It's a day at the races for Jedd Allebach and his gas chromatograph. It's a typical work day. You switch on the GC, run a few standards, and check your recovery. I do this every race. After all, IRL cars run on methanol, which produces a single peak in a chromatogram.
Contaminants stick out like a sore thumb.
But you never know what might turn up. And this is Indy racing, a sport in which adjusting a car's height by a thousandth of an inch means the difference between winning and losing. But the better the sanctioning body or racing group manages the rules . . . Other racing leagues also test their cars' fuel, Allebach says. But they do send their samples to a lab.