Tesco Momentum 99 Racing - Who are we?
By John Thorne
The new name for Thorney Motorsport Racing – Tesco Momentum 99 Racing, the UK’s first ever racing operation in partnership with the UK’s largest supermarket and fuel retailer.
In essence its quite a logical partnership, to develop road and race cars we need fuel and fuel developers and retailers need their product tested and marketed, however the relationship between Thorney Motorsport and Tesco plc goes a lot further than simple livery on cars.
The history is interesting, when John Thorne (founder and owner of Thorney Ltd) moved the company from London to Milton Keynes there was a period of time where he was commuting daily between the two sites, his car of the moment was a BMW CSL (which now races in the CSL Cup) so 100 odd miles a day was starting to get expensive. Milton Keynes has three Tesco fuel stations and all sold their Tesco 99 Octane fuel so John gave it a try, prior to this John was a typical petrol head – Supermarket fuels were for ‘cooking’ model cars, previously he only ever used Shell Optimax (as it was then named) and BP Ultimate.
On his first drive home John was convinced the car felt better; smoother, more powerful and returned better fuel economy even over short distances so he was amazed, here was Supermarket fuel that was better than the ‘premium’ brands. However, knowing full well that there was a high probability of a placebo effect John was unwilling to simply assume the feeling was accurate so when TMS received its new Dyno Dynamics chassis dyno they set to work testing all the premium fuels against each other and standard 95 octane fuel. The motivation was simple, as a business owners come to TMS to get more power from their cars (amongst other things) so if the owner runs their car on decent fuel our job is made easier, however no-one had ever bothered to test the fuels against each other.
The first test report primarily tested the original car – the CSL as well as a couple of others, the results were startling, the CSL alone had nearly 40bhp more when running the Tesco 99 Octane fuel compared to running Total 95 octane, so John wrote the report up and sent it in the mail to Shell, BP, Total and Tesco with a simple covering letter saying “thought you might like to read this”.
We heard nothing for 6 months then out of the blue a lady from a company called Greenergy called, with a very simple question – “this report you’ve written......is it for real?” and there began a relationship that continues to this day. Greenergy supply the Tesco 99 Octane fuel to Tesco, they were sent the report and we agreed they could use the data in their marketing (no skin of our nose). Following this we then engaged in three more fuel tests working a variety of types of cars including a test we did for Auto Express all confirming the same thing – Tesco 99 octane fuel gave more power and better fuel economy than 95 octane fuel.
Armed with this data Tesco decided that this was a message that was worth promoting so the name of the fuel was changed to Tesco Momentum 99. Our role now is one of simple promotion of the fuel, a process we are more than happy to do for the same reasons we started testing fuels – the better the fuel you put in your car the better it will run, the more power it will generate and the better fuel economy you will achieve – if that’s not worth promoting then nothing is!
