It's a day at the races for PerkinElmer's Jedd Allebach and his gas chromatograph. You switch on the GC, run a few standards, and check your recovery. I do this every race. The main concern is detecting performance enhancers, such as propylene oxide or nitrous oxide, which, when sprayed into the intake manifold, can boost an engine's performance to 20-30 hp. 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 one-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 send their samples to a lab.