By Jonathan Eisenthal
Ten-year-old Gloria Hansen plans to launch her racing career this month.
When she gets behind the wheel, Gloria depends on E98 — a racing fuel that’s 98 percent ethanol, to keep her single stroke, air-cooled engine running cool and smooth, and getting her going faster than 60 miles-per-hour within seconds.
She follows in the footsteps of her dad Corey, who raced all over the Midwest in his late teens and 20s.
As a “junior dragster,” Gloria competes with other kids on a one-eighth mile strip.
At this level of competition, vehicles have a clutch very similar to a snowmobile engine. The driver revs the engine until the clutch engages. To achieve drag racing speed and make a winning run, the racer starts with feet on the brake and the accelerator at the same time.
“Then when she gets the green light, Gloria releases the brake and puts the pedal all the way to the floor to get that hard start. The clutch engages and she’s off,” Corey described.
Gloria has done practice runs, but still needs to get her license in order to compete. The family will head down to their “home track” in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where a tech inspector will watch as Gloria demonstrates that she knows how to stop, how to turn off the engine and how to drive safely.
Corey and Kaye Hansen farm south of Austin, Minnesota, where they raise corn, soybeans and a few beef cattle. Their oldest, Victoria, 12, loves car shows and car racing, but doesn’t care for the drag strip, whereas Gloria’s inclination runs exactly the opposite. She’s always loved the dragstrip. And their youngest, son Luke, has little interest in cars, but loves farm equipment.
Gloria in her junior dragster car.
As a member of the Mower County Corn and Soybean Growers Association, Corey Hansen has been an active booster of homegrown ethanol. They found their way to E98 through a source at the local ethanol company.
“We knew that this car that we got for Gloria had been run on alcohol, that it was set up for oxygenated fuel,” Corey said. “We were going to try E85, but then a friend of ours hooked us up with a source for E98 and we jumped at that, because the higher the ethanol content, the cooler the engine runs. That’s the big thing with these engines — they’re air-cooled. The cooler it runs, the faster you can go. These are essentially lawn mower engines. It’s a five HP engine that your making to go 25 horsepower. A side effect of going for all that horsepower is heat, so running cool is a very important element.”
Ethanol companies cannot ship pure ethanol. Federal alcohol policy requires that they add at least two percent denaturant — typically a petroleum product, to make it undrinkable. When the company ships the denatured ethanol, it has to draw off a sample from each tank, which they keep until the fuel is delivered.
“The junior dragsters only use a cup of gas for a pass,” Hansen said. “I don’t know what they did with that sample ethanol before we took it off their hands.”