Originally Posted by
Dustin If you really want to improve gas mileage put a throttle stop so you can't go over half throttle.
Funny that everyone seems to think that a lead foot is always an issue to low gas mileage, but no one ever things that possibly sludge, vacuum leaks, oil, gas leak, gas evap leak, etc. etc. could be the problem.
Today I took a 269 mile trip. Left at 4:30 in the morning, was in DC by 6:30, car stood in the parking garage until 3PM at which time I left to go back home. This was in DC traffic, and I redlined the car about 5 times. I drove 198 miles and fueled up 6.175 gallons, giving me a gas mileage of
32.13.
I fueled up 69 miles before reaching home, there is a Shell gas station that I really like, I only use Shell 87 gas in my car. I drove 69 miles, redlined the car 2 times, hit the 4krpm couple times, ran with AC on all the way. Fueled up 1.833 gallons to be getting an amazing gas mileage of
37.64.
Now if you take the mile to redline ration, in 200 miles you can fit almost 3 (2.869) 69 mile runs. Say I would redline my car twice in every 69 mile run, that would be about 6 times would redline the car.
So in that 69 mile stretch, I floored the car more in ratio then in the 198 mile run. Yet I still got a gas mileage about 5 miles higher.
Now I may floor the car, but trust me sometimes you are at just hardware limits. Like no matter how hard you try a stock SE-R will only give you 140 BHP.
Now the reason I am looking at this is because I'm looking for a vacuum leak. It has occurred to me that every time I have to turn off the car for longer then 5 minutes to gas up, my gas is evaporating, thus giving me bad gas mileage.
This makes perfect sense because on the highway I would constantly get above EPA numbers, but in the city I would get 20-21MPG (my friends Camaro gets 23). In the City I fuel up once every few days, while highway driving it all gets used in one trip.
Anyway onto the PCV data, I will post it in the next post.