Formula One goes green

If politicians commuted in open-wheeled racing cars, we’d have none of this nonsense about “greening” the greatest show on Earth. But, as we all know, they go to work sitting in the business-class sections of airliners, because there’s always something important to do on the other side of the world.

Boeing 747s burn fuel at roughly four litres per second, or 1 200 litres per 100km, while Formula One cars sip the stuff at the rate of about 75 litres for the same distance. Yet those bastards want to turn our sport into a glorified Scalectrix slot-car game because we’re ruining the planet. Go figure.

Cheer up. Things aren’t likely to be as bad as all that when Grand Prix racing goes green in 2011. In fact, for us couch potatoes the spectacle might even get better, and in the long term, the world can only benefit.

The proposals being punted about at the moment involve reducing engine size and power, and because the FIA says that the intention is to reduce emissions rather than slow down the cars, other regulations that have been put in place over the years to reduce speeds in the interests of safety can be relaxed to liven up the game a little.

Current F1 cars generate huge down force, which enables them to scuttle around corners at ridiculous velocities but has an adverse effect on top speeds — that’s why today’s race cars can’t match the 380km/h top speeds of the mighty Auto Union and Mercedes-Benz open wheelers of the 1930s.

Proposals for 2011 include removing some of the current aerodynamic devices to reduce down force, and thus drag, by more than 50%. The boffins reckon that cars could then reach the same 300km/h-plus top speeds from 40% less power, with a bonus being that drivers will find it much easier to slipstream other cars before nipping out to pass them at the ends of the straights. At the moment, the down force generated at speed creates a wake of dirty air behind an F1 car that destabilises anything travelling too closely behind.

Another possibility is that on-the-fly adjustable wings like we saw in the early 1970s will be reintroduced to give the cars better traction and higher cornering speeds without creating drag that would reduce velocity down the straights

A worthwhile cause

Anybody with more than about three seconds to spare thinking about the issue will realise that making F1 cars environmentally friendly on the racetrack isn’t going to preserve one blade of grass, never mind a rainforest or three. The emissions produced and the fuel burnt just getting the teams and their cars to the various racetracks around the world render the damage done to the environment on race day itself insignificant.

The purpose of the exercise is rather to divert the massive budgets of the teams into something worthwhile — and score brownie points with the increasingly vociferous conservationist lobby. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to squeeze 760kW from an engine that already delivers 730kW, engineers can try to coax better fuel consumption from their cars, reduce emissions and convert waste energy from the braking and exhaust systems into power they can use on the next straight.

FIA president Max Mosley says: “We are in active discussions with the major manufacturers to ensure that, in future, research and development relevant only to F1 will be discouraged, whereas that which has relevance to road-car development will be encouraged.”

Speaking of environmental goals, he added: “While aiming to achieve these goals, we will ensure that the sporting spectacle of F1 remains the same or is even improved by the new developments.”

So what’s the typical F1 car going to look like in three years’ time? For a start, it will quite likely be smaller and lighter than today’s car, but not by much. It will have a smaller engine, perhaps a four-cylinder unit displacing as little as 1,3 litres, in which case it will more than likely have a turbocharger forcing air down its throat. Power output directly from the engine will be 15% or so lower than that of today’s F1 cars, but waste energy recovered from the cooling system, exhaust and braking forces will be recycled to produce an extra 80kW to 120kW of punch down the next straight.

The environmentally friendly F1 car will run on a carefully rationed supply of bio-ethanol produced from non-food vegetable sources — this is to stop the nitpickers complaining about good food being sacrificed to create fuel. The F1 car of 2011 will have only about 50% of the down force of today’s Grand Prix car, but will most likely be equipped with currently banned traction control to help it gallop round the corners quickly.

Because Mosley and his gang of millionaire administrators rely on spectator interest to keep them in the manner to which they’re accustomed, the cars will still sound ferocious and will have lap times and top speeds very close to those of today’s cars.

Energy recovery

The most intriguing aspect of F1 in the future is the energy recovery system, something like that of the Toyota Prius and other hybrid cars, which will be central to car development. The FIA refers to kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) and surge power units that will be phased in from 2009. These could be electric motors fitted to each wheel — yes, four-wheel drive is likely — that can deliver a power boost of magnitude and duration, perhaps 80kW for six seconds a lap, determined by the FIA.

Under braking the motors would act as generators, producing electrical power that can be stored in batteries or other devices and then used to drive the motors and supplement the engine power on the next straight.

But electricity isn’t the only way to go. We could find wind-up cars also being part of the programme in a couple of years’ time. In November, a new mechanical KERS being developed for F1 was voted engine innovation of the year at the Professional Motorsport World Expo Awards ceremony in Cologne. The British companies that developed the Flybrid system claim that their fast-acting flywheel system is up to twice as efficient as current hybrid electric vehicles in the way it stores recovered vehicle kinetic energy.

Their system utilises a flywheel connected to the car’s transmission via a continuously variable transmission, with the gear ratio being manipulated to achieve control of energy storage and recovery. The flywheel rotates at more than 60 000rpm, and because it is very small and light, gyroscopic forces are minimal.

When the gear ratio is changed to allow the engine to speed up the flywheel, energy is stored, but when the ratio is changed to slow the flywheel down compared with engine speed, flywheel energy is recovered. The flywheel will naturally lose impetus due to friction in the bearings and seals, but these losses will be reduced due to the fact that the device runs in a vacuum.

There’s no doubt that 2011 will go down in history as the year that F1 changed forever. One of the reasons this is happening, says the FIA, is to drum up support for the green movement among ordinary people and motorsport fans.

I suspect that Mosley and the team bosses don’t care as much about the environment as they’d have us believe — they have simply bowed to the pressure, and if they could carry on exactly as they always have, they would. It’s all about the money.

For most of the fans, all that matters is that the cars sound right, look right and get around any racetrack you care to place them on significantly faster than anything else on wheels.

What Max Mosley says