Bender Unit wrote:Its obvious that this approach will divide opinion. Some people are all for pushing as hard as they can with what they have got and others prefer to consider every fine detail before moving ahead.
James, what I'm concerned about is HOW people know better than someone that used to test stuff to destruction at TTE as his job!! If they're so good, why don't they just apply to an F1 or WRC team for a job??
Which brings me on to what I don't agree with what *you* said about the mapping. If the US has better mappers than the UK, then why do the US race teams buy their chassis and engines from the UK? Why are WRC, F1 and all other top-level motorsport teams in the UK, or Europe? It's not by accident, mate.
One thing that many people haven't grasped is the difference in mapping with race fuel compared to regular road fuel. For a start, most race fuels have oxygen content in them that affects the air/fuel mixture (hence why often you have to richen up the fueling when some race fuel is dropped into an engine mapped for road fuel.
More importantly though, the higher the octane, the less "explosive" the mixture is. In fact, fuel burns as a wave front, and the higher the octane the slower that wave front burns. However, you can run more ignition advance with that race fuel. This is where the extra power comes from. On a typical 2litre turbo engine, for every degree of extra advance that you can run, it should be worth an extra 10bhp. A lot of the time, you can run 10degrees more ignition advance without getting anywhere near det - that's an extra 100bhp from nothing!!!
This is with everything else staying constant (ie boost, intake temps, fuel mixture, etc). So, if a race fuel can give THAT much more power, you can see why they're not really that comparable.
Also note that a lot of the guys in the US are using race fuel on the strip. They tend to run less boost too on road fuel, and raise it once they've dropped in some race fuel. So again, being in a country when very few of us want to start using race fuel to get the power, and in a country where we tend to run considerably higher boost, we're not comparing apples to apples. How many people in the US run even 19-20psi ON ROAD FUEL?
So you see, in the UK, we are asking a HELLUVA lot more from our tuners. If we were to use race gas, we'd be making it a LOT easier for them!