Goodwood Revival is around the corner, and we are getting more and more calls regarding which of the sustainable fuels to use, so we thought we should do a short recap.

The fuel regulations for Goodwood are very specific, as they state that the fuel must be made from at least 70% sustainable components. This basically excludes petrochemical products that have been mass-balanced, but what does that actually mean?

Sustainable components:

• Typically, waste from the food or forestry industry, or gases from landfills. The products are fermented and ethanol is produced. This ethanol is classed as Generation 2 ethanol and is therefore sustainable.
• Carbon capture. This is when CO₂ is captured from the atmosphere OR from industry, if the exhaust from the industry is a result of a sustainable manufacturing process. Hydrogen and CO₂ are then combined into fuel – this is very energy-intensive, and these products are not commercially available at this moment.
• Petroleum made from Generation 2 ethanol. This is today the base of most sustainable fuels and is produced by Ekobenz in Poland.

Mass-balanced components:

• These are products that are being sold as sustainable but typically do not contain many sustainable molecules. Imagine a normal refinery that is producing petrochemical products from crude oil BUT has a small fraction of sustainable components, such as oil from waste harvests, food production, etc. (Generation 2), added to the crude oil before the process takes place.

Let’s say that the crude oil mix contains 100 litres of Generation 2 products and 999,900 litres of crude oil. The refinery can then sell 0.01% of the output as sustainable. So, if the refinery produces 100 million litres of toluene (a chemical used in race fuels), they can sell 10,000 litres (100 million x 0.01%) of sustainable toluene, although each litre of “sustainable” toluene only contains 0.1 ml of sustainable components, this is called mass balancing.

FIA allows FIA sustainable fuels to contain mass-balanced products, whereas Goodwood wants fuel that is made from 70% sustainable components. This means that we can use 30% of non-sustainable components to make a higher octane race fuel which is crucial considering that the Ekobenz sustainable components average 91-92 octane.

We are going to supply six different types of sustainable Goodwood-specification race fuels, so that you can choose a fuel that suits your engine:

• Sunoco S70UE5. This is a 100 octane unleaded race fuel that contains the same amount of ethanol as Super Unleaded and is designed to be a drop-in fuel for cars running on forecourt fuels.
• Sunoco FAS. This is a 101 octane unleaded, highly oxygenated (4.7%) race fuel that you need to map the engine to. If you do, and don’t need more octane, this is a very powerful fuel.
• Sunoco S70L. This is a 102 octane leaded, non-oxygenated race fuel that is a drop-in fuel if you run Super Unleaded or R5SR+. It will run around 1–2% richer but will be safe.
• Sunoco S70LE8. This is a 102 octane leaded, oxygenated (2.6%) fuel that is also a drop-in fuel if you run Super Unleaded or R5SR+. The A/F will be very similar. It contains 7.5% ethanol.
• Sunoco S70LE15. This is a 104 octane leaded, highly oxygenated (5.2%) fuel that you need to tune the engine to. It gives excellent power, but as it has a high ethanol content of 15%, you need to make sure that you do not keep the fuel in the tank for too long.
• Sunoco Methanol S. This methanol is made from waste from the Swedish forestry industry. At 99.95% pure, it is the highest-purity methanol that we have found. We’ve added Sunoco Alky to increase lubricity of the valve train and to also burn with a yellow flame (good if you are on fire). No tuning is needed if you are running normal racing methanol.

As with any fuels containing ethanol, we recommend that you do not leave them in the tank for longer than the race weekend to make sure that the fuel system is not affected.

We recommend that you flush out the fuels with our CFS Storage Plus, which is a 99 octane, non-ethanol, super-stable fuel that can be left in the tanks for at least three years!