Anyone succeed in avoiding refueling altogether? (Page 1 of 2)

Spank tried it with the Moke and a big fuel cell at Sears a few years ago.  He also tried to do it solo as I was flying in that day.  There was a couple of problems.

1. He ran out of fuel with 20 minutes to go.
2. He had to run slower lap times to conserve fuel.
3. With making one stop on Sunday, we turned more laps than Saturday even with a flat tire.

Is that conclusive?  Probably not.   I'm sure fatigue played into his lap times as well.  Spank teetered around with clenched fists like Robbie the Robot on Saturday night so I would highly discourage anyone from trying the solo route again.   Conversely, we knew we didn't need to add much fuel during the driver swap since it only came up 20 minutes short so 1 can of fuel is all you need and no worries about fuel spill from overfilling.  Was it enough to win?  No, although I think that's the time we won IOE with the overnight theme switch from the Caterpillar yellow tractor to the green John "Jay" Deere.

I'd be curious to hear how the diesels do with fuel use as it seems like their efficiency goes way down once they get above their normal operating RPM range.

From memory, the Porsche 926d ran for about 450 miles at Buttonwillow on around 30 gallons of fuel.

Elsewhere on the internet, I've seen D24 guys claim 45MPG on the road in their Volvo bricks, so that's one data point for diesel fuel economy on a racetrack.

If we use Q's 924 diesel getting 15mpg as the benchmark, it looks like we come up short.  Winner of C does a little more than 150 laps/day at Buttonwillow's 2.65 miles which comes out to about 400 miles/day.  That's 26.5 gallons which means you come up a half hour or so short.  Looks like you need at least 17mpg for a 24 gal cell to make it.

I forget the race (Joliet?) but a Rabbit diesel with a GTI suspension did sunday (shorter day...like 6 hours) on no stops running all out.  They finished in the top 25% as well.  Brake pads still looked like new as well after running the 1.5 diesel.

We don't have either of those reference points given the information that was shared here.  We only had gallons used, miles covered and a way to figure miles covered historically at that same facility.  For our own fuel stop calculations we use gallons/hour.  I have no idea what sort of mpg our cars get.

I don't really have the kind of team that lends itself to measuring gph.

That sounds hard... We use a pink flag to communicate... and the only thing it means is "come in sometime about the next time you see the pit exit."

For on track issues, the tow truck brings it in. I tell everyone to just pull off and stop if it is bad... and that includes running out of gas.

Mechanically injected diesels are the easiest to manage. Need more Hours per Gallon? dial the smoke screw out, and even the lead-footiest driver can't kill your economy.

We'll maybe/probably get better economy once the injection pump is timed right.

I would ask the Duff Beer guys what kind of economy they saw in their 240D with the original engine.

Hello With the DRVOLKS TDI Beetle we run a VW ALH diesel engine with hi boost 28 LB  weigh 2800 LB racer ready. Last year at Thompson Lemon, in there VID ( Thanks for the PR) we ran 4HR 45 min on 14.5 Gal . At some points we where in the top 5 lap times!!  I still feel a diesel is the way to go but takes some skill and cost on parts to do it right.  But at NH we took a few bad hits and will scrap the Beetle and swap all race goody's to the new Audi TT  AWD for this year. At some point I would like to install a diesel with a DSG in it later in the year with a 22 Gal fuel cell
I got a lot of those junk parts around the shop.  So if we backed the boost off and added the 22 Gal fuel cell to the Beetle we could do 8+ hr on a tank!!
Bob Mann
DRVOLKS

We had our Ecotec swapped Celica running a little over 4 hours on 22 Gallons, it made us reasonably competitive in A class but we still needed to have a lot of luck to really be in the running. Recently sacrificed the economy for more power so we can run more competitive lap times and should on the right track as we can still get 3.5 hours out of it. 4:10-15 is a sweet spot for single stopping a lot of days and this is huge but then when you get the split sessions in the midwest on Sundays you can't take advantage and are better with more speed over 3-3.5 hours.

You should jut figure out how to not run rich and get your economy back Brett!

Need to crimp the fuel line with vice grips.