A friend of mine has a buick Grand National. The turbo he added is about as big
as the engine in my 2004 Mini S.
He has an injector that he uses to inject isopropol (i don't know if it is 70 or 90%) alcohol or a mixture of denatured ETOH and MTOH (ethol-drinking alcohol and methol-wood alcohol) into the plenum before it goes into the engine. He says he can increase the boost from the turbo and gets a lot of power from it. He also says the same about just water. I don't know if he is BSing me or not. I don't know if the power comes from burning the mixture, or making steam which would increase the cylinder pressure or if it works by cooling the cylinder.
Has anyone heard of this?

He also says it would be ok to run racing fuel in my mini cooper s, but it would probably burn out the oxygen sensor. And that 100 octane would work too. I thought that octane didn't indicate power persae. Would race gas be ok?

One other thought. I've heard of people using nitrous oxide to get more power. Where does the power come from? Does the Nitrous Oxide have a great deal of kinectic energy? Or is there some other mechanism at work here?
I was wondering about hooking up an oxygen supply to the air intake. I could probably push as much ( or I guess little - I don't know how much nitrous get injected) 15-30 Liters of Oxygen a minute. Would this increase power?

And what about putting dry ice on my intercooler? Would I see an iincrease in power for an albeit short time?

Thanks
REH

 

OK, from the top..........
alcohol injection.......probably give you more power but yourll for sure be corroding your cylinder liner and start pitting your valves. ditto with the water injection. The mechanism for both these schemes to increase power is basically the same as the intercooler....water and alsohols will decrease the temperature of the charge air, make it more dense, thus more of it can get crammed in to the cylinder.

Next....UNLEADED racing fuel would be OK and it won't hurt anything, specially the sensors. LEADED racing fuel will not only trash your sensor but your cat as well. Pretty anti social stuff plus you'll plug the cat up eventually and truly f... .p your motor.
Will it give you more power??? Marginal. I would imagine that the computer in the MINI adjusts timing to compensate for low octane, it should do the opposite as well. To really get the full benefit of high octane you would have to mess with the timing (and chances are you'll f.... .p your engine if you do not know what you are doing)

Go to http://www.summitracing.com they will sell you a nitrous oxide system. Most drag shops carry them. Tremendously higher energy content and burning efficiency will absolutely give you LOTS of power. If you could somehow haul an NOx filled trailer behind you (and could afford it) you could do LA to NYC in about 3.2 hours...Of course at the end of the 3.2 hours your engine would be trash....NOx is great for short bursts and every time you use it you take a few hours off of your engine's life....
O supply won't do diddly as far as I know unless you force feed it. You would have to deliver LOTS to overcome the already large amount of atmospheric air the engine is breathing in.
Dry ice on the intercooler will lower the air temp even more, denser air= more power.
A lot better and safer (for your engine) AND cheaper than NOx or is it Nox? the former, no the latter..... :smile: