I never put in octane boost in any of my cars and realized why not but would like some feedback on them before I proceed. I was liking the Lucas one.

 

I have never had any luck with the dump into the tank kind. When they say it will raise the octane of XX gallons of fuel by 9 points, that 9 pts is actually only 0.9 octane. Read the bottle very carefully. Now these numbers are just made up, but the analogy still applies.

Are you trying to get higher octane than the max octane you can buy or are you just trying to save at the pump by putting in the lower stuff and bringing it back up? You really can't save at the pump by putting an addative in.

Unless your Hypertech can tune for 94+ octane, there would be next to no benefit to running it. The way you would tune for higher octane is with advanced timing, but if the Hypertech tuned for an expected 93 or 94 octane, you really won't gain even on 105 octane race gas. If you do decide to go the race gas direction, make sure you run unleaded only - leaded gas will kill your O2s quick.

Now if you were to scan (with a computer interface) the truck on a run and were to see KR (knock retard of the timing), then you may see gains with a higher octane. A lower compression (9.5:1) motor like the 4.3L shouldn't see any KR unless there are problems. Higher compression engines require higher octane because of the higher resistance to preignition.

Another thing to note is the higher the octane, the slower the burn rate of the fuel. This is why you want to run more advanced timing to light off the mixture sooner before TDC so that when the piston gets to TDC, you've already got a good flame front building and the pressures are at their max to force the cylinder back down. Too much advance and you'll have the max pressure before the piston reaches TDC and will have detonation knock or ping. Too little advance and you won't reach max pressure at TDC and will be wasting power.

Wow.. I do ramble! All of this on a simple octane booster question. Ok so to summarize on the original question. Octane boosters only raise the octane by tenths of an octane. If it states 7 pts increase, that's 0.7 octane and just because you have a smaller tank doesn't mean it will raise it significantly more. If you have a source for unleaded high octane fuel, it would be much better to grab that like a day before you wanted to throw down at the track. It may give you some performance gains, but you won't get the mileage on higher than tuned octane. The only way that a higher octane fuel will actually show noticable all around improvements on an N/A motor is if something else is wrong creating spark knock and causing the PCM to retard the timing, thus cutting performance.

Hope this helped.

 

I liked the lucas booster it says it not like others. I use 93 or 94 at the pump always and tried the lucas booster.. Hypertech says it performs with 94 or better gas so thats why I thought about it. Next time your at a store look for lucas boost and let me know what you think of it. Well the truck sounds deeper and feels different but would like someone else to try it.

 

If it doesn't say how many points it increases the octane by, it's not worth it. I think that the Lucas Octane Booster touts a 3x increase in octane over others. But what 'others' do they compare it to? This may be good for 1 octane. Not worth it IMO. But use it if you feel it did something.