[Flieger]

Originally Posted by sammyg2

Drag racers have known about the horsepower avantages of alcohol and high compression ratios for decades, hence the blown alcohol classes.
I even played with it back in my boat drag days but not with much success.

But the amount of alcohol required can be called anything but efficient unless you try to use a tiny engine due to the low BTU content of methanol or ethanol.
The optimum stoichiometric ratio for HP on gasoline is around 12.5 to 1, for most effiency it's just under 15 to 1.
For alcohol max hp is just under 6 to 1.
That's 6 pounds of fuel for 1 pound of air.
Takes a whole bunch more fuel.

BTU for gasoline is around 19k BTU/pound
for methanol it's almost half that.

You can easily get 30 or 40% more power from the same sized alcohol motor vs gasoline, but it takes nearly twice as much fuel to get it.
Color me skeptical.

If you run close to stoichiometric on Methanol you still come out ahead of gasoline on a power or energy per gram of CO2 basis. Plus Methanol can be made domestically from non-food biomass. Methanol has a high heat of vaporization already so you shouldn't need so much extra fuel for cooling as you do when cooling a combustion chamber with extra gasoline. It's like a free intercooler.

Now, your range is still halved unless you put in a bigger fuel tank.