TEAM ADVENTURE
Team PC meets with bio-fuel pioneers in order to fill up and sample a truly sustainable future
It is the burning issue (pun intended). How are we going to keep our petrol and diesel powered classics fuelled and on the road in the future if the future for fossil fuels is finite? The world is heading for carbon neutrality whether we like it or not, and so we need to adapt to survive. It’s happening right now, which begs the question: Are we ready?
Well, the answer is pretty much ‘yes’. Well known race fuel and oil supplier, Motor Spirit, has teamed up with Coryton, who supply synthetic fuel products to industry, to create a petrol we can all use without taking anything out of the ground. You still burn it, but because much of the fuel comes from recently grown sources, it is way more sustainable than anything made from dead dinosaurs. But does it actually work? We like a ‘real world’ test at PC, which is our get out clause for not being able to afford a proper, long term, laboratory based controlled testing regime. I wish we could, but the world is what it is. What we do know is that our friend Guy Lachlan is a smart chap, who knows his science, and as the boss at Motor Spirit he needs to, because he has just become a pioneer, the first company to open a fuel pump specifically for the purposes of dispensing synthetic fuel.
It's a bold step, borne of the confidence Guy and his team have gained from using synthetic fuels in racing. If it works there then it’s pretty much guaranteed to work on the way to a show at the weekend. Still, his invitation to come and give it a try needed to be acted upon, so we hatched a plan to bring four different vehicles to the nozzle for a suck and a drive. Matt Tomkins would be in his Austin 7 special, Matt George would bring his twin carbed Triumph TR6 along, Ding Boston and the Oxford Universities Motorsport Foundation would have a go with their rally Alfa and I would be attending to see if synthetic fuel would cause the fuel injection system on my 205 CJ to play up.
I can’t speak for the others, but I can say that having emptied my tank and filled up at Bicester Heritage, where Motor Spirit is based, my drive around Oxfordshire was spectacularly boring. I mean the drive was great, but I have absolutely nothing to report other than it works. I always use Super Plus E5 in all my cars so the synthetic fuel needed to be up to scratch… the fact that I completely forgot about it as I whizzed the CJ merrily around the lanes was testimony to the fact that it, put simply, was. I left the 205 for two weeks after that first run out. It started first time and continued to run perfectly happily afte
