I'd just like to point out that I'm also using Octane booster with the Optimax - when I said optimax minimum I meant until you find some OB!! optimax should be the worst case scenario.

Also, when I have all the bits on I will still use OB, thats if I can get my hands on NF - I worked out @ £2.50 a tank that if you do XX,000 miles a year it'll cost £XX a month, not that much extra is it?

 

yes but your RA is a sti?

 

what i do, is i have about 10 bottles of NF, 6 of them were emptied, and every so often i measure out 50ml into them and stick a painted dot on, then its a doddle to goto the fuel station, grab a painted bottle and whack 50ml in, no mess and it takes a few seconds

i was sick of measuring out 50ml`s in the snow and stuff while cars parked behind me queing for fuel lol

 

not nice to get on your paintwork either.

have had three STi type RA and two WRX type RA

 

EEERRRR the last time i looked i was in Scotland Wouldnt be worth going to Germany to fill up IMHO

Cheers Grant

 

I was talking to someone from shell the other day about this very thing.

Optimax is guaranteed to be a minimum of 98 RON.Now in somthing like a turbo with all the heat this can change and become 104 RON.The rep also told me that on bench testing turbo engines and getting them extremly hot they saw 140 RON from optimax.

He ended by saying that if you use another aditive with optimax you can reduce the proerties in the optimax.

This is all the reps words and not mine.

Hayley.

 

"A good idea would be for 1 of the major fuel players to start selling 100RON at the pump The would get the business of every import user in the land"

talking to a Shell tanker driver today, he said Shell are going to bring out a 100 RON unleaded fuel called V-Power or something similar...........I will try to find out more!

 

My import doesnt use booster and until my KL tells me different it never will

 

Ive also heard rumours of this,as other Euro countries are going to get this V-Power Please keep us informed as ive emailed Shell UK but no response

Cheers Grant

 

Time to stoke the fire on the weekly 'octane booster or not thread'
Posted this before, it's nothing more than my experience before any of the 'wouldn't put that in my car' brigade start flaming me....
Owned my 98 STi3 for 5 years now and done 40k miles on NUL, car has regular trips to the 7800 rpm redline and has never missed a beat. Biggest expense in owning the car other than consumables has been a replacement battery. Car runs a full decat and K&N kit. Not only that.....I also use Magnatex oil and do all my own servicing - it's a wonder the car gets out the garage in the morning. Were SUL available I'd use that but the nearest supplier of SUL is a 14 hour ferry journey away. Like I said, nothing but my own experience.

 

EJ20 engine here (UK Map) run on 97 most of it's life and been ragged to within an inch of it's life for almost every single one of it's 110,000 miles. So no: the car WILL take the abuse, M0NEY. I agree you can be UNLUCKY though
The engines are bench dyno'd at massive levels of abuse on crappy fuel for UK maps, so I don't think ragging it makes that much difference. It ages the engine quicker, but godo maintainance should stop it blowing.



The imports run MUCH better on Optimax. No one can deny that on 95 they DO pick up some knock, and retard the ignition to suit, so if nothing else, put Optimax in to release the cars true potential.

Knocklink on my import (STi) used to show signs of det after extended thrashing on 97. Less on 97 with octane booster. I watched this like a hawk. I suspect the ECU ran out of retard.

Out of interest, do all these blown up imports still have their speed limiter intact?
Mine behaved very well det wise until I had it delimted. After a couple of minutes at 125mph or so, the knocklink would start showing more and more signs of det.....I never dared push it past the 2nd orange, which on 95 took about 2mins at 129mph, and on Optimax would take 4 or 5 minutes. Never tried it with booster.

I suspect that the imports get delimited, and start hitting load points/RPMS on their maps that they would NEVER hit with the limiter intact, and the map is not suited to it. Possibly not even mapped at all, and just runs lean as hell. No Wideband AFR so couldn't tell you. Certainly on my UK car, at over 120mph the thing runs rich as rich can be...almost suspiciously so, as if Subaru were correcting for crappy non-jap fuel.

You say you blew a piston during mapping.......could it be that the piston was already det damaged, or was it a freshly built engine. What were the bore clearances?
And if it was a rebuild...were they Subaru pistons? ( And if so.....why? )

This is a debate that could rage on and on, and as many have speculated, certainly running an import on Optimax is only going to hurt your wallet. And what's the point of buying a (fairly expensive) Scooby, and running it on crappy fuel which DEFINITELY costs performance?

 

Thing is guys will the octane booster put up the CO level to the joy of the Emitions Gestapo squad? Or, alternatively, should we all buy a ford escort????? better to be safe %$&%^&%"£^"%"