How motorsport can improve its green credentials

Motor racing and the environment. It's an issue that has been raised many times in recent years as the clouds of environmental consciousness have gathered over a sport that seems to be, in terms of its ideology, at odds with the needs of the 'greens'.

It is not an issue that is being ignored, however. AUTOSPORT engaged the opinions of two industry experts; Andrew Davis of the Environmental Transport Association and Williams F1's technical director Sam Michael, to find out how best to improve the sport's green credentials.

Andrew Davis, director of the Environmental Transport Association

Motorsport is not exactly the first industry you think of when looking at those taking a keen interest in 'green' issues, but it is an arena that can play a leading role in helping people reduce their impact on the environment.

People are drawn to the sport for many reasons; excitement, noise, smell, winning, mixing with the rich and famous, but not saving the planet. In an ideal world the industry and its fans should not be bothered about the environment. This though, is not an ideal world and the ETA is not letting motorsport off scot-free.

There are ways in which the sport is improving its green credentials presently, but much more can be done. Outlined below are some of the main ways in which a difference can be made in the short- and mid-term.

Lots of cars turn up to races, adding © sutton-images.com

Let's start with environmental impact of the cars themselves. Racing cars produce shedloads of climate-changing gases. Why not introduce a carbon tax on all racing cars based on how many harmful emissions they produce? It would be the cheapest and most effective way of reducing motorsport's impact on the environment and would do so without penalising people who simply love the sport. If done, racing car engines may be predominantly electric within four years - or even warp drive! Who knows, maybe all climate change gases could be removed from the industry within four years.

Technology is another area where motorsport can contribute - although this is an area where the industry has had a very positive influence on the wider world in the past. Perhaps the most profound technology coming from racing technology now is not in electric technology - as many people think - but in 3D printing, which is the art of printing, rather than machining, car parts. It's a technology that is likely to change the way our world works as it is faster and less wasteful than machining; almost a new industrial revolution, in fact. Motorsport should be thanked for its impact on this front.

Race organisers can help in a big way too. With circuits generally being located in the middle of nowhere, it's safe to assume that most spectators at race meetings arrive by car. They could be encouraged to adopt travel blending - as was trialled at the Sydney Olympics - and offered tailpipe and tyre pressure checks in a bid to reduce the environmental impact their cars are having. Let's not forget that by cutting the environmental impact of any number of cars parked up next to the track, you would be doing far more good than by changing the type of engine the racing cars were using.

There's nothing to stop organisers auditing the environmental impact of their events - and making it public too, while telling people their future plans to reduce output.

The quickest change that can be made involves how people get to the races. Simply encouraging car sharing would be a start, and while stopping them coming by car altogether is an unlikely scenario, long-term changes can be made.

There are other ideas that could be adopted, and they are not exclusive to race audiences. How many paper cups, or event programmes are used at a typical race weekend and binned (or thrown on the floor)? Where possible, these should be recycled. How many sausages and burgers are cooked and sold? Why shouldn't they be locally sourced from sustainable suppliers using the most humane agricultural practices? The carbon footprint would be drastically reduced.

Locally-sourced food would reduce carbon footprint © sutton-images.com

How many race meetings are held in wet weather? All surface run-off should be directed into controlled locations and not lost as groundwater. All waste should be used again, or sold if possible. And if your even is not staged in a country that has a carbon tax, then carbon offset it, as well as all the participant, supplier and visitor journeys. None of these last mentioned things would impact at all on a spectator's enjoyment of the event, but would contribute to a lesser environmental impact greatly.

Even by the ideas put forward here, it should be obvious that there is no single solution to this problem, but every view and every opinion adds to this debate and helps people - race fans or otherwise - to make the changes that they feel they can.

Sam Michael, technical director of Williams

There is certainly a requirement for Formula 1 to look at its green credentials. You only have to look at some of the press recently over the BBC/Sky deal and see it negatively referred to as a 'gas-guzzling sport,' to realise that. If that's what people are reading in the mainstream press, then of course they're going to think it. There's also a real willingness from business - the kind that Formula 1 teams are trying to attract or retain as sponsors, to do that, so for many reasons - including those - we've got a responsibility to ourselves to push forward the green issue within the sport.

The big question is how best to do it.

For starters, don't talk to me about the exact amount of fuel we burn in a lap and how that needs to be cut down drastically. That's not an issue, and everyone knows it. Don't get me wrong, the fact that we're going to have an approximate 40 per cent reduction on fuel consumption in 2014 - because of the different kinds of engines we will be using - is a good thing. But it should not be the first order of priority.

Instead it is the development of alternative technologies that we can not only use successfully in Formula 1, but also apply to the road car industry, that is where we should be focusing our attention. Anything that we can develop to make road cars even one per cent greener will more than make up for any non-green aspects of the sport.

Michael says technology can help green image most © sutton-images.com

Formula 1, as a sport, is all about technical developments, and quick ones at that. The speed with which new concepts are devised and arrived at is totally out of synch with the road car industry. It's tremendous by comparison and a number of technologies that have been pioneered in Formula 1 are now a staple of the road car industry, like the way the braking systems are used, and the widespread use of CFD (computational fluid dynamics). Because the aerospace industry - which pioneered the use of CFD - never had a use for programme code that dealt with ground effect, it was Formula 1 that built it up and the car industry now benefits for the kits available. The sport can do exactly the same with green technology.

A perfect example of current green technology is KERS, although there are plenty of other areas as well. A Formula 1 KERS unit consists of three major areas of technology; a motor generator, a flywheel and a battery pack. Put together to make a KERS unit and all these components will not make it into a road car (although some examples have done, such as the Williams flywheel inside Porsche's hybrid system), but by developing the technologies further and making them smaller and lighter, for example, then there's something that would be transferrable.

We should be looking at KERS and if you look at the rate of development in F1 compared to the road car industry, it's tremendous and I think it's areas like this in which the sport can make the biggest contribution to improving its green image.

To read about how championships around the world have been improving their green credentials, read this week's AUTOSPORT magazine here.

To see the first images of Quimera's first all-electric GT car, click here.