Continuing on with this thought, I used to get 'better' performance with my car if I bought major brands of gasoline like Standard, Conoco or Phillips 66 than I did if I had to buy some independant brand. It seemed my car would hardly run. Then in 1969 I became an accountant with a Skelly oil jobber and after 5 years behind a desk I discovered I could make more money driving the tanker. After my first trip to the pipeline and seeing that the fuels came from the same bulk tanks my car suddenly began to run just fine on any brand of gasoline. Oh majors put addatives into their premium grades but usually nothing extra in their regular. Before our loading terminals got injectors to automatically put addatives in while loading, we had to manually add about a quart to 1,000 gallons of premium. (Must have been very concentrated indeed.)
While in the Air Force I had seen the purple 140 octane used in our ground generators. Never saw anything like that at the loading terminals.
DW's relatives used to come from California and complained how bad their car ran on our cheap Missouri gas. They drove Fords and Chevys and couldn't wait to get back to the high priced good old CA gas. It was a shock to many when the mandatory octane stickers posted on gas pumps read 87 octane. Of course the oil companies tried to tell everyone that 'our gas is still over 100 octane, we are just required that it never drop below 87.' Yeah, sure. Did I mention that I am from Missouri and you have to "Show Me."
After 9 years of dragging around a 9,000 gallon tanker I went back to driving the desk.
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