In the days leading up to the 12 hours of Sebring earlier this month, General Motors, the Corvette Racing Team, and EPIC, the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council, all joined together to hold a media event at Sebring International Raceway, about three hours north of Miami.
The event was to hype the use of E85 Ethanol racing fuel as an official fuel the American LeMans Series, and specifically in the GM Corvette Racing team. The result was successful as the GM Corvette Racing team came in first in class (GT1), and second overall. (Clarification: the Corvette Racing Team is campaigned by Pratt and Miller Racing for General Motors.
Cellulosic Ethanol is the flavor of the week and at 105-octane, it is the highest octane rating for fuel on the road today. Made with a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline, it is refined not from corn, but from wood waste, switchgrass and citrus by-products. Differing from vegetable-waste-derived ethanol, which takes approximately three gallons of water to yield one gallon of ethanol, cellulosic ethanol takes between 2 and 2.5 gallons of water to produce one gallon of E85. For comparison, it takes three gallons of water to get one gallon of straight gas.
The GM Corvette Racing teams efforts were fueled by enough cellulosic ethanol to drive over 1200 miles in day and nighttime closed-course racing conditions. It’s ironic because the good folks at General Motors arranged to drop off an extremely well equipped Tahoe LTZ for us to make the trip from West Palm Beach to the famed racecourse.
The trouble was that there are no pumps within a 50-mile radius that dispense any type of ethanol — an interesting statement on the current state of ethanol availability. Thank goodness for the FlexFuel-equipped Tahoe — we made the trip with a tank full of regular unleaded-based gasoline.
But to add salt into the wound, it probably would have been a better idea to take off all the promotional stickers trumpeting the virtues of ethanol over gasoline. Every time we stopped, people gathered around to discuss the plusses and minuses of ethanol. And then they reacted with scrunched brows when we told them the Tahoe was quenching its thirst with gallons and gallons of gasoline.
Oh well, maybe in a few more years, once the energy suppliers figure out how to make ethanol cheaper, will we see more ethanol pumps nationwide.
But we can all admire the GM Corvette Racing GT1 car as it enters turn one at central Florida’s oldest racecourse.
Words and photos by Mark Elias
