Ethanol question.

[Power Hungry]

Originally Posted by JackandJanet

...And, our engines are designed for 87 octane fuel. We can get a bit more out of them by running 91 or 93 stuff and advancing the spark, but, we still throw a lot of potential away since the compression in our engines is not high enough to really take advantage of the burn properties...

- Jack

You hit the nail on the head, Jack. The one thing I've found is that if you run compression up enough (or run a supercharger/turbocharger), you can actually make good use of Ethanol and see reasonable performance gains. If cars today would run the kind of compression ratios and combustion chambers we saw back in the late '60s & early '70s then Ethanol may actually be an attractive option due to the higher octane rating. But alas, they don't so the potential gains are lost.

On smaller, air-cooled engines, the extra heat generated is often more than the cooling system can radiate. The solution to this is running a little richer to keep cylinder temperatures down, but this reduces performance and increases fuel consumption so that's not exactly ideal either.

If we are going to continue to run Ethanol, then we need to rethink certain design aspects of current engines in order to make better use of it.