ALL ABOUT FUEL RATINGS
A long with air, fuel is the one thing an internal combustion engine really needs. An engine will run, albeit not for long, without water and even without oil, but it simply cannot function without fuel.
A tech feature on fuel would usually talk about how it’s made, how using it is killing the planet, the refinement processes it goes through, and how it originates from a load of dead fish and plants buried under the sea – all boring and irrelevant stuff when it comes to owning a fast Ford.
What is important, though, is the fact that fuel, when mixed with air, compressed, and then ignited, is what gives a combustion engine its energy.
Therefore, it’s a crucial ingredient when it comes to the search for power. And when you start looking at exotic stuff like E85 ethanol, methanol and nitromethane fuels, it’s clear there are many more variations of fuel that can be used in a combustion engine above and beyond the regular petrol and diesel fuels you see at the pumps of your local petrol station. And even these have many different variations when you start looking closely at them.
So, let’s find out what’s what when it comes to fuels…
SPARK-IGNITION VERSUS COMPRESSION-IGNITION
Before we can understand how different fuels offer different benefits and advantages to our engine, we must first understand how our engine uses that fuel. There are two main types of internal combustion engine: spark ignition and compression ignition.
The term ‘spark-ignition’ is what we would call a petrol engine, and ‘compressionignition’ is what is more commonly known as a diesel engine. Although it may sound a little odd at first,
