The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 591
SWITZER PERFORMANCE: A CASE IN POINT
If a person buys a vehicle and they want it to go really, really fast they can take
it to a specialty performance shop like Switzer Performance in Oberlin, Ohio.
Switzer is expert in taking super cars and making them super-duper cars.
Three years ago this month, TheAutoChannel.com published a story titled,
“Switzer Builds e85-capable 900 hp Nissan GT-R.” The story was written by
Switzer’s PR guy Jo Borras and it relates how a client wasn’t satisfied with
Switzer’s “run of the mill” customization of a Nissan R35 GT-R that only put out
800 hp. This client wanted more, he wanted 900 hp. (Reminds me of the classic
funny bit in “Spinal Tap” when Nigel Tufnel talks about his amplifier that has
knobs that go to 11.)
Switzer re-customized the already customized car by adding a new transmission and making clutch adjustments. But they still had the horsepower wall to
climb and the barrier was gasoline. This is what Jo reported:
“We didn’t want to just deliver a race-gas package that tethered the client
to a fuel drum in his garage, but we wanted to be able to turn up the boost,
also.” The solution? Readily-available E85…”
“…In the end we had a fuel that gave us everything we needed to crank
up the boost on this car and deliver over 900 hp. The E85 delivered other
benefits as well: it is significantly “greener” than the pump-gas and racegas versions of the GTR. “With most high-horsepower cars, you can
barely breathe after just a few dyno runs. With the E85, we were able to
run pull after pull to dial in the tune without feeling any effects of the usual
emissions. It’s hardly scientific, but there was a noticeable improvement
in the air quality in the shop compared to race gas.”
Jo Borras did say that some adjustments were made to make the engine ethanol optimized, as I wrote about earlier.
In a phone interview that I conducted with Jo at the time, I asked him why they
would use ethanol (he was not aware of The Auto Channel’s position on ethanol), his response was, “Why in God's name would you not use ethanol? It’s
cheaper, cleaner, and gives the car more power."
My follow-up question was, “So why don’t you use E100”? His answer was, “We
would if we could, but it’s not available to us on a ready basis. It’s easy to find
E85.”
