e85Viper

The last month or so Ron Jr. has been trying to convince me to go for it with this car. Generally I am an all or nothing type of person so it didn’t take much and the final nudge was this question "Ever heard of e85?". Of course I had heard of it, but always in the context of a new car and all the articles on the EPA website about not converting your old car to e85. For those of you who don’t know e85 is a renewable fuel usually made from corn and is 85% alcohol and 15% gas. The key to this fuel is growing the corn actually helps balance the carbon monoxide produced by burning the alcohol later. As well alcohol burns quite clean, in fact so clean you usually can’t see the flame. Basically you can run e85 and have a minimal impact on the envirnment. This may surprise a lot of people but e85 is actually superior to race gas which is about 105 octane.

Then the idea struck me. We could build the first high perfomance environmentally friendly car in the world. As an entrepreneur I have always loved overcoming those seemingly contradictory statements like "build it faster and higher quality" so building a high performance car that is also enviromentally friendly couldn’t be resisted. It also helped that Ron Jr. was currently racing his car which was generating over 2000hp and had a lot of data and experience with building a car that can break records. It was time to do a gut check and go for it. The first problem was upgrading the fuel tank, fuel lines etc to handle e85.The next was changing the tuning of the car which was a bit easier since we chose the high-end Motec system for engine management. As an added bonus we decided to go with another first, a system which would switch tuning maps on the fly thus allowing us to run, premium unleaded, e85 or race gas.

Next we had to deal with the fact that a Viper was never designed to cope with over 1000hp which meant we had to completely re-evaluate our engine build, transmission, driveline, differential…well just about everything. Finally, engines that run this kind of horsepower and boost (over 13psi) meant we had to deal with the fact it would generate a tremendous amount of heat, particularly in a road course scenario.

The changes were massive and I have included a partial list of the upgrades that had to be made

New fuel tank	Suspension and fuel lines	The ever expanding rack

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