Thread: VVL and E85

Anyone running on E85? Did a search for E85 and got zip.

Noone runs E85 here

I guess if you live in an area where it is available, you can try it. But it has some serious drawbacks that most people don't really like:

Bad economy, requires from 30-40% more fuel.
Not available, with frequent fill-ups if there isn't a station where you go you are stuck.
Requires fuel line change, and conversion for the alcohol.
Requires a larger fuel pump, and larger injectors. Sometimes to the point the car won't idle well below 1500+rpm.
Harder to start in the winter, hope you have a big battery.

All motor applications would be pretty cool to see with high compression though. A few of my friends run E85 in their cars. But here is a real big drawback: advertised ethanol concentration! Our pumps here say E85, but it is more like E60-70 where I am. This will mess with your tune.

I think E85 on a 13.5:1 motor would be pretty cool to see.

Answers in bold above.

Any cars since the early 90s should work just fine on stock rubber lines.

But there is a teflon lined hose that goodyear makes that all my friends switched to. (just to make sure)

1600cc injectors will not idle like stock, no matter what you do. Even 1000cc injectors would be hard to idle under 1000rpm. If you are going for 200whp on E85, then you will need around a 400cc injector. It should idle fine on that.

Is it worth it for you to run E85 over gasoline?

Was just something to think about. I have friends running E85 on their 95-96 subaru's with stock fuel systems. (+550 injectors) Would probably run something around there. The only thing that makes ethanol corrosive is that it attracts moisture. (water) So metal lines can rust from the inside out if they are not made after the mid 80's.

Right, as with methanol, ethanol will mix readily with water. This is sorta good, and sorta bad.

So what specifically are you trying to find out, just if there is anyone out there running it and how there car goes? I can't recall anyone posting about running their car on E85, but I think there is a few in the pipeline.

Just do it, sounds like you know the +'s and-'s just go bump that compression right up winch up the timing and let us know how you get on

Just give the head an N1 treatment and shave her down a bit with some SR16 pistons or something. Just go crazy and let us know how it goes!

Plan was to run it on a stock 20ve bottom end/head with 16ve cams. You don't have to run super high compression.

Yeah but Ethonal has a lower calorific value than petrol. I.E it takes more ethanol than petrol to get the same amount of power out of it, hence the bigger injectors required. It is more detonation resistant so what that means is you can run more boost or compression and timing before detonation occurs. Unless your planning on making use of that fact you'll probably make less power than you would on petrol.