Anyone on here manage to run E85 on their Minis? I have looked into it a little and cannot seem to find anything substantial on any E85 kits for these cars or tunes supporting it. I have an Accessport on mine, so I assume I would need a custom tune to get it to work anyways.

 

As of today there is no hardware to support E85.

mQubed Motorsport, Manic Tuning Dealer

 

I've heard of one company prototyping hardware and having a running car but nothing available as a buyable kit yet.

The stock fuel hardware just can't flow enough fuel to even run on E85 with a retune. Some people do a blend with regular gas to get a higher octane but even that's dangerous if you do it improperly and add too much E85.

 

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I was playing around with blending fuels while waiting on meth kit. I mis-guessed on how much fuel I had in tank and went to blend in like 3-4 gallons of E85 into what i thought was 8+ gallons (fuel gauge only missing 2 lights) turns out it wasnt only drove it maybe 50 miles it ran ok, afrs stayed fine, topped off tank with 100 octane. ended up being closer to 50/50 mix.
I'm sure you could tune for E85 and it would run good, but you would probably max the injectors out at 250-275hp, but thats also not taking into account if the pumps would last any amount of time

 

In my 2016 R60 JCW CM I run 3 gallons of E85 (80% pure) with 10 gallons of 91. Car runs stronger and there is enough fuel with the bigger turbo and tune, but I wouldn't do more than 30% E85

mQubed Motorsport, Manic Tuning Dealer

 

I believe the company was Fuel-it (which was then maybe acquired by Burger, this is a maybe).

The last that I read was that they were having lean issues in the mid rpm range running +60% ethanol. I think they attributed it to the HPFP and not the low pressure one in the fuel tank.

I could be totally wrong on all accounts though.

 

There were many technical challenges and cerenkov is correct. The vehicle was leaning out dangerously in the mid-range due to a lack of fuel flow from the HPFP. The tune was altered to generate 3000 psi of fuel pressure IIRC but pressure does not equal flow. You need 30% more volume of E85 to make the same horsepower. There are high flow solutions for the Bosch fuel pumps used on VAG's but those have not appeared on our platform as yet. Serious gains will also require a higher volume E85 capable LPFP, enlarging the metered orifice in the fuel rail and larger injectors, possibly from an LNF/LTG or Opel. That I believe would get you a partial but workable solution. Fuel-it made a bluetooth E85 content sensor so you could see ethanol content on a smart phone app but you would still have to manually switch maps on a Manic tune based on ethanol content. Going out on a limb here, but my guess is that the intent was to have a stock map, a performance pump gas map, an E70 map and an E85 map. However, if you can't find E85 and have to do a partial fill with pump gas your ethanol content could fall between the pump gas and first ethanol map. Lots of possibilities for overly rich or lean conditions and possible detonation at WOT. Provided you kept your foot out of the boost, the fuel trims would compensate until you could match the ethanol content to the correct map.

The ideal solution would be to find an unused input on the ECU and feed the 0-5V signal from the ethanol sensor to the ECU. The next step however would require a significant investment in time and money as the ECU binary would have to be disassembled using IDA Pro then re-compiled (not mapped) so as to apply scalars to injector duty cycle, timing and boost based on the ethanol content.

 

I have a fully built engine with a garret 2867 on a custom map, was wondering if i can just add it to my car in the ratio you stated and get gains or do i need to remap? very curious.

 

depends how much boost and the efficiency of your Garrett turbo From my experience your won’t be able to use E85 but you can do race gas
Mario
mQubed Motorsport
MINI ECU tuning