainstream adoption. Not to mention that competitive racing is a very good testing ground for further development of the fuel as well as for new engine technology purposely designed to maximize the energy derived from it. Article here, originally from businessweek. Related Articles: […]