[Martinjlm]

The position taken by the tuners in Florida is an understandable position. It all boils down to what they may or may not know about particular types of engines. Ethanol is corrosive. Running E85 requires valves and valve seats hardened to resist the corrosive nature of ethanol. If the tuners don’t have a way of confirming that the valves and seats in an engine are hardened to support E85, they are smart to walk away from it.

Now, specifically for Camaro, I am pretty sure...90+ %-ish sure, that the valves and seats in LT1 are hardened to support E85. And from what I can tell, the E85 kits that are sold replace a part of the fuel line that might also be impacted by corrosive ethanol, so getting the sensor and tuning for E85 is really all LT1 needs.

My background for saying this is that when I was in Powertrain Portfolio Planning at GM, I had an engineer assigned to working with Product Engineering and the people in the company who managed GM’s fuel economy reporting to determine which vehicles using which engines would be planned to use E85. GM’s position was to maximize the credits that could be generated from using E85 capable engines. 3.5L and 3.9L OHV engines were targeted, as were 3.6L FWD (but not RWD) engines. A lot of small block V8s were also targeted, as a lot of the GM truck portfolio was to be outfitted with E85 capability. This is where Camaro and Corvette benefit. With so much truck volume being E85 capable, it made sense for the engine plants producing those engines to use the hardened valves and seats for everything, whether they were E85 intended or not. Fewer part numbers to track and inventory and separate.

There was typically additional E85 content that needed to be added at the vehicle assembly plants. Not totally certain what that would be for Camaro, since it was not intended to come from factory E85-capable. I think fuel pump may have been one of them, but I wouldn’t swear to that.