Originally Posted by
Heiss M3
I'm by no means bashing E85. I think it's a great idea, but it does have its drawbacks as well, as with any setup - in the Ethanol setup, you just lose gas mileage.
I wouldn't hesitate to run if, if the car was set up to do so, but I just dont feel like having to order a drum of it or find a station that has a pump. If we lived in Charlotte, that's a different story.
The M3's DME is quite interesting. You're right, it advances timing up until it feels knock, then it figured out a nice threshold. Even running race gas on non-blown M3s has shown performance gains even on the dyno, simply because the stock ECU will advance timing accordingly. Its really cool!
I hope you didn't think I was bashing your setup, it's sweet! I just wanted to make sure Dustin knew there were drawbacks even to E85.
I wish we had some E85 pumps around here, people are pulling some great numbers by running the stuff. Too bad VA has like 4 stations that run e85 and 3 of them are private. Some of the problems or potential problems that people have running meth doesn't outweigh the gains that they see. They both have their drawbacks. E85 requires some heavy fuel mods to support the system not to mention trying to tune it, but hopefully its only a matter of time before we see more stations with it.