usac is trying to destroy the silver crown series by running ethanol. ethanol makes less power and costs more money. i will sadly not be at the hoosier 100
The price per gallon may be a little more but you will use half the fuel. The power gap isn't really very wide either. Its just getting your engine to run on it properly that's no easy. Fans wouldn't tell a difference. Most likely not a good move for their series.
Use less fuel? If it is anything like in a street car you will get less fuel mileage. My truck and some friends cars have flex fuel. We get about 5+ miles per gallon less than with regular unleaded fuel. Maybe it is different with the racecar since they are actually tuned to just run on ethanol. Hopefully someone can explain in better detail.
The fuel to air ratio is greater with methanol than it is with ethanol, don't know the exact number but comparing regular gasoline(14 to 1) E85(10 to 1), Ethanol(9 to 1) and methanol(7 to 1) The first number being volume of air the second being volume of fuel. Takes more air to burn gasoline and less air to burn Methanol, ethanol is somewhere in between. Less air means more fuel.
Todd, ethanol is indeed less dense than gasoline and thus less efficient in a street car, however, silver crown cars run methanol which is even less dense than ethanol. The fuel mileage won't be double, based on specific gravities and Joules involved it should be similar in efficiency as methanol but less powerful using the same volume.
Hopefully the influx of money from the ethanol folks will keep the series on life support and future better economic
times will increase the car and spectator counts to a sustainable level. The uncertain effect ethanol will have is no
comfort to existing teams or prospective race teams (I do actually know a couple of folks near ready to field new
champ cars) but to me, Silver Crown on ethanol is WAY better than no Silver Crown at all.
