Who else loves watching these iconic races from the 80s? They bravery of these guys. *Shameless Plug* - You should follow us on TikTok @official_driver61

So f1 engineneers are basically rocket sientists

Toluene, not tolulene! ;)

Love the video. Small thing to note: toluene along with hypogolic carcinogenic chemicals stopped being used as main rocket fuels decades ago, even before the apollo program. They are still used very rarely as a reaction control monopropellent in satellites and such, but otherwise toluene isn't really "rocket fuel". In fact, the vastly most common rocket fuel, RP-1 (+LOX), is much more similar to diesel , being a form of kerosene. The only other widely accepted rocket fuels are liquid hydrogen, methane and hydrazene.

0:11 When you are an italian and pay for the RAI and then you see a non italian put it in a video for (i think) free...

Great video, thank you!

Maybe a bit misleading. The rockets you show, including the Falcon 9, are modern rockets. They do not run on Toluene. They do not use the highly toxic fuel you talk about. Actually I dont know a single rocket of recent centuries that used Toluene in major volumes... Maybe someone remembers a rocket?

Group B Lancia and F1 BMW are like the kids in the playground that take the game to an extreme and ruin it for everyone when mommy sees

Race fuel has always been controversial, but it's not rocket fuel. An interesting fact is that they had to heat the toluene fuel to about 70 degrees C before injecting it into the engine to get good vaporization. I really miss those days even if they were very irresponsible and dirty. Toluene is extremely harmful to the brain and nervous system, being a solvent it will literately dissolve the brain (lookup painters disease). How much one's health is affected by toluene also depends on your DNA.

1:25 *Poor guy*

"Race cars want high octane fuel for power" NO NO NO. This is one of the dumbest myths in the automotive world. Facts: Octane is a measure of how a fuel resists igniting under temperature and pressure. High compression engines need high octane to prevent premature detonation before the spark. But a high octane fuel can have LESS energy density. Saying "fast cars need high octane" is a holdover from marketing campaigns in the 50s when octane ratings became a thing and companies wanted to sell more high octane fuel. This is like saying race cars need to mount bigger brakes to make a car go faster. The brakes don't have anything to do with the car going faster. It just happens that when a car goes really fast, it will then also need big brakes. Just like a high compression engine will need high octane fuel. But the fuel is to resist detonation. The high compression is what makes the power.

Yes the 80s... Best time for racing, no bullshit, just insane power and aero.

Crazy thing is a few old engineers have said if you took these engines and ran them with a modern ecu and mapping they’d make over 2,000 HP easy.

It was never used as rocket fuel and never even used in jets it was used in some German ww2 fighters though

Title should be..... When f1 cars used to be f1 cars 🏎

Toluene is NOT jet fuel. Nor is it really or has it really ever been used as an additive in jet fuel. Jet fuel is mostly naturally refined hydrocarbons, very similar to diesel fuel or kerosene. Nice try with the clickbait title and dramatic avoidance of saying what the fuel they used actually was.

Imagine being a f1 driver and your boss tells you how much was spend on fuel so you feel pressured to make the race worth the money 😂

Toluene is also the fuel in TNT (tri nitrate toluene)

banned f1 technology combined make a 1 car...

Took rocket fuel and diesel to get 120 octane, we used to buy 120 octane race gas at the drag strip back in the 80’s for our NoS cars

Toluene is primarily a paint thinner, then a drug that most homeless people use and then a rocket fuel. It is not really that common in rocket fuel industry, as it is common amongst painters and drug users...

Learn something new everyday

Automobile racing in the 80s was the best. F1 and Group B rally.

