2006 Infiniti G35 drift car

Reading the result

The biggest gain on this page, and it did not come from turning the blower up. It came from changing what the fuel would allow.

A supercharged VQ35 on pump gasoline runs out of knock margin before it runs out of airflow. The calibration has to pull timing to keep the engine safe, and every degree removed is power left in the cylinder. E85 changes that constraint twice over: it resists detonation, and it cools the intake charge as it evaporates, which drops intake air temperature exactly where boost was raising it. With the fuel no longer the limit, the timing goes back in and the engine gives up what the hardware was already capable of.

The headers and exhaust matter more on a supercharged engine than people expect. A centrifugal blower is driven by the engine, so every pound of backpressure it has to push against is power taken back out of the crank.

Worth saying about a drift car specifically: peak horsepower is close to the least important thing about this calibration. What matters is throttle response, the transition on and off boost mid-corner, and fuelling that stays honest through sustained high-angle runs at high load and low road speed — the condition where cooling is worst and a calibration written for a dyno cell falls apart. That is the part of this job that does not show up as a number.