VP Racing T4: It’s a gas

And not just for superbikes…

VP Racing T4 Motorcycle Fuels

What’s a body to put in the gas tank of the treasured collector bike, racebike or track-day special? Time was, we wouldn’t have thought twice about pump gas. But the world turns.

Today, we hear about problems with stale gas, gum blamed on ethanol in pump gas and even sluggish throttle response. Anti-oxidants are supposed to prevent cat-cracked olefins in commercial gasolines from turning dark and strange in a few weeks. Do they? Ethanol in gasoline gets dangerously close to politics, but look at the volume of complaint on the Internet! And for the sake of making crude oil go farther, pump gas is allowed to contain “heavy ends” (low volatility, high-molecular-weight components) that would take their time evaporating in a 400-degree oven. Can we please just have some good old gasoline as it used to be?

"Yes!" says VP Racing Fuels, offering its T4 gasoline ($68.34 for a 5-gallon pail; www.vpracingfuels.com) as a remedy for people's problems with today's pump gas. It's made as a stable, reliable, responsive replacement for pump premium. It is unleaded, free of alcohol problems and—with an end point (temperature at which it is all evaporated under test conditions) of 248 degrees Fahrenheit—it is a lot faster-evaporating than pump fuels with their permitted 437-degree end point. It is said to have high oxidative stability, giving it a storage life of years, not weeks. With this fuel, a bike that goes unridden for long periods won't become a test of your ability to "remove, clean and replace the fuel system."

Senior Editor Paul Dean made numerous dyno runs with the Ducati and EBR to compare power and torque output using both VP's T4 and pump gas, and the numbers were very close. VP's Motor Octane Number is 93, Research Octane is 108, so (R+M)/2 =100, or quite a bit higher than the 91-to-93 of pump premium. Remember, Octane Rating measures only the detonation resistance of a fuel; it has nothing to do with power or economy.