This might sound daft but I think current f1 should have 1300 hp and weight 500kg with current downforce levels to bring back the sound and liveliness of the alonso days

They should bring it back 🗣

This was the golden era... legends driving. Nowadays is meh

I'm 2:51 into the vid, the fuel consumption has been mentioned many times at this point - but why not explain to the viewers WHY they were running such a rich mixture? I'm sure you know, a fat mixture is a safe tune, as leaner mixtures burn much hotter. Additionally, the overly rich mixture can act like water injection, further cooling the combustion temps (but potentially washing the oil out of the cross- hatching on the cylinder walls, causing excessive piston, ring and cylinder wall wear). Generally the higher the combustion pressure, the higher the combustion temps... Hence the excess fuel was used to cool the combustion temps... Elementary my dear Whatson

normies: "ah the turbos weren't that big, plus they had twin turbos so less lag" turbos: *pump 5 bar of boost into 1.5 liter V6*

100% NOT ROCKET FUEL

In a free society, drivers would be allowed to choose how much danger they want to be exposed to.

F1 used the 'jungle juice' toxic concoctions, up until 1992, when 'pump fuel' was mandated. Ferrari(Agip) and McLaren Honda(Shell) had toxic fuels for their qualifying engines, right up until 1991. From then, the ingredients in the pump fuels were the same as road car fuel, but I guess they played around with the percentages of the ingredients, F1 being F1.

It was roughly 90% toluene. High energy density and the main point it was extremely knock resistant allowed crazy boost levels. Can be added to pump gas up 2 about 20% to increase knock resistance. Ha

For People wondering 5.5Bar of pressure is almost 80PSi

They badged this engine as Megatron. Rumour has it the engine blocks were left in the smoking section of the BMW factory for workers to urinate on. What difference that would make is anyone's guess.

Senator ran out of fuel first. Always the master.

You keep saying toluLene.

Interesting they ran on rocket fuel in 80’s I remember early 90’s silverstone and the special cocktails.. defo had a distinct smell... but remember stories of empty barrels been peed in so others teams couldn’t swab samples of the fuel ....

The coolest decades in motorsports where the 60s, 70s and 80s

BMW Use V2 first intercontinental missile

Toluene- true, it was a major constituent. Dense, that means high energy per unit volume; a major constituent of unleaded petrols in Europe, too, as it is cheap and high- octane... Now, the high prices of F1 turbo fuels came not from that (or the diesel, added also to bring down the octane rating that was regulated) but from special high-energy additives that got a few % out of combustion. One I was hearing of at the time was cubane, a strained hydrocarbon, extremely energetic and dense (1.29 g/cm3) and also high-octane because of its kinetic stability. It is made by a difficult and expensive synthetic route; today you can buy it or some derivatives for lab use at tens of euros per gram. Big oil sponsors would set up production labs, saving on the scale, but still that few % that they added would drive the price up to 100s of euro per kg (I use euro instead of currencies of the time for laziness).

And you ask me wy i find todays racing boring 1930s to 1990s was the peak of motorsport sound feel and real racing and so much more sadly i only could encounter 1% by my own as i was born way to late (1995) i literaly feel myself in the wrong generation.

Luftwaffe beschde

This really puts the "Gas" into "Gas Gas Gas".

Cool video, I was in a bad mood and this helped distract me. Thank you

Correct me if I’m wrong, but fuel freezing was essentially the equivalent of adding a big shot of nitrous onto the engine.

I’m not sure about F1, I’m sure it was much the same, but I remember reading that the team bosses for the ELF motorcycle GP team had a special clause in their contracts that said they would never have to handle or even come in close proximity to the fuel.

300l/race...? Once I managed to burn 42l/200km with my Honda (d16z6).. the last 40 minutes - not dropping under 5500 & topping at 7000 rpm on 4th & 5th (highway) - ended up with 2.5l of coolant missing & spun rod bearing... :D

Well, I'm sold! Off to the hardware store to buy a gallon of paint thinner to top off the tank on my M3...

sooo who will be using quiktrip fuel?

