Race Car Drivers Switch To Ethanol, Full Speed Ahead
The Indianapolis 500 is hardly the place you'd expect to find anything "green," outside of the starting flag. The cars in the annual race average 220 mph and get 2 to 3 miles per gallon. But this year, they'll be burning rubber on ethanol...
This is a big change for the Indy 500 — the last time the race switched fuels (to unleaded) was back in 1965. ...
Indy driver Jeff Simmons says the fuel switch is anything but a gimmick, citing the environmental and economic benefits of ethanol. "If our engineers had said, 'hey, this isn't a high performance fuel,' we wouldn't be running it." ..
The high-performance race cars will not be running on 100 percent pure ethanol. The reason? Two percent gas had to be added to the mix, otherwise it would have been considered pure grain alcohol and subject to liquor tax.
Perhaps we need to update our liquor laws!
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