Alcohol and SBM.

IMO, you can (and should) make the same power on gasoline as you do alcohol IF your cooling system is capable of keeping the engine cool enough for gasoline.

Most guys think 180 degrees at the start of a run is good for gasoline. A gasoline burning engine shouldn’t see the high side of 170 at the end of a run.

Gasoline hates heat.

Alcohol on the other hand loves it. That’s partly because you are stuffing 2.2-2.5 times as much alcohol through the engine as you do gasoline. You have to atomize, then vaporize ALL that fuel to get it to burn.

I‘d have no issues leaving the line at 190-195 and hitting 220ish through the lights IF your cooling system (with the help of the alcohol) can get the temp back down to 180 or so on the return road.

Alcohol requires different cam timing than gasoline does. The intake charge is wetter and therefore heavier than the same charge (meaning the same charge to make the same horsepower) for gasoline. The mass of air/fuel is harder to get moving and harder to stop. And harder to turn a corner or change directions. You should consider that when porting for alcohol verses gasoline.

As far as lean out valves and stuff like that…IMO you need to dial in your tune up, get your engine temperature up and clean it up that way. They don’t need to be drooling, sloppy rich to make the best power. They can be, but don’t NEED to be.

If I’m driving the car to the staging lanes and back to the pits I’m running a power valve on the primary side. If you don’t, it will be super pig fat rich and miserable to drive and it will stink far more than it should.

Learn to read your plugs and trust that.

If you are milking the oil, that’s a tuning/temperature issue. Get that squared away and you should have relatively clean oil. And the extra coolant temp will vaporize more of the fuel, which reduces crankcase fuel dilution.

Also, never ever run Group IV or V synthetic base oil engine oils on alcohol. The two (alcohol and Group IV and V base oils) are wholly incompatible with each other.

If you do try it, you will notice any alcohol that gets past the rings will act as a solvent to the oil and cause the additive package (apart of it anyway) to separate from the base oil. That’s not good and I’ve seen it first hand many, many times. There are a couple of companies out there still claiming you can do the IV and V base oils with alcohol but they are fibbing at best.

You can use a Group III “synthetic” because it’s really a highly Re-refined mineral oil. It only gets labeled as synthetic because the courts made a mistake.