The rally fuels VP blends to the FIA's specifications

RX102 and R5.1

VP blends RX102 and R5.1 to FIA fuel specifications, and both are in the European catalogue. VP does not homologate them — it blends them to the governing body's requirements. They are the answer to the question a rally entrant has to settle before anything else: is this fuel legal in the car I am entering.

RX102 is 95.5 (R+M)/2 and 102 RON, unleaded, colourless and lightly oxygenated at 3.45 per cent. VP blends it to FIA specifications and lists it for FIM competition as well — cars and motorcycles, which very little else on the shelf can say.

VP's own description of it is a FIA-compliant 102 for circuit and rally, and VP positions it for motorsport broadly rather than specifically for Rally2 and R5.

R5.1 is 94.3 (R+M)/2 and also 102 RON, unleaded, colourless, oxygenated at 3.68 per cent. VP developed it with M-Sport for the Fiesta R5, and blends it to FIA specifications.

It is a fuel built for a rally car rather than adapted to one: the same 102 RON as RX102, at a deliberately lower MON and higher oxygen content, tuned specifically around Rally2/R5 engines rather than motorsport in general.

A rally is not won in scrutineering, but it can be lost there

A fuel specification is paperwork, not a performance claim — and on a rally, paperwork decides more than lap time does.

Both of these blends are made to the FIA's published fuel requirements. VP blends to those requirements; it does not homologate the fuels. What that gives a crew is a fuel they can check against the rulebook before the car reaches the service park.

A fuel without that paperwork can be perfectly good and still be the wrong thing to have in the tank on a Saturday morning.

Rules move, and classes inside a championship do not all run the same regulations. Confirm against your sanctioning body's rules before race day.

The part numbers behind them

A specification is no use if the fuel cannot reach the event. Both blends carry European part numbers, which is what separates a product from a catalogue entry.

RX102 is listed as 4212, 42114 and 4214, in 18.9, 53 and 204 litre packs. R5.1 as 01660-14 and 01664, in 53 and 204 litres. A national championship crew ordering by the drum and a team taking a pallet to a multi-round programme are buying the same fuel from the same sheet.

That is the part of the operation a Sligo warehouse and a Rotterdam port exist for. The specification is decided in a laboratory; whether it turns up on the Friday is decided by a supply chain.

More weather in a weekend than a circuit sees in a season

The specification that decides a rally is not peak octane. It is that a fuel behaves identically in a service park in Finland in autumn and one in southern Spain in spring, because a rally crosses more weather in a weekend than a circuit season sees in a year.

Both of these blends are built that way: unleaded, colourless, lightly oxygenated, blended to a published specification rather than to a target on a dyno sheet. The same drum in March and in September is the whole point, and it is the reason a crew stops thinking about fuel at all.

Which is the argument for buying a fuel blended to the rulebook's specification rather than the strongest one available. On a rally the fuel should be the variable you have already removed.

Rally2, and the fleet it actually serves

R5.1 takes its name from a car class, not a marketing number. Rally2 — R5 under the FIA's own previous nomenclature — sits directly below the World Rally Championship's works Rally1 cars: a 1.6-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine regulated to around 285 horsepower, permanent four-wheel drive, a five-speed sequential gearbox, and a minimum weight of 1,230kg.

It runs in WRC2, in the FIA's continental championships and in national rallies across Europe — the fleet a European fuel supplier actually has to serve, rather than one works team on one weekend.

M-Sport built the Fiesta Rally2 to that specification as the successor to its own Fiesta R5, and calls it its flagship customer competition car.

By M-Sport's own account the Fiesta has taken more than 2,000 victories worldwide, and the Fiesta Rally2 and its R5 predecessor won 13 regional championships between them in 2022 alone — the scale of customer, not a single factory entry, that R5.1 was developed to run in.