E85 is billed as an environmentally friendly alternative to gas, so what’s it doing powering a fuel-guzzling 1,025-hp drag racer?
When things are working as designed, the fuel sprayed into your car's engine doesn't explode, it burns. That may seem like a subtle distinction, but it's an important one if, say, you want to make 1,025 hp from a 6.2-liter supercharged V-8,To make that much power, Dodge's new street-legal drag racer crams buckets of fuel and air into each cylinder, squeezes hard, then strikes the match. Cylinder pressures in the Demon 170 peak at 2,500 psi, 50 percent higher than in.
This is where fuel comes into play. The higher a fuel's octane rating, the greater its resistance to knock and the more power an engine might make. Dodge required 100-octane race gas to unlock the full output of the 840-hp 2018 Challenger SRT Demon. The new Demon 170 instead uses E85, a blend of gasoline and ethanol, to make 1,025 hp and 945 lb-ft of torque.
The name E85 is a misnomer, by the way. It suggests the fuel contains 85 percent ethanol, but the ASTM standard for E85 allows as little as 51 percent and up to 83 percent ethanol. Sensors on the Demon 170's fuel rails sniff out how much alcohol is in the fuel right before it reaches the injectors, and the engine controller adjusts parameters such as boost pressure and ignition timing accordingly. The V-8 makes full power with 65 percent or more ethanol.
The downside of E85 is it contains less energy than gasoline, so it takes about 25 percent more fuel to deliver the same power or cover the same distance as it would using gas, which eats at and sometimes erases the cost advantage. When asked what fuel economy the Demon 170 achieves, Dodge CEO Tim Kuniskis had a single-word answer:"Terrible."
If any automaker was going to use a low-carbon fuel to power a drag racer's fantasy, it had to be Dodge. For years, the brand's corporate parents have purchased credits from competitors and paid massive fines to regulators as they have failed to meet U.S. fuel-economy and zero-emission-vehicle mandates. The Demon 170 is one of the last combustion-powered cars Dodge will build before it gets serious about hitting those regulatory targets.
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