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E85 ethanol fuel is becoming popular with racers running boosted engines, for the high octane rating yet low cost compared to race fuel
I don't think anything more of it and I'm in line about 4 cars back from the start line, ready to make a run, when Jason runs up and says, "Shut off the motor, that was E85!" Oh crap. I pull out of line and get out of the car. He explains that a friend of ours put his fuel jugs in our trailer overnight, after I told him he could stash his stuff in our trailer. He runs E85, didn't mark his fuel cans, and they just put 5 gallons of corn juice in my tank. CRAP! I kind of... lost my temper. I wasn't so much mad at them but mad at myself for watching them put "unknown fuel" in our car. I should have stopped them. They went to go get our fuel jugs both filled, and we talked about ways to get this fuel out of the tank. Kyle had already left for the day and we didn't have the Ford quick-connect fuel line tools needed to make this easy. The weather was looking bad and we knew we might get rain at any minute. The only dry runs left for the day were about to happen in the next 10 minutes. CRAP CRAP CRAP!
I did some mental calculations... I had about 2 gallons of 93 octane in the tank (fuel light had come on) when they dumped 5 gallons of E85 in there. There was not enough time to dump out the tank and no tools on hand to do it easily. We'd need to run to town, get the tools, dump the fuel, refill it with 93, and that would take an hour or more. By then it would likely be raining and the day would be over. I needed to make some more speed stop runs as well. Instead of all of that I decided we would DILUTE the E85 with a lot more 93 octane, but before that I'd take one more run. I was so mad, and so far back in the standings (4th place would cost me a lot of points in this event) I just didn't care, and needed just a tenth of a second better to make 2nd place in the autocross.
I got back in line, strapped in, and made this run below. Click that image for the in-car video, some commentary about the E85 fiasco, and go to the 720P for the best resolution.
I don't know why I was faster on this run, maybe since my head was somewhere else (E85 dilemma) that it let my subconscious drive the car? I wasn't thinking about driving at all, I just drove. Jason said I was smoother and cleaner than I had been all day, not hanging the ass out for the camera, and he knew it would be a faster run before I even crossed the finish line. This 41.581 second run ended up being my fastest lap of the day and moved me up to 2nd place, just squeaking ahead of Finch and Tucker (shown below). I never got close to that time again in the half dozen laps I ran in the hours after the rain had come and dried back up.
My 41.58 run still was pretty far off of Hobaugh's best, and he backed up the 40.9 with another 40.9. Nobody had anything that could touch him in the autocross competition all day, but even being almost 7 tenths back my 2nd place finish was good enough to net me 22 out of a possible 25 points, which made all the difference in the end. After we quit switching courses between the even and odd cars we were finally able to run together, so and I could watch Tucker, Finch and Hobaugh run. Wow, those guys were hailing some tail.
Left: Hobaugh's Camaro was in a league of it's own. Right: He took a lot of autocross and speed stop runs! Each of those papers is a time slip.
All of their cars looked great but Hobaugh's Camaro was so hooked up I cannot describe it. Here is one of his runs on video, below, which is obviously much faster than any of mine - or anyone else's. He dominated the Goodguys autocross event the weekend before (on Friday/Saturday) by an even larger margin.
That Camaro is hooked up and Brian had no driving mistakes. Very well done. Agian, he won the Optima Invitational last year in his dad's
1965 Corvette, and he has been autocrossing for something like 28 years, so he is no stranger to these events. Looking at his video, I'm going to have to step it up driving-wise as well as make some fundamental changes to our TT3 set-up to work better on these street tires for the Vegas Optima event. I had enough little driving mistakes but for the most part my run was right on the cones and on the limit of the tires everywhere.
I might never catch Hobaugh on any autocross course, and I don't think with 100 more runs that Saturday that I would have caught him. That car is seemingly tailor made for the tight stuff, and I was very happy to pull off 2nd place at this event.
Saturday Breakage
Our Mustang was a tank all weekend with nary a hiccup, but that couldn't be said for everyone. When you are making 700+ hp and taking dozens of runs in a row, things can break, even on street tires.
One of the more popular builds was this vintage Volvo built by "Swedish Ops". This had an LSx V8 swap and a manual transmission. Apparently they lost a McLeod hydraulic throw out bearing and had to snatch the transmission out to repair it. This was one of 2 cars in the "under 3000 pound" class, which it ended up winning. It
barely made weight, as you had to weigh under 3000 pounds to run this class.
Saturday was also a bit of bad luck for the DSE crew. Kyle Tucker's 2nd gen Camaro munched a clutch, one of the multi-disc variety. His crew had the transmission out and the clutch changed in a little over an hour, and he was back out there making Speed Stop and Autocross runs.
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