In the halcyon days when anyone with big enough carb jets ran their racing car on “alcohol” and petril was just for little tin boxes nitromethane briefly found favour as a fuel additive. Apparently you had to be careful about handling the stuff as it could be absorbed through the skin, with hilarious consequences. There is a story about Charlie Cooper getting higher than Sputnik after a nitro mishap. Top Fuel dragsters use the stuff, which explains a lot.
Then the Feds FIA interfered, as was their wont, and mandated “pump petril”, prompting an irate Tony Vandervell* to demand to know exactly which pump racing teams had to use. The Man relented and specified AvGas instead, since at least there was an existing standard for it. Somehow by the 1980s everyone with a tame oil company chemist managed to use stuff based largely on toluene which still met the letter of the rules.
* whose Chaps, coincidentally, were having a hard time making the Vanwall engine work properly when deprived of the booze it was designed to ingest
