Roberto Coyiuto III, PGA Cars Inc. executive director: We haven’t seen any noticeable difference between the old Petron Blaze formulation and the new Euro IV-compliant variant. Which is a good thing because it shows performance hasn’t been affected with the cars we’ve sold and regularly service. The new Petron Blaze Euro IV is cleaner and more environment-friendly than the old Blaze formulation. Hence, we’ve always and will continue to highly recommend using Petron products, especially Blaze Euro IV, for all our high-performance sports cars, sports sedans and SUVs.
Carlo Jacinto, tuner, racer and shop owner, HP Racing: We tune a lot of mega-HP cars (500 HP and up from turbocharged four-cylinder engines boosting 2 bar/30 psi or higher), run on Petron’s Blaze exclusively since it is the only 100-octane pump gas readily available. While we haven’t heard of any of our customer’s cars that have had any engine failures relating to the switch to the new Blaze formulation, a lot of our customers have been complaining of misfire problems. So we need to check and possibly retune these customer cars. Nothing serious, but definitely it needs some looking into. It’s a problem that’s possibly caused by the fact that we tune our customer cars almost to the knife-edge; so any small problem which might not be noticeable with regular, nonmodified cars is exacerbated by the very high level of tuning that we perform on our customer cars.
Carlo Chungunco, Lexus Manila Inc. marketing services officer: We have yet to specifically test Petron Blaze Euro IV on our current fleet of Lexus vehicles. What we simply require is for our customers to use a minimum of 95 octane fuels to achieve the best power and fuel efficiency. So Petron’s Blaze Euro should be OK. Initially, when Lexus Manila first opened, we had Japanese engineers test out all the popular premium fuels available, and Petron’s Blaze (the original blend) was one of them. The engineers found no problems or other faults. With the introduction of the Euro IV blend, the performance should be the same, but the cars deliver cleaner, more environment-friendly emissions. As a side benefit, since it has lower harmful particulates, our emissions control equipment (and of other car makes and models) should last longer because they run cleaner.—Botchi Santos