“Green racing” might seem like an oxymoron, what with souped-up cars spewing exhaust and burning rubber as they tear around the track. But for an elite segment of the auto racing industry, it’s no longer just about which car gets to the checkered flag first — it’s also about which one crosses the finish line with the smallest environmental and energy footprint.
This year, the American Le Mans-style sports car circuit is featuring a “race within a race,” with Acuras, Audis, Ferraris, Porsches and yes, even Corvettes, vying to win recognition as not just the fastest but the greenest things on four wheels. As drivers jockey for the lead, computers are monitoring fuel consumption to determine which vehicles are burning it most efficiently.
Fans might not be able to tell any difference just by watching the race, but that’s the point, says John C. Glenn, a specialist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who helped spur this green shift.
“This is about making the best use of energy,” Glenn said, “but these are still 200-mile-per-hour racecars.”
A race fan himself, Glenn said the idea for greener racing came to him as he struggled to square the sport’s conspicuous fuel consumption — the cars average 3 miles per gallon — with growing concern over climate change. About four years ago, joined by representatives of the Department of Energy and the automotive engineering society, Glenn said he told racing executives that their sport risked losing its fans and its lucrative commercial sponsorships unless it cleaned up its act.
“They’re on the wrong side of two major issues, energy security and global warming,” Glenn explained as he outlined the new racing trend at a recent Green Chemistry conference in College Park, Md. But the EPA specialist said he told racing leaders they could be heroes instead, by helping government find solutions to those problems.
Auto manufacturers pump millions of dollars a year into souping up engines and cars to win these races, Glenn pointed out, and the technology developed for the track quickly finds its way into car showrooms.
“What we want them to do is focus all that creativity, all that money the car companies are putting into (engine) power, into energy efficiency,” he said. “If they had done that earlier, we probably would’ve all been driving hybrids 20 years ago.”
Glenn said the message hit home with the American Le Mans Series, which stages a dozen sports car endurance races around the United States and Canada every year. “My heart skipped a beat the first time the call came in,” Scott Atherton, president and chief executive of the Georgia-based racing organization, recalled of being contacted by the EPA. But once he realized what the government officials wanted, Atherton said his group’s leaders embraced it.
“We saw it three years ago, even before it became the mainstream popular thing to do,” Atherton added. “Now, everything’s going green. That wasn’t true then, and it certainly wasn’t the case in auto racing. We saw an opportunity to lead … and felt it would be positive for the series and for racing in general.”
It took three years to set the technical rules, but last fall marked the first “Green Challenge” during the Petit Le Mans, one of the series’ premier contests, a shorter version of the famed 24-hour French race. Cars competed on the basis of their fuel efficiency, their consumption of petroleum-based fuel and their greenhouse gas emissions. A Corvette and a Porsche shared top green honors in their respective vehicle classes. The GM roadster ran on fuel that was 85 percent ethanol made from wood chips, while the Porsche used gas spiked with 10 percent ethanol. Others ran on low-sulfur “clean” diesel. This year, the green competition is being featured in each of the Le Mans races, and it has gained a sponsor. It’s known as the Michelin Green X Challenge.
The fans — or at least the sports media — seem to be warming to it, as well.
“A year ago, you had to read in the news report to the third paragraph to find out that perhaps a Corvette won the green racing challenge,” said Dennis Simanaitis, engineering editor for Road &Track magazine. “Now … this year you’re more likely to see it in the first paragraph.”
Green racing has yet to penetrate the much bigger NASCAR, though. The Florida-based stock car empire, which sanctions more than 1,200 races a year, has opted to green up its image for now by promoting recycling and planting trees at tracks to offset carbon emissions of the racecars.
“Our initial focus is … on the overall carbon footprint of the sport, and waste reduction and really looking at that ‘low-hanging fruit’ and attacking it first,” said Andrew Giangola, NASCAR’s director of business communication.
While NASCAR is using hybrids as pace cars and showing off fuel-efficient vehicles at its tracks, it’s in no hurry to push race teams into doing anything with their racecars, such as trying alternative fuels.
“Alternative fuels are very complicated, and there are no green magic bullets,” Giangola said. “We certainly don’t want to rush into anything that might affect the quality of the racing on the track.”
But Atherton, the Le Mans chief, says greener racing hasn’t hurt his sport’s performance or appeal.
“We’ve demonstrated that you can race but not sacrifice anything, and do it in a more environmentally friendly way,” he said. “If you can do that, why wouldn’t you?”
Even so, Glenn said, there’s plenty of room to make it greener still — trimming the engine muscle, for instance, from eight cylinders to four and maybe even just three. And while only one of the cars competing so far has been a gasoline-electric hybrid, he envisions a race featuring all-electric cars — minus the whine of internal combustion engines revved to the max.
“You’re going to see cars roll into the pits, and (instead of refueling) they’ll yank out the batteries and put in new batteries,” Glenn predicted.
The EPA specialist also believes green racing can alter the public’s attitude about what cars it thinks are hot.
“In the future,” Glenn said, “your kid’s going to come up to you and say, ‘Dad, don’t buy that V8 Mustang, that’s so passe. You need to buy a straight three.’ That’s the engine of the future.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
