Nineteen seventy-five, and a fuel that got out of Texas

A blend that did not exist yet

VP Racing Fuels, Inc., headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, was founded in 1975, experimenting with different blends to improve horsepower beyond what existing fuels offered.

The first-ever VP Racing product was C12, and it gained traction locally. Read the order of that sentence carefully, because it is the unusual part: the product came first and the company followed it. C12 was not the output of a company that already existed. The company is what happened once enough people wanted the fuel.

Fuel that changed the engine, and back again

Through partnership with Buddy Morrison and David Reher, VP Racing created a cycle of innovation that led to advancements in fuel technology and improvements in Reher-Morrison's engines — and the other way round.

That is the sentence worth carrying into a European paddock. Not the anniversary, not the Texas of it. A fuel supplier sitting inside an engine programme's development loop rather than at the end of it, close enough that a change to the fuel changes the engine and a change to the engine changes the fuel.

Warren Johnson paid for it

Drag racer Warren Johnson was VP's first paying customer. Not a sponsorship and not a favour — a purchase.

Warren Johnson's and Bob Glidden's successes using C12 catapulted the product to being one of the most renowned race fuels in motorsports. Both are drag racers, and that is where the early proof came from.

Fifty years, standing next to a specification

Today VP Racing continues to serve as the premier manufacturers of high-performance racing fuels, lubricants and additives.

C12 is not a heritage edition. It is a current blend on this site, which is why every blend here carries the year it entered service. History filed under About Us is a museum. The same history standing next to an octane number, on the page where somebody is deciding what goes in the tank, is an argument.

So a European MXGP programme is not the sport VP came out of. It is the same method applied to a different discipline, five thousand miles and half a century later: get inside the development loop, and make the fuel the one input nobody has to argue about.