There was also a nice caveat in FIA rules, which did not state that you had to run on same engine in qualifying round as in main race - HENCE, teams would run far higher boost during qualifying laps and destroy the engine -> quickly replace the engine for main race and run with lower boost (and different map as well to stop engine from melting)

On the fuel being a second a lap different well that's A TON when your a second ahead of second place when the white flag comes out

I think 70s-80s f1 cars looked cooler

Diesel will also lubricate the cylinder

1 hp per CC. WOW and the gauge that said 4 bar is 58 psi of boost. 5.5 bar is 79.77 psi

It's all because of octane!!!!

Such a great channel... So interesting! I was never into F1 but your vids show us just how ingenious the sport is. Wow... just wow!

Great vids fella, however do you really think fuel burning hurts the “plannet”? Come on, and if it did do you really think thats the end goal with these restrictions? Look at dpf and tell me thats not double the pollution than a regular diesel engine then extrapolate it out and it becomes very clear

Rocket fuel is a two part mix of peroxide and oxygen. Hardly suitable for car. The other rocket fuel is a solid. What is likely is old style petrol of 110+ron with methanol.

Rockets run on Kerosene! You are full of BS!

6:54 Indeed 1.5 is less than 6.4

What about direct injection liquid hydrogen? get a small boost from the hydrogen expansion, but massive energy density(3x as energy dense as gasoline), and as long as there isnt an explosive decompression, would be in theory safer than gasoline, as if there is a leak, it vents into the atmosphere and quickly rises away instead of the vapors flowing around on the ground.

Thanks for taking me back.

When MEN were MEN, not kneeling in surrender on the grid...I miss those days so bad.

It costs 400.000 dollars to drive the BMW rocket F1... for 12 seconds. - bmw rocket fuel supplier propably

Stopping F1 will really help global warming instead of us average people turning off the two light bulbs in our tiny houses

I didn't know they used toluene in rockets. It's so carcinogenic that we leave the bottle in the fume hood. I thought they were sticking hydrazine in lol.

Wrong from the start. There is no such thing as "rocket fuel", rockets have used a wide range of different fuels in different rocket engines - and toulene was NOT one of them except perhaps in EXPERIMENTS.

Big correction, the type of fuel you use doesn't change the amount of power you make, the only reason you would need higher octane fuel is because you make more power.

Love your videos man but pls get a haircut

to be honest i don't think f1 is a "race" anymore. as a racer you just want to push as fast as you can whatever it takes, nowadays it's a marathon and no racing action what so ever. with tech we have now there should be a safe way to bring back a racer being a racer, instead of a paddock wall engineer working 50 laps or so on strats while driving a car, if a racer wanted to worry about strats i think he'd become a paddock wall race engineer instead of a racer. i once opened my mouth in 2019 that they didn't push the car to qualifying times during a race, the next upcomin race i saw a response, way more stops for tires like 3 to 4 and the race was much more enjoyable to watch, more back end teams were in a challenging position for points. so yeah they need to give racers the focus on being a racer back. change my mind.

I was expecting something more exotic than toluene, but then again, I only really thought of toluene as a precursor to TNT, rather than a dangerous chemical in its own right.

To be fair a second a lap in F1 time is humongous.

me hearing a faint ill never die: turns up sound me when i find out it accutaly is the song: breakdown breakdown

Toluene was used as rocket fuel? I just know that stuff as paint thinner... And I really struggle to believe that is was the common rocket fuel in the 80is.

Why would they do that? Rocket fuel is less efficient and wouldn't make the car go any faster

Nitromethane, or top fuel, as used in top fuel dragsters, is not rocket fuel. The Saturn V rocket's first stage carries 203,400 gallons (770,000 liters) of kerosene fuel and 318,000 gallons (1.2 million liters) of liquid oxygen needed for combustion. Liquid oxygen (LOX) and highly refined kerosene (RP-1). Used for the first stages of the Atlas V, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Soyuz, Zenit, and developmental rockets like Angara and Long March 6. This combination is widely regarded as the most practical for boosters that lift off at ground level and therefore must operate at full atmospheric pressure. LOX and liquid hydrogen. Used on the Centaur upper stage, the Delta IV rocket, the H-IIA rocket, most stages of the European Ariane 5, and the Space Launch System core and upper stages. LOX and liquid methane (from Liquefied natural gas) are planned for use on several rockets in development, including Vulcan, New Glenn, and SpaceX Starship. Those are examples of actual rocket fuel, not the stuff they put into top fuel dragsters or put into an F1 car. Nitromethane and liquid methane are not the same thing, nitro is made by combining propane and nitric acid. It's main advantage is it contains more oxygen than other fuels, allowing it to burn with less atmospheric oxygen, rockets have LOX so this is irrelevant and you ideally want fuels without oxygen in them.

