Mark Hughes: F1's Inside Line

Malaysia's Sepang track used to be a circuit where we saw lots of overtaking. Even just a couple of years ago that was true. Two long straights preceded by tight, traction-type corners, with hard braking into slow corners at the end, lots of track width to make for a variety of lines; it all seemed tailor-made for passing.

On Sunday we got a great race there anyway, courtesy of the fascination of McLaren's team play against Ferrari and Lewis Hamilton's starring performance. But those two former overtaking zones saw virtually zero action.

Ferrari's Luca Baldisserri made the point that, with the tyre regulations as they are, the teams have to use yet more upper-body downforce to work those tyres harder. The reliance on wings, endplates, bargeboards and winglets was exaggerated a couple of years ago when underbody downforce was effectively restricted by new regulations on diffuser dimensions.

From 2005 onwards, passing became much more difficult because of the more turbulent airflow wake produced by the upper body devices - and the greater sensitivity of the car behind to this more turbulent flow. Now the tyres have made it yet more difficult.

Working the process backwards, what tools is F1 using to design these devices that are spoiling its racing? Windtunnels mainly. Thinking out of the box a little further, how much energy and resource is the increasingly green-aware sport expending to produce these devices that spoil its racing?

When the day comes that F1 is seriously attacked on environmental grounds, it will have some strong counter-arguments. The search for engine efficiency that translates into F1 lap-time reduction can be reapplied to road car economy gains.

The energy regeneration devices that are coming will be developed far more intensely by the insanely competitive F1 world than if left just to commercial pressures - and these will be gains that, when applied to the car industry, will play their part in significantly reducing energy consumption.

A likely fuel flow formula will have a similar effect on road car energy usage. The FIA has been buying forestry credits to make F1 carbon neutral. Now McLaren plans to follow the FIA's lead and plant 110,000 trees and soon the sport will be carbon positive. We also need to remember that to run the full grid of F1 cars for a whole season of racing burns up no more energy than four average UK households in a year.

But against all these arguments, there is one huge big, black, knock-out counter-punch. When F1 is asked just how much of the planet's resource and energy is spent on those enormous windtunnels that run 24 hours a day perfecting the devices that spoil the quality of the races, the answers get a bit ugly.

A typical F1 tunnel needs enormous, 3000bhp motors to drive the fan that moves the air around. When accelerated around a tunnel to around 60 metres per second the air heats up spectacularly.

To give accurate readings the hot air needs to be cooled again before it reaches the working area, so the tunnels have huge powered cooling chambers to keep the air over the model at a constant temperature - usually around 25C. This requires even more energy than the fan. Then the rolling road that replicates the moving ground has to be powered.

Then you have to keep the rollers cool so they don't influence the readings. That's before you consider lighting the place - that pales into insignificance. The fan would consume around 130 kilowatts per square metre of working area, the rollers around 500kw, the cooling around 100kw.

A conventional tunnel big enough to run a 60 per cent scale model would have a working area of around eight square metres. So you're looking at a power requirement of around 1640kw - a colossal amount.

These things literally have their own sub-stations. Teams are restricted in the number of times they can start them up from cold because of the strain it puts on the national grid!

So you start it up and run it for seven days a week, 20 or more hours per day. Then you find you don't have enough capacity for a typical F1 development programme and you build a second one - at least half the teams have two tunnels running and then they commission more time in independently owned tunnels. Eleven teams, each of them with some variation of this programme.

When you add all this up it's the equivalent to the energy use of thousands of households. Repeat: running all the cars for a season costs about four households-worth of energy.

And the reason we're using all this energy? In a formula where aero appendages are being ever-more restricted? We're using it to eke out tiny aero gains that spoil the quality of the racing. What on earth are we doing that for?

Windtunnels must be banned...