[Jamesp]

So this is old school (literally) but I had a fuels and lubes course as part of my engineering degree, and we had a lab. The lab setup was half mad scientist, and half API testing rigs. a small part of the class revolved around determining, and changing octane ratings in gasoline using a knock engine in the lab. This was a big electricallty driven rig with a single cylinder, the compression ratio of the engine could be changed by turning a crank until detonation occured. Made a h3ll of a noise, all great fun (for engineers). The upshot was that experimentally, using the octane engine, the greatest increase in octane was not obtained with off the shelf octane boosters, but by mixing different octane gas (low and high ) from different producers. Why? Because at that time different chemicals were used to boost the octane in different brands, and the octane booster level in the gas was usually slightly in excess of what was needed so there was a little booster left over in each gas blend. Mix the gas blends together and you get a synergy that uses the left over boosters in each gas brand/blend to increase the overall octane of the mix you created. Because gas blends change constantly, as do the octane boosters, this is not reliably repeatable, but we were getting blends that were between 95 and 100 octane. There was an octane booster that claimed 101 octane that wasn't even close. I've made a point to use different brands ever since for higher octane.