I rode in a friend’s Ferrari (1978 308) recently and while I love how it sounds… I often can not get enough of the turbocharged sound. So if you love the sound of turbochargers doing work here you go:
Link for you RSS peeps.
It may be an older video of ours, but I love it and cannot get enough.
Update: Apparently I decided to post this exactly two years after uploading it to YouTube. Odd.
Gas stations need to be refilled just like your car. The trucks that fill the gas stations have pretty busy schedules, so they pump in the gasoline as fast as they can. That is all fine and dandy until you are refilling your car soon after they refill the gas station. The refilling process stirs up all the particulate matter that settles out of the gasoline in the storage tanks. The particulate matter then gets pulled up into the gas pumps and into your car.
So don’t fill up at a gas station that has been refilled recently. While a small amount, you’ll be spending parts of a penny on things that are not gasoline and paying for it as gasoline. Plus you will be making your fuel filter work just that much harder and possibly restrict its flow over time. So if you see the gas truck in the gas station, keep away from there for a few hours. It might save you that much more (if your time is worth it).
While this is not so much a gas saving tip as it is a money saving tip, I think it addresses a common misconception about gasoline.
Stick to Low Octane Gas. If you don’t have a requirement for above 89, buy the lowest octane gas that will keep your car working. Octane has nothing to do with engine performance by itself. That is 93 octane will not make a car that only needs 87 octane run better.
Higher octane gas can put up with higher temperatures before it ignites, so high performance engines take advantage of this fact. They compress and heat up the gas and air more than a normal engine would in various ways. They could turbo/supercharge, increase compression in the cylinders, etc… All of those would require higher octane gas. If they used lower octane gas, the engine may start to knock. That means the gas is igniting before the spark and you can damage many parts of your engine when this happens.
So unless your engine requires it to prevent knocking (detonation), stick to the lower octanes.
Keep Your Tires Inflated
Low tire pressure increases your cars rolling resistance. Why? Because more rubber is in contact with the ground, and while this may generally be a good thing for racing, as we all know racing is not about fuel economy. Increased rolling resistance (which equates to traction) makes your engine work harder. Harder working engines consume more fuel so your MPG suffers. It is the same principle that makes road cyclists ride paper thin wheels and tires. So keep your tires inflated.
Keep your tire pressure around the factory recommended levels. However, if you over inflate your tire you may decrease the life of your tire while decreasing traction (what a loss). So keep an eye on your tire pressures! FYI the tire pressure in my WRX is currently around 36psi.
You should be able to find your factory levels stamped on a plate in one of your door frames. Combine that with the fact that most gas stations have free air for tires you really have no excuse to not keep your tires inflated. Happy hunting!
Don’t Drive Like a Douche…until the corners.
What I mean by driving like a Douche is tailgating, accelerating like a bat out of hell stoplight to stoplight (red light racers) and lots of pedal work on the road. So don’t do that. Accelerating like crazy (braking and gas) wastes energy needlessly, so if you really care about your MPG calm down with your pedals. That also means don’t do any of the neat stuff we’ve been telling you how to do like J-turns.
When you will want to drive like a douche is the corners, if you can safely not slow down for a corner then don’t. Driving for lower gas consumption is like winning a race in a low power car, it is all about preserving momentum. That doesn’t mean keep your foot planted on the accelerator through the corner!
So be nice to those pedals and dont mash them, drive around the speed limit (wind resistance increases with velocity duhhh), if you can, keep your speed up going into the corners and last of all calm down. Hopefully you can adjust the nut behind the wheel this summer and save a few bucks.
I have been asked how will gas prices change rally cars. My answer is that they wont…much. Gas is such a small cost compared to registering for a race, buying tires, prepping the car and buying parts to replace broken ones.
Lets Do Some Math
Assume that a rally car rolls for about 300 miles a rally, including transits. Assume the race team pays $6/gallon for 100 octane gas. Their race car, throughout the whole weekend, averages 13 miles per gallon. They’re going to have to buy at least 23 gallons of gas for $138.
Lets Compare
Races often require $500+ registration fees to cover event insurance, marshal’s pay, and tons of other stuff (most staff are volunteers). I can find cheap rally tires at $150 a pop, so that’s $600 a set. Teams usually have a few different types of tires that they can use over a couple rallies. Assume a tarmac, gravel and snow set so that is $1800 in tires per few events. Hotels cost about $60-100 a night for 2 people so a team of 4 (small team!) that stays near the rally for 2 or 3 nights will run anywhere from $240-$600 an event. Feeding your crew costs too (food price is positively correlated with gas price). Not to mention the amount of things that can break on a rally car, and do break! You have to be carrying spares for almost everything, which increases the upfront and between race costs.
