High octane
Posted by Bill Thomas at 12:50PM on Wednesday 16 April, 2008 7 Comments
A brief foray into the arcane world of fuel last week turned into an excellent adventure - in fact, it was one of the most fascinating and entertaining days I've had for a long time.
It's a difficult sell, fuel. It's not exactly sexy, is it? It smells funny. You don't see it. Not like beer or gin, for instance. It doesn't get you drunk. Well, maybe it does, but you won't be feeling too swish after a pint. You put it in your tank and it makes your engine go. Some is diesel, some is petrol. Wow. Sometimes you put the wrong stuff into your tank and your engine dies in a cloud of dense smoke, and that's about the most exciting thing you can expect from it. Unless you use a match in the wrong place. Like lighting it and dropping it into the fuel tank.
How do you sell that? It's not particularly difficult to push it to car freaks - probably you and certainly me - who want the best sort of stuff for their engines and are prepared to pay for it. But for the great unwashed, it's not so easy. You need some kind of awareness, some kind of identity, and some kind of link with other, sexier automotive brands. Probably.
Shell are probably doing the best job of it. It certainly helps to have a strong link with Ferrari, both the road cars and the F1 cars. And that's what this day at Fiorano, Ferrari's test track in Maranello, was all about - their V-Power high-octane superfuel, the stuff that most motorists think is too expensive and the stuff that you probably make a beeline for at your local garage.
The thing about V-Power, and what Shell was at pains to point out, is that it really can help your car's performance. No, really. They did a thing which proved it, which was fairly hard-core but actually had me a little bit spellbound... An Alfa 156 sat on a computerised rolling road. It was fed by two external fuel tanks, one filled with ordinary 95 octane fuel, the other with V-Power. Bear with me on this - they ran it on the ordinary fuel first, did three in-gear acceleration runs, then swapped the fuel feed over to V-Power and did exactly the same thing again - three runs.
Then they took the best of each runs and overlaid them onto a graph, then converted that graph to a graphic representation of two Alfa 156s side by side on a road. One computer-graphic image was the car powered by V-Power, the other was the car powered by ordinary 95. Then they created a drag race, and it was a bit surprising to see the V-Power car pull ahead by so much - it was ahead by a car length after not much distance at all.
This briefly caught my attention. There was some stuff about cleaning your engine and valves but I didn't really wake up until Ferrari F1 test driver Marc Gene did some laps in last year's F1 car. Alone on the Fiorano track, which is partly surfaced with Shell minerals, that wonderful car really rammed home the value of an F1 tie-in. Then they ran it on forecourt-quality road car V-Power and it didn't make any discernable difference.
I've got a feeling the Ferrari-Shell relationship will carry on for a few more years yet.
Advertiser links
7 Comments for "High octane"
POST A COMMENT USING THE FORM BELOW
Comments are now closed for the blog archives.
I love the hard top; I HATE that it's identical to a Peugeot. If I passed this, I'd think it's an updated 307CC in red. California is also a terrible, terrible name.
Wow! That is truly suprising. I guess I'm goin' Shell from now on. If it's good enough to make over a car length's worth of difference and it's good enough for Ferrari, it's good enough for me.
I find it hard to believe that marketing oil is all that hard. We all remember Jimmy Carr's description of it on Top Gear: "Do you have a fuel gauge in your car? You know when that goes into the red? Buy some petrol - job done."
Very interesting to read that you refer to 95 octane as 'ordinary' fuel. In Australia our ordinary fuel is 91 octane and we have to pay more for 95 octane and even more for the 98 octane, so consider yourselves fortunate compared to the Colonies.
To get any increase in performance, don't you have to remap the ECU?
Higher Octane Fuel is less likely to pre-ignite, so you can get more out of the remap of the ECU.
The cleaning agents are the only thing that could make a difference on the average road car surely.
The problem is that most of us only go to garages which are close when we need fuel. There's less brand loyalty, unlike if you're buying a shirt, or even a car; where you might go specifically Mercedes if your rich and smart, and Kia if your not and/or work for them.
Also, if any greenos are reading this, V-power also returns a higher MPG, and lower CO2 production apparently.
Most modern cars use knock sensors to automatically adapt the engine performance to the fuel used, so no, you wouldn't generally need to re-map to see the benefit.
V-Power really does work. Unlike most 'Super Unleaded' fuels in the UK, it's a different fuel, blended at a different refinery. Other oil companies usually tweak their standard 95 Octane blend with a few additives to get the higher rating - this gives some benefit, but not as much as blending a fuel from scratch, like V-Power (or Optimax as it used to be called in the UK).
If you're wondering, no I don't work for Shell - a former colleague works there and used to be on the team working with Ferrari.