Drinking Sterno.
 

Remember that routine?

I guess there has been a lot of Sterno sold around the NASCAR tracks.

Turns out the big penalties coming out are from crews putting gel Sterno in the intake runners and in the interior walls of fuel tanks of their cars. The Sterno liquifies when the (very closely monitored) racing fuel goes in. Ups the octane and power output.

Geez.


$100,000 fines for 2 crew chiefs and they are ejected from NASCAR.

Pure Toluene will work great at boasting octane as well. Xylene does a fantastic job at cleaning up injectors. Ahh, the power of solvents! Hell on seals though.

I read the first line of your post and figured the NASCAR fans were getting too lazy to buy cold beer, so they resorted to Sterno.... Would definitely explain the majority of NASCAR fans out there!

What was the name of that old movie where everyone in some town died , their blood dried up - something to do with some kind of alien virus. Everyoneexcept for the town drunk and a kid (?). ?

Turns out what they had in common and the reason they survived was Sterno - they were drinking it.

Hope I didn't ruin the ending for anyone.

John

Up to 25% (by volume) Toluene mixed with pump gas facilitates very nice performance in a 951 - you can boost the crap out of it.

It has a voracious flame spread too. :)

Andromeda Strain

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, about a team of scientists investigating a deadly disease of extraterrestrial origin which causes rapid, fatal clotting of the blood.

"We'll have the answer to this disease," said one scientist, "when we know why a sixty-two-year-old Sterno drinker with a bleeding ulcer is like a perfectly healthy two-month-old baby."

Turns out the thing the had in common was their blood Ph balance was off. The drunk's Sterno drinking, and habit of taking huge amounts of aspirin for his painful ulcer, acidified his blood beyond the range in which Andromeda could reproduce. The baby, constantly crying, blew off so much carbon dioxide from his blood that he became alkalotic: his blood was too alkaline.

Exactly.

So what explains the NASCAR fans?

That's the one. Can't believe I forgot the name.

I always remember that it was either that story, or one of Steven King's stories which started out with a person sneezing on a bus. Soon everyone was dead. I still get a little wigged out when someone next to me on a plane starts sneezing (bird flu aside!)

It sounds like Walthrups team was looking for the "unfair advantage" since his Toyota may not have the speed to get into the race on it's own. While not the first time someone's been caught cheating on fuel in Nascar, it does remind me of the last time that a team was ejected from a WRC event? That would be...

(wait for it!!!!!)

... Toyota! That was a manifold issue too, but in that case they had developed a very trick manifold that bypassed the air restricter when the filter was installed.

And then there was the issue of being caught with an F1 competitor's design documents -- Toyota again.

Hmmmm, anyone seeing a trend?