just thought you guys might appreciate this info.

My cousin works for a formula renault team and has to make regular trips to fill up 20 gallon barrels with fuel for test runs.
his advice to me is never go to supermarkets for your petty as he can actually see the diffrence when empty these barrels.
the supermarket fuels are actually a diffrent colour (more diesel like) than dedicated suppiers like bp/shell ect.

not really sure what to make of it but im sticking to shell bp ect. in future.
if anyone knows more about it feel free to enlighten me

The shell filling stations are state of the art.
Nothing like taking a brake an Swiss highway stations on your way to Cote d àzur. I pay gladly extra for that.

Regards

I always assumed you would be getting the same fuel as if you'd purcased regular unleaded from Shell or BP. Supermarkets won't have their own refineries so they must be getting their supply from one of the big players.

The Tesco's 99RON seems to work pretty well!

Supermarkets do not have their own refineries, some petrol companioes buy from other refineries, the only difference is in the final additives that are put when filling the tankers. Any petrol will come from the same crude, from the same hole in the ground, sit in the same tanks and travel in the same pipes.

Due to the additives their will be a marginal difference in final quality, hence the ultimate or optiflaps are generally better for your car.

Oh and I used to work on a refinery

On top? Wow!!

Ross

Ross don't be facetious, JimO clearly did not work on a refinery I would hazard a guess that he worked in a refinery instead

EVO mag recently done a test on different fuels/shell opti and 95ron, BP ultimate and there 95ron,tescos 99ron and some 100ron race fuel
they used an M5 bmw and i think a turbo gti golf or something similar
the bmws brain was so complex it produced the same power which ever fuel it used(must compensate well)

im sure the overall winner on performace(excluding the race fuel obviously) was the BP ultimant...which was a bit of a surprise..as i allways use the optimax..which i believe is one ron higher than the BP....how odd is that

also see a v6 audi at goodwood this year 3 cylinders on regular fuel,3 on ultimate and had cameras inside the engine and theres pretty amazing difference betwwen the 2 halfs , ultimate half was spotless

From personal experience my car doesnt like Ulitmate and it doesnt produce any extra mpg. When i use it the car feels like its on normal fuel.

Ross

Each car will react differently to it, in the coop I feel little difference, but have only used 1 or 2 tanks of normal and on my previous coop, the current one has always run on ultimate or optiflaps. But in my wifes old Saxo, you could feel the difference straight away, it pulled so much better on optiflaps.

But to a degree the performanec and MPG is only part of it, as Rossie says with the Audi V6 analogy - its the cleaning as well and I will gladly pay more knowing it is cleaning the engine.

all right dont get your knickers in a twist lol

There's always 2 schools of thought on this topic, those that believe the "premium" grades are better, and those that don't. Oh and those that don't know. And those that don't care. Err, that's 4, oops

Some refineries run the same old crude day in day out but most do not, over the course of a year they may have run 50 or more different crudes at various time.

And even if you fill up right next to a refinery, you can't be sure the fuel came from that refinery or another one hundreds of miles away, or more likely is a blend of fuels from different refineries held at a place like Buncefield

But there is more than one hole that the crude oil comes from (thousands in fact), and more than one way to blend the crudes run in each refinery, and a whole load of different ways to create the different types of molecules in the petrol (normal and iso-paraffins, olefins, naphthenes, aromatics, plus things like alkylate, oxygenated compounds like MTBE, TAME or even ethanol) but at the end of the day all the gasoline has to meet the same spec, eg: BS EN 228 95 RON with a load of other specs, of which energy content is NOT one of them.