Hello and welcome to Simplified on PowerDrift where complicated ideas and break them down into
something small bite size that you can use in your life with motorcycles.
Today we're talking about the types of petrol that you can put in your motorcycle and before
we go ahead, there's four types of buttons we'd like you to hit, this one, the share
button, the bell, notification icon, and the subscribe
and see how I switch the order and confuse everybody?
That's not what we do with Simplified.
So types of fuel.
The reason why there is confusion about the types of fuel starts at the octane number
and honestly, the larger the octane number, it simply means that this fuel is harder to
burn, now I know that that sounds backwards, right?
All you want to do in your motorcycle is burn fuel, have larger explosions, go faster and
you're saying that better octane numbers like 100, 106 are harder to burn, and they're better
for your motorcycle, how does that work?
Well, what the octane number actually says is that the fuel is harder to burn automatically.
So if I take petrol, add air, I make something that can burn, right?
Now there's two ways to actually burn this, one of them is to take a match and throw it
into this mixture and obviously it will ignite.
If there is petrol but no oxygen, nothing's going to happen, if there's oxygen and no
petrol, nothing's going to happen either, right?
But I can also do this, is take petrol, take air and start compressing this mixture and
if I compress it enough, at some point, the petrol will ignite and use oxygen to have
the chemical reaction that we call combustion.
What octane number says is that the bigger the octane number is, the later this event
will happen and this is important because what I want to do inside an internal combustion
engine is to control when the combustion happens, because the position of the piston at that
point is super crucial and if I do it right, I will have all the forces I generate go down
the piston through the crank to the rear wheel, and generate torque and motion and when I
have fuels with low octane numbers, which can ignite before all of this, it's badly
timed and more importantly, because there are a series of uncontrolled explosions, which
we know is knocking or pinging, these explosions can also physically damage your engine and
you don't want it and that's why it's probably always better to run a higher octane fuel
than a lower octane fuel.
But,
the thing is, engineers design vehicles to use specific kinds of octane fuels.
So if your vehicle for example, says 91 octane is okay, you're not going to get a huge benefit
by putting 99 octane into it, that will not make your vehicle faster, because this fuel
is better, it might have smoother combustion, you might get the feeling of easier acceleration,
but it will not be faster acceleration will be a smoother running, cleaner running vehicle.
You might even get a small advantage in fuel economy, but it will not be enough to justify
the price difference that you paid for the extra octane, right?
So from that perspective, whatever your vehicle is rated for, if it's rated for 95 octane,
95 octane, clean, good fuel is all you really need to get the maximum performance from this vehicle.
The situation where higher octane becomes more useful is when you start changing the
engine around, so if you're tuning your engine, trying to extract more performance from it,
that's when a higher octane number will help because remember, the more strain I put in
the engine, it's usually done by compressing the petrol and air mixture harder, the harder
I compress it, the more the chances that it'll do its own ignition thing rather than wait
for the sparkplug to fire.
In that situation, having a higher octane number fuel will help you and that's why racers
and drag racers tend to use octane boosters and other ways to increase the octane content
of their fuels.
You and me driving regular cars or motorcycles are not really going to see a benefit from it.
Worse, most naturally aspirated engines just don't see the benefit of octane boosting at
all, that's reserved for turbocharged engines and in that sense, if your engine is naturally
aspirated, and if you're on a motorcycle at 100% it is today, adding octane boosters or
putting high octane fuels is not automatically going to change anything, it's not a way to
extract more performance from that engine, that's one.
Second is, now you get multiple types of fuel, right, there's the base fuel grade and then
there's like the Shell V-Power, the Speed, the Power and all these remember, they have
the same octane number almost all of the time as your base fuel.
Again, these fuels will not give you a performance benefit.
What the manufacturer is adding to these fuels more or less is detergents and cleaning agents,
which can help clean up the fuel lines, clean up the sludge around the sparkplug, clean
up the carbon deposits around the engine, and that could be a positive effect of using
these kinds of fuels.
So, if you put Speed into your car or Power into your car, it's not going to go faster,
but 30,000 kilometres later, you might get a cleaner engine out of it, so when you go
to overhaul your engine you will find a cleaner engine, and any performance degradation that
has come from the accumulation of these deposits might be slowed down, but the thing to remember
is that your user manual will tell you if your vehicle is ready to have additives in
its fuel or not.
To give you an example, both my Aprilia and my Ducati manuals clearly state that you will
run minimum 91 RON, but you will not add any additives to this fuel and I've tried it,
every time I've been forced to put Speed or Power into my Multistrada, it runs rougher
than it would with normal clean pump gas, right?
Then comes the question of should you be using an octane booster at all and I think by now
the answer should be obvious.
The higher the compression ratio on your vehicle is, the more it can use octane boosters to
generate a benefit, but most of our vehicles don't hit the 12-13:1 kind of compression
ratios where ocatane boosting does actually do some amount of work.
So most of us, if you were to put a good octane booster in your tank, you would feel that
the engine runs smoother but will not go any harder, if you were to tune your engine, which
means raising the compression ratio, change in the cams around and all of that, in that
event, octane boosting might be of some advantage.
The final thing is cost, obviously, the cheapest fuel is 91 RON, the most expensive fuel, I
think when Indian Oil launched XP100, which is their 100 octane fuel, I'm going to say
two years ago, it was Rs. 160 to a litre when base fuel was only 90,
do you want to pay the Delta?
If you have a Lamborghini that can actually make use of 100 octane?
Sure, you should, but if you have a Maruti Alto or a Celerio, or even a Kia Sonet, it's
not going to make any difference.
On the Multistrada, I have tried 99 octane, the bike ran smoother, but it didn't run any faster.
And that brings us to the question of should you be spending money on octane boosters?
I looked up on Amazon, the average octane booster bottle is about Rs. 500 and it goes
into a full tank of gas, that's for a car, so which means you'll spend 500 over let's
say three tanks of gas on a motorcycle on the average motorcycle.
Ask yourself, is it worth it?
Because what I would say is that in India, fuel prices are already high, there's no reason
to add octane boosters though is that all, octane boosters do have one positive side
effect, which is they do have cleaning agents, so when you use octane booster in your fuel
tank, it will clean your fuel lines a little bit, will clean up the injectors and stuff,
so maybe for that benefit, if you want to use an octane booster once a year, maybe there's
a benefit to it, but in every other situation, whatever octane number your vehicle is rated
for is the octane number that you should be using.
What we are not covering in this episode are other types of fuels like E10, which is 10%
ethanol or E85, which is 85% ethanol and the gamut in the middle, because that's a discussion
for another time, but the fundamental thing I'm going to leave you with is this, you need
to have clean fuel in your petrol tank.
Then RON number, the octane number of this fuel needs to match whatever the vehicle specification
says as recommended, or must have, whatever that number is 91, 95, 99, that's all you need,
if you're going to give it more octane numbers than this, effectively, you're buying a cleaner
grade of fuel so the vehicle might feel like it runs better and if that you think is worth
the money, certainly go for it, there's nothing negative to it, but don't expect a boost of
octane to give you a boost of performance because that's not how it works.
Thank you so much for watching, this is Simplified on PowerDrift where we take complicated ideas
and break them down into something simple that you can use in your daily life.
If you'd like to discuss this further, leave us a comment, if there's other topics that
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and if you have friends who have octane boosters in their bikes and they're going faster than you,
it's not the octane boosting, it's them.