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GC in the Fast Lane.
DAN BOYD
It's a day at the races for PerkinElmer's Jedd Allebach and his gas chromatograph
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t's a typical work day. You switch on the GC, run a few standards, and check your recovery. Then you walk to the first 750-horsepower (hp) race car and wait for someone to peel away the tape covering the gas tank so you can collect a fuel sample. "You guys know I'm coming," you say. "I do this every race." That is, you say it if you're PerkinElmer Instrument's Jedd Allebach performing GC for the Indy Racing League (IRL) in the United States. The league has the cars' fuel and oil tested on the spot at races to ensure that the "playing field" is always level, says IRL Technical Director Phil Casey. The main concern is detecting performance
Elizabeth Zubritsky
enhancers, such as propylene oxide or nitrous oxide, which, when sprayed into the intake manifold, can boost an engine's performance to 20-30 hp. Granted, a GC's part-per-billion accuracy isn't necessarily required to detect some of these unauthorized additives. After all, IRL cars run on methanol, which produces a single peak in a chromatogram. Contaminants stick out like a sore thumb. Analyzing gasoline, with its hundreds of components—-now, that would be hard. But you never know what might turn up. And this is Indy racing, a sport in which adjusting a car's height by one-thousandth of an inch means the difference between winning and losing. And with races delivering up to $9 million in prize money, everything is scrutinized.
"In racing, every team is looking for an unfair advantage—within the rules, of course," says Kelly Racing's Michael Crawford. "But the better the sanctioning body or racing group manages the rules . . . the better the racing is." And from the team's point of view, he adds, "if you've been beaten by someone, you'd like to believe that they did a better job with similar equipment." Other racing leagues also test their cars' fuel, Allebach says. The stock car racing league NASCAR, for example, runs tests, which they keep very secret. But they send their samples to a lab. IRL tests on the spot because it gives officials a better chance of finding out what they want to know, according to Casey. "If a team ran nitrous oxide [during the race], it would
Analytical Chemistry News & Features, December 1, ,999
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evaporate before you got the sample back to the lab," he explains. "There would be no way to prove that people were using it." The IRL officials also like the rapid turnaround of the on-site testing, Casey says. If Allebach finds anything unusual, he can call in officials and they can make a decision on the spot. They may go down to the pit immediately and confront a racing team about what they found. Or they may ask Allebach to analyze a sample from the fuel tank in the team's pit. People in the IRL are used to operating this way—for example, deciding in a split second whether to give a car more mechanical grip or more aerodynamic grin to
traces of lubricants—legal additives that may extend the life of the motor. He also mayfindvery low levels of contaminants that were left after an engine was cleaned or a hose was connected improperly. "I've never found any unauthorized additive in the fuel," he says, "but I'm always hoping." Racing teams have been known to do the GC analysis themselves. Allebach trained two crews, Kelly Racing and Team Menard, in chromatography. Crawford says his team was very interested in the technique when they thought they might be allowed a 1% impurity of any kind in the methanol But
trous oxide, for example, might not show up in the fuel, but small amounts could be picked up by the oil. Second, the analysis indicates how much bearing material is in the oil—a sign of bearing wear—which helps teams keep an eye on their cars. But perhaps most important, the IRL certifies that the racing teams are using particular brands of oil. "It's a truth-in-advertising guarantee," Allebach explains. Companies sponsor the racing teams and offer additional prize money if the team wins while using their oil. In exchange, the company gets to advertise that their product was used in the Indy 500. Ifs a simple enough arrangement, but one that teams have tried to skirt, according tt Allebach. During one of the practices, for example, a team who was A member of the sponsored by one brand IRL technical crew of oil was caught using a pulls a sample from different brand. The situthe fuel bladder ation was corrected bein one of the fore the race, he says, race cars. because the tests picked it up right away. .These [R spectra have characteristic stretching," he explains. "[The technicians] will just run a standard and then
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"arease" on track Theyare not used to wait ing a week for lab results. S All h h and his GC go to every race. The instrument travels in an IRL administrative trailer; Allebach flies in and sets up the GC. That means searching for the means baking in the summer sun on the tracks in Georgia and Texas. It means people walking in and out of trie trailer the wnule mile mat lie a uuing ma analyses, n s
The qudiiiymg day when drivers compete for me prime spot, or pole , in the EJdC'll. I\o syjyJll d o t i l t t^dl o l l l l l o l l , l i e i^(Jllev_.Lo
samples and starts running them. There may be 40 cars on the track. i ne race day is a little easier. i ne nrst sample comes from the communal tanker, which holds the methanol for all the cars. Allebach will collect a sample from each car before the race, but after the race, the IRL officials may want to see results for only the cars finishing in the top 10. During the analysis, Allebach may find a little water condensed in the fuel or 810 A
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once they learned that they were limited to water and similarly uninteresting substances, they decided to leave the testing to the IRL. At the Indy 500—the race with the highest profile and biggest prize—the IRL also has oil samples analyzed with an FT-IR housed in a permanent lab in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's infield. Other PerkinElmer employees fly in to conduct the "fingerprint" analyses. The oil tests serve several purposes, Casey says. First, they give the officials another way to look for performance enhancers. Ni-
Analytical Chemistry News & Features, December 1, 1999
sample from a car Ifs amazing how well they fit" If the sample is the wrong brand, the critical regions just don't match. Even so, he adds, "people still try to get away with it" Both the IRL and PerkinElmer wanttotest oil samples at races other than the Indy 500. For that, Allebach would like to take an FT-IR ann n mass spectrometer which can confirm the identities of some contaminants, on the road. The league and the company have begun to talk about aa expanded mobile lab—one with better cllmate control and less traffic in and outt Allebach says he wouldn't mind better air conditioning in his trailer, but he's content to keep searching for his gas tanks and reinstalling his GC every few weeks. After all, if he'd wanted a typical lab job, he'd have taken one. Elizabeth Zubritsky is an assistant editor at Analytical Chemistry.
