04/03/2026
Years of development have gone into this crazy little Ka and if we want to increase performance, there’s not much more left to do.
The obvious answer is to bolt on a turbo and turn it up to 11, or switch out the engine for something more potent. However, this would take away so much of what makes this particular Ka so special. It would also change the classes and races we would need to enter it in, which is never a simple decision in competitive club motorsport.
Therefore, we have spent a morning with the wonderful guys at , putting the car through proper dyno testing and live engine calibration, to see what we can achieve by changing the fuel from pump fuel 99 octane to Sunoco 260GT 105 octane race fuel. When you are working at this level of race car preparation and performance development, sometimes the smallest changes are the most interesting.
The answer, put simply, is unfortunately not a lot. With a 2 degree ignition advance and a 6 percent fuel increase to compensate for the higher oxygen content in the fuel, we saw an increase across the range of just 3 bhp. Useful, yes, especially when chasing marginal gains in motorsport, but not worth the £6 per litre cost for regular track use.
We have saved the map and it will be used with the 105 octane fuel when the Ka goes sprinting, where every brake horsepower matters.
But not on track, when it is guzzling 40 litres over a race and qualifying session, as the cost to performance ratio simply does not stack up.
