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Originally Posted by Mt Tam I am
The only place near me is ten miles away. It is an out of the way boat sales, tackle etc., right on the water. I guess older boats have older engines that need pure gas(?).
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Generally you will only find pure gasoline in rural areas and areas that have a lot of boating. My family has a summer home in northern Wisconsin and all the gas up there is pure. I'm not sure if this is because it's in the middle of nowhere or because there are tons of lakes/boats around there?
In general, finding ethanol-free gas in your area has nothing to do with stations wanting to carry it. Fuel blends are set by law and stations have to carry the blend of fuel that is specified for an area. A possible exception would be if they were a specialty station, like a marina or race track.
There is no inherent power advantage to running pure gasoline as long as you use the right amount of fuel. If you had been running your car on pure gas for a long time and switched right over to E10, you might pick up some power temporarily due to the engine leaning out. This of course assumes that your car is running fairly rich for safety. But as soon as you start driving and your O2 sensor picks up the lean condition, the ECU will start writing positive fuel trims and pretty soon you'll be right back to where you started.
E85 is different because it should be substantially higher octane than E10 or pure gasoline. If you had a boosted car, you could turn up the boost or if you were forced to run very retarded timing (which I'm assuming is the case with the Z06), you could pick up significant power. I was once tuning a boosted Celica and initially picked up over 50 whp at 17psi just by increasing timing.