The BMW engine did not break the dyno it went beyond the scale - at the time they had a dyno that could display 1000 or 1100 hp (not exactly sure) and when they tested the engine it went beyond that, that's when the rumors of 1400hp started.

We don't live on a planet little feller more like a plane.

An unpleasant effect of petrochemicals, back in the 80s before crack poisoned people, the parks were full of people sniffing rags, watching some stagger like zombies i asked what they were sniffing and one said "toil"...people will choose poison far too often.

Lol back when teams would say ‘show me where I asked’ to the FIA

When you cool something it gets smaller..... explain that to water......

acording to what I have read about rockets, they run on kerosene !!!!!

I was thinking of rp1 which is just pretty refined kerosine/diesel and i was like "so? Where is the problem?"

Toluene has not been used in any rocket worth mentioning. Hydrazine, on the other hand is and has been used in motorsports! Nitrous oxide has been successful used as a rocket fuel that has set world records, but it is most notably referred to as laughing gas. See history.nasa.gov/conghand/propelnt.htm why toluene has NOT been used as "rocket fuel"!

Just a note but elio had already won a race Austria 1982 so elio 2nd win was san Marino 1985.

Aside from a couple of experiments, toluene has never been used as a rocket fuel: it's too heavy and the performance increase over kerosene isn't enough to compensate for that. It worked in F1 because their primary concern was volume and because the weight penalty wasn't too bad in an application where the vehicle didn't have to lift its own fuel into the sky. In fact, it may even have been an advantage, given how much effort F1 cars go to to generate more "weight" through downforce. Toluene has also never seen significant use as a jet fuel where, again, weight is the ruling factor. So, interesting video, but based on a number of major misconceptions.

Toluene is methylbenzene - benzene (very toxic) with a methyl CH3 group stuck on one side of the ring. I'll have to look in Ignition (John D Clark, 1972) again, but I'm not seeing much use of toluene as rocket fuel. Maybe as part of a mix to get higher combustion rates than RP-1, but as it carries a lot of carbon for the number of hydrogens I'd guess that the exhaust velocity would be lower and so would specific impulse.

The raptor engine (4:57) runs on methane and liquid oxygen.

That being said, F1 today is but a sad shadow of it's former self.

1400bhp from a 1.6l WTF.

250 litres of fuel in a 220 litre tank is clever.

So much is scientifically wrongly said in this video

Damn the 80's were crazy xD

they should start using acetylene instead of gasoline

"Its probably smaller than whats in your car" Laughs in unreliable 1.4 twin charged golf

My sister's car is a Volkswagen Polo with a 1.4L engine. so it's definitely more powerful than hers but, not mine, dad's nor mum's car!

"tolulene"

All of the roblox jailbreak players, pls stfu

4:10 thats not a fuel sample..... thats a pee sample!!!! . either they are playing a joke on the F1 rules team..... OR THEY ARE RUNNING CARS ON WEE!!!! . F1 has saved our energy crisis....... just run our cars on our own piss!!!! . i bet if you are drinking beer..... the pee fuel would have some ethanol in it.... so if ya drive a turbo / high compression car..... drink some beer before ya fuel it up ;)

Great video, thanks. I would argue that the moment you start adding fuel and tyre restrictions to racing, it becomes an “economy challenge” and no longer racing. At the moment F1 is the most expensive absurd rule filled economy challenge on earth. Pity that...it used to be spectacular.