Carrots, Potatoes and Soy, Oh My! A Look at Racing's Greenest Car
By John O'Dell April 16, 2009
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Auto racing, demanding of performance and downright disdainful for most of the past century of concepts such as curbing tailpipe emissions, is getting greener.
Formula One's governing body, the FIA, for instance, has a website promoting green initiatives, and there's a conference in Southern California today, in advance of this weekend's Long Beach Grand Prix, that focuses on opportunities in the racing world for environmentally friendly products.
Yokohama Rubber, for example, has just come out with a "green" racing tire that replaces 10 percent the compound's petroleum-based oil content with orange oil. That cuts down the amount of oil used in production and makes the tire easier - thus less energy-intensive - to recycle.
Most of the talk and development work, though, has been centered on increasing race cars' fuel efficiency and reducing racing's carbon footprint - engine and fuel stuff.
Bio-Racer
That hasn't been enough, though, for researchers at the University of Warwick in England.
Concerned about racing's environmental impact and its financial future given the high cost of building and maintaining cars and the wobbly economy that's put a big dent in sponsorship money, a team at the university-affiliated Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre set out to see if it were possible to build a competitive race car from environmentally sustainable products.
The short answer: Yes, although not every component can be earth-friendly.
The research team has designed and built a "proof-of-concept" Formula 3 race car that might best be described as a bio-racer.
It uses carrots, potatoes, flax fiber, soybean oil and other natural products in its various parts, makes extensive use of recycled carbon fiber and composite body panels, runs on biodiesel that can be made from vegetable oil or even waste from chocolate candy factories, and has radiators that clean the air that passes through them.
All that and it goes around corners at 125 miles an hour - or at least that's what it's designed to do: the researchers just fitted the engine last week and haven't completed on-track testing yet.
To stop, it uses non-carbon brake discs and the research team is working on - believe it or not - brake pads made from cashew nut shells!
World's First
The builders call themselves WorldFirst Racing and the car, which they say is the first to be made largely from sustainable and renewable materials, the WorldFirstF3 racer.
James Meridith, WorldFirst project manager and a university researcher, told Green Car Advisor that the car will make its first public appearance May 7 at Circuit Zolder raceway in Belgium at the kickoff for next year's Clean Week 2020 event.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Click on illustration for legible list of "green" parts and suppliers.
The project, said Meredith, is aimed at showing conclusively that performance doesn't have to be tossed out in designing sustainable motor vehicles and that racing can be a lot greener without boosting cots or sacrificing speed.
The car's engine is a 2.0-liter BMW turbodiesel rated at 220 horsepower. Meredith said the car is geared for a top speed of 140 mph.
It is set up to burn biodiesel derived from renewable resources including vegetable oil and waste chocolate.
Real Performance
The university research center teamed with a number of "conventional" companies on development of the car - the chassis is a standard F3 chassis from Lola, for instance, while Scott Racing did the engine and racing transmission specialists Hewland Engineering provided a gearbox designed to use plant-based lubricants. Lear Corp. did the seat - but used soy-based foam instead of a petrochemical foam for the cushioning.
The intent is that despite its green credentials, the WorldFirstF3's performance "will be in line with a standard F3 car," Meredith said.
While reluctant to disclose the cost of the prototype car, Meredith said that his team estimates that if put into regular production, "it would cost no more than a conventional F3 car."
Costs could even go below that threshold, he said, if the amount of recycled material in the car, particularly recycled carbon fiber, were to be increased.
Use of recycled carbon fiber - while not so unusual as carrot-based bioplastic - is one of the project's potential big successes, Meredith said.
"We have determined that recycled carbon fiber can be used to make body panels significantly cheaper than virgin carbon fiber [and] this may pave the way for lower cost race cars in the future." A company called Milled Carbon supplied the material, which was used ro make the engine cover.
Veggies
The WorldFirst car also uses plant-based greases and oils from Fuchs Lubricants and a wiring harness, from the European division of Japan's Yazaki Corp., that utilizes recycled aluminum and plastics.
Now, about those carrots and potatoes:
The car's steering wheel was made from a composite plastic, Curran, developed by Britain's CelluComp (which doesn't seem to have working website) and derived from fibers found in carrots; the side mirror housings, from New Zealand's Biopolymer Network, were made from a polymer derived from potato starch.
The car's side pods are emblazoned with a rendering of carrots that looks a lot like an old-fashioned racing flames design. They are made of a glass-fiber mat that uses a resin Cray Valley Co. extracts from recycled plastic bottles.
Now if they could just figure out how to recycle drivers like Jackie Stewart and Phil Hill.
LEAVE A COMMENT