Race fuel in a 488?

I ran 91 octane for close to 3 years with no issues.

 

Just make sure it's unleaded or you'll very expensively foul the oxygen sensors and cats. Otherwise, yeah, when I raced (not a Ferrari but the principle is the same) in Denver (and OK for that matter) we mix the local 91 with race gas to get up to 93 or more. Ethanol is not inherently bad, but in cars that aren't driven often it has a bad habit of drawing water into the fuel system. If you can't avoid it there are "fuel stabilizers" that minimize this.
If you have somewhere safe outside but out of the weather to store it, you can order 55 gallon drums of race gas to your home.

 

You'll be fine. Total waste. Give it a try and see for yourself. If you know the car will sit kver the course of a winter, sure, fill it up with ethanol-free high octane fuel and add some sta-bil fuel stabilizer. But as long as you drive the car in a regular basis, just put 91 in it.

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All modern cars, even Ferraris, are built to accommodate ethanol in the fuel. In some older cars, the ethanol would eat seals and rubber parts. But not anymore.


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As other's have correctly pointed out, 91 Octane should be more than fine.

The only reason you'd need to go beyond that rating is if you are planning on running custom ignition timing and/or planning on turning up the boost or changing the engine's static compression ratio. However, even then, the car employs a knock sensor which will automatically retard the timing if needed; so even if you ran higher boost, for example, and saw some detonation due to uncontrolled flame travel or pre-ignition, the knock sensor would pull the timing back a little.

On older, very high compression race engines, without sophisticated electronics, detonation was a real issue and could destroy your motor in short order. That's mainly where very high octane fuels (such as race fuels or jet fuels) were used in order to give you more of a margin of safety. If the advance is mechanically controlled (meaning it's set when you built the motor and tuned it) and you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a race, you can't exactly pull over to the side of the track and make adjustments. Also, on very high compression motors, even one occurrence of detonation can sometimes destroy the motor immediately. Same with running very high boost. Sometimes the only safety margin you have is the "much higher than needed octane fuel".

Years back, I built a little turbo charged 1.6L motor just for fun and was running 25-30 PSI of boost. Much above 20 PSI and the motor would start to ping at WOT and full boost (it sounded just like someone hitting the valve cover with a small ball-peen hammer). I tried adding octane boost, but it didn't help all that much. I ended up having to add water injection, which was activated via a boost switch; this turned on a small water pump around 16-17 PSI or so which sprayed water into the compressor side of the turbo. Since the turbo was spinning probably over 100,000 RPM's, that atomized the water, which then burnt inside the cylinder and reduced the cylinder temp and also helped to control detonation (sort of like how an intercooler works). As long as the water tank didn't run dry, it worked like a charm.

In situations (where you do not have electronics helping you out or monitoring the engine), your fuel octane ratings are critical and provide a much needed margin of safety for the motor. Adding something like 104 or 112 octane boost helps ensure you didn't accidentally destroy something. However, again, unless you are running very high compression ratios, very high boost or making changes to engine's ignition timing, then usually not needed on a street car w/ a factory ECU and today's knock sensors.

BTW, here's a good link talking about Ethonal E85, which is just an 85/15 mix of ethanol and gas, if you're interested:

https://www.hotrod.com/articles/ctrp-1008-ethanol-race-fuel/

I've never messed around with E85 or ethanol fuels. The fuel you really want to use is methonal when racing. You can run a much more favorable air-to-fuel ratio and methanol is also exponentially more effective at cooling during phase change from fuel to energy (sort of similar to how water injection cools things down). For high boost turbocharging and very high compression motors, methanol is really where it's at. Even for just normal cars, there are many other fuels out there which are much superior to gasoline. Propane, natural gas, methanol, etc.

Anyway, the short answer is that 91 octane is totally fine and you aren't risking anything, nor really gaining anything, by going higher or not.

Ray

 

I’d stick with pump 91. The newer cars are fine with the ethanol. Older cars not so much.