Bought a 2010 Vette Grand Sport LS3 - E85 upgrades?

[byndbad914]

I believe converting the car to run on E85 voids the warranty, but here in CO it is pretty plentiful and I have to think the car could be tuned with some more timing, etc to run E85 with the high compression the car has and make more power with a simple fuel swap.

that said I have a hard time after looking around the net determining if I would actually need to upgrade the injectors, etc etc. I don't want to swap the cam yet or anything and would really like to do a minimal change that can be easily changed back should I have an issue I want fixed under warranty.

It is hard to say if a fuel swap will make any real difference since the high altitude here tends to accept higher compression ratios better, but with 91 octane premium I am thinking that the computer may have to pull timing, etc when I am really on it to not ping, etc.

So anybody know if an E85 switch is simple, if the injectors will handle it assuming no other changes beyond a tune for E85, and what tuning software items are out there to use with the swap?

I know that when I lived in SoCal and built the engine in my race car in my avatar I dyno'd it on a near perfect sea level day and made just under 500HP before the 93 octane pump gas began to detonate at 34deg timing on a 10.5:1 combo with a big cam that would have bled cylinder pressure. It made 525HP after swapping over to race gas and bumping timing just two more degrees, so I certainly can see that there may be some free HP to get from better fuel with the high compression of the the LS3.

[AM.MSCL]

Check out Corvette forum and do a search over there for E85.
Also Katech Engineering has done several E85 conversion on Z06's that you might be interested in reading about.
Ray

[XcYZ]

I'm not sure which ECM the LS3 is using, but EFI Live has a new custom OS for the E38 that allows you to run secondary tables (for E85 or NOS or whatever). You install a simple switch to toggle between the tables - it's based on flex fuel cals except you manually control the switch between tables (tunes).

I don't think you're going to see a big difference in performance. I think you need to be at 12:1 compression before you'd see the benefits of 85% alcohol. Plus, being at 5,000 elevation, I don't think detonation is going to be a big concern.

Out of curiousity, how much timing does the factory tune give the LS3?

If you're going to open up the ECM, you're going to void the warranty. With that being the case, I'd just have the car tuned locally. A friend just put headers, full exhaust (no cats), and a mail order tune in his LS3 C6 and it ran 119mph in the quarter. I thought that was great for so little work to the car.

[Jay Hilliard]

They are nice cars..The grand sports are a good buy for the money. Did you get the dry sump upgrade on the LS3?

[byndbad914]

thanks for the inputs guys!

Ray - I will check out the Katech stuff.

Scott - I dunno diddly-squat about the LS3 ECM... I basically saw the car and decided I needed it more than a tow vehicle I planned to call my old boss/still friend this weekend that owns a performance shop in SoCal and see if he knows much about the ECM yet. Issue is he is in CA and I am still getting attuned to everything here in CO so not totally sure where to look for local tuning.

As for timing, my concern is that if the engine senses detonation it will just pull timing and I have no idea if that is the case. The altitude does help with reducing the detonation, but the fuel is also lower octane here to balance that out, so that is why I am questioning if there may be an advantage to E85... but I tend to agree, I may see nothing significant.

I have been getting similar feedback too regarding simple exh changes and tunes making big differences, especially if the cam is swapped for a bit larger but still streetable one.

Jay - yes it is the dry sump that comes with the 6spds - that was a must have. I have always ran dry sumps on any race car so finding out the GS came with that was quite a nice surprise.

[byndbad914]

pics of the car - bit of a proud papa mentality I know but I haven't been this happy with a factory built anything, my 04 Lightning maybe, it was definitely fun, but this thing is too damn fun to drive. I have no idea how I will keep the mileage down on it like I intended to (want to keep it as a collector car too). I drive a Volvo wagon to work that I paid $800 for, but the AC isn't working and any excuse to drive the Vette will do...

[rwhite692]

Beautiful car, best of luck with it.

Must be hard to jump in that $800 Volvo and leave the vette home each day!

[BBC71Nova]

Wow! That's the best looking factory Vette I've seen in a long time! That thing looks really nice.

Congrats!

[jmac]

WOW! Nice looking car! Good luck with it!

[byndbad914]

thanks for the compliments! Needless to say, I stepped foot on the local dealer's showroom floor just to see what a GS looks like in person, saw it, and basically couldn't leave without it

Called Katech BTW - Jason gave me some pointers on how to get access to see if the timing is being retarded or not, if so, then the E85 makes sense. Otherwise, there are enough questions (injector sizing may not be big enough, fuel pump volume, etc) and the fact I would have to enter the computer and void the warranty, I may just sit tight for awhile.

It ran 103mph Wed night at Bandimere at 14.24 best time (traction control didn't help, horrible 2.4-2.6 60' times, should be 13.70s) so I should be happy with it, but a guy had an LS3 Camaro with a Lingenfelter Maggie build running 12:70s, so the yearning for more power creeps in He was on pump gas which I thought was a waste given the ease of E85 here - damn near every kid with a Suby in town runs E85.