Hopefully you’re starting to understand that gas prices aren’t a big deal to most racers. Sure gas prices make it that much more expensive to compete, but the increase in cost is small compared to all the other costs associated with racing. The interesting thing is that the more gas prices increase, the fewer competitors the SCCA is seeing. I guess most racers really are racing on the margins.
If you’re a racer I would to hear what you think about increasing gas prices, comment below.
With people so concerned over the price of gasoline I will post gas saving tips, no matter how strange and minute they may be. Today’s gas saving tip is Fill Up When It Is Colder.
That means, since it is summer now, fill up late at night or on cooler days. Why? Because a gallon of gasoline is a volume not a mass. Higher temperatures of gasoline means less mass per dollar when compared to the same price at a lower temperature. While the effect of this is small, it could make a difference in the long term.
The effect of temperature is not minute enough to scrape by the law books. Most states (probably all) have laws related to the sale of bulk volumes of liquid, especially gasoline. They have to be sold as the volume they would fill at a defined temperature. For example, in Arizona all bulk sales have to be sold as the volume they would be at 60ºF. So, during the summer, a gasoline truck actually carries less gasoline than it does during the winter even though they are carrying the same volume. By the way, Arizona is WAYYYYYYYYYYY hotter than 60ºF during the summer, so people at the pump are losing a good amount of mass per gallon.
Also, when it is hot out, gasoline likes to evaporate faster. So you could be losing some mass to evaporation before it even gets into your gas tank.
Recap: Fill up when it is coldest (at night).
So Charles and I were talking about the engines in rally cars the other day, specifically how the horsepower in the WRC is limited to 300hp. If you have read my article on engine power and torque, you’ll realize that this means they have the option to make amazing amounts of torque at lower rpm while staying under that 300hp limit. It is possible to design a gasoline engine to stay close to 300hp for a good part of the rpm band. Just size the turbo right so that there is a lot of boost down low and use a control system to taper off the boost in higher rpm to not exceed the power limits, coupled with a well-configured camshaft profile and such.
This type of power output curve very closely resembles that of an electric motor. The most torque is seen at or very close to 0 rpm, with the power output being pretty constant through the rpm range. This torque makes an electric motor great for starting off the line, or coming out of slow corners with lots of acceleration. There is another aspect of an electric motor that makes it far superior for the responsiveness that rally racing requires: the power response is instantaneous. With an internal combustion engine (abbreviated ICE), the throttle valve opens when you push the pedal down. This allows more air to flow into the engine, the ECU will see this through various monitoring methods and inject for fuel to keep the mixture close to what is required for the conditions (usually around 12:1 to 14:1). Then the exhaust gas flows through the turbine wheel, makes the turbine and compressor spin faster, increasing the pressure in the intake, causing even more air to enter the engine, creating more power. As you can see, there are quite a few steps involved here. The throttle response of a typical ICE is considered to be pretty fast, which is why they are used in cars, but in comparison, the electric motor is much must faster.
Simply press the accelerator pedal (not a throttle anymore!), the power control circuitry will allow more current to flow through the motor, and the motor creates more torque. No waiting for air to accelerate into the engine, no waiting for the ECU to compensate for this extra air with more fuel, no waiting for the exhaust to flow past the turbine to spool it up. It’s nearly instantaneous in comparison.
There are quite a few other advantages to electric motors aside from this. The thermal efficiency is often >80%, while a typical high performance ICE will be lucky to get 15% efficiency out of the gasoline it burns. The overall package size and weight of the engine itself is greatly in favor of the electric motor. Same with reliability: a gasoline engine has a lot of moving parts from the crankshaft up to the valvetrain, while an electric motor just has the core that spins.
The two of us sat there and discussed this topic for quite a while, and realized how amazing it would be. There is just one significant technical hurdle left to overcome: the batteries. Getting the range and power output needed for a rally car will weigh a lot. However, it is definitely something to consider as a possibility for the future of rally racing. What do you think about it? What other unforeseen problems do you think there would be? We would really like to hear what you think.
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