Today, every car sold on the market that has a petrol engine uses unleaded fuel. That wasn’t always the case - leaded fuel was available for about 50 years and for a purpose. Refined fuel, namely petrol, has a habit of auto-igniting, i.e the ability to detonate on it’s own without a spark and this meant that cars up to the 1920s could run roughly as the fuel ignited at the … [Read more...]
Universal Oil Products
I was prompted to write this article after the recent death of Don Nichols, who owned the Shadow Formula 1 team in the 1970s. I remember from my youth, the F1 cars with UOP sponsorship. UOP is short for Universal Oil Products, a company founded in 1914 on the back of inventions in chemical cracking developed by Jesse Dubbs and his son Carbon. Cracking is the process by which … [Read more...]
