12/19/06 Ethanol Indy Team Honored

Yesterday, - the IndyCar Series and the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council will receive the Ethanol Innovator in Sports Award for their adoption of 100-percent fuel-grade ethanol for the 2007 racing season. Florida Governor Jeb Bush presented the award at the launch of the Commission for Hemispheric Coordination on Ethanol. During the 2007 IndyCar Racing season - driver Jeff Simmons will drive the Number 17 Rahal Letterman/Dallara Team racing car. That car will be fueled by 100-percent fuel-grade ethanol. Simmons says that the high performance benefits aside, people want to know if they can use it in their everyday driving. SIMMONS: We're showing it to be a high performance fuel and that's the primary purpose of our program and the IndyCars this year is to get the high performance aspects out there and make people aware of them. You'll find that there's a fair amount of people that know some of the environmental benefits but their first concern is, is it good for my car and when we have all 33 cars at the Indianapolis 500 burning 100% ethanol at 230 miles an hour then they can rest assured it's going to be fine in their car. Simmons talks about some of the performance aspects of ethanol. SIMMONS: We're making better horsepower, we have a broader power band and we're making more torque which is really good for us because it makes the gearing a little bit easier and the car pulls through the corners a little bit better and if you happen to lose momentum you're able to pick it back up easier. And we're also making a lot better fuel mileage. So the Indycars are, or the Indy racing is actually going to reduce our fuel cell size from 30 gallons this past year to somewhere down to; they haven't decided on the final number but it sounds like 22 or 23 gallons so that's like a 25% difference. We're going to have higher speeds this year than last year and you are going to see some great racing all season. And one thing Simmons says he can always count on is a lot of questions not only from the general public but other Indy drivers as well. SIMMONS: We get out and do pump tours and stuff around some of the races and people have a lot of questions. Most of them are about how it's going to be in their car which I can assure them and the whole league is going to reassure everybody this year that it's a high performance product. And we don't want to talk about it as a commodity or something like that, as a resource, because it's really a performance enhancing product and that's how we want to be able to discuss it. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.