Do Formula One’s Tires Deserve Their New Green Stripes?
The top tier car racing sport has jumped the gun by adding green stripes to plain ol’ Bridgestone tires for their upcoming race.
Formula One racing announced that cars in the upcoming Japanese Grand Prix will have green striping on their tires to represent “going green.” Currently, there is nothing green about the hyper-horsepower vehicles nor the tires themselves, but the cars do have a remodel coming in the near-future.
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Next season’s regulations require that the cars use hybrid energy-regenerative braking. By 2011 the sport will make many other improvements, including the replacement of the current 2.4-litre V8s with 2.2-litre turbocharged V6s, a decrease in horsepower by 100, and the use of biofuels, which the FIA WTCC and the IndyCars circuit have already fully adopted.
After all these improvements are actually in place, Formula One could go ahead and paint every car green, and not just the tires.
For now, the stripes are supposed to remind fans to take simple measures to improve their own cars’ fuel efficiency by visiting the website Make Cars Green. The site recommends everyday drivers adopt better driving habits, such as “accelerate gently and keep your speed constant.” In other words, fans should not look to the racers as role-models.
Photo Credit: Uppure on Flickr under Creative Commons license.
I sincerely hope this is a joke. Who honestly is so incredibly stupid that they think changing a few regulations on F1 racing is going to have any impact on the environment whatsoever?
Well!! going greaner is the way to go. But with more restrictions on F1 cars’ power will make it lesser attractive to me. We watch F1 for its shear speed and power. Honsetly, Cleaner F1’s will not be making a huge statement, and ofcourse no difference on the amount of CO2 emissions.
Making F1 cars burn less fuel isn’t going to affect the world at all. However, technology from F1 regularly feeds down into regular cars that you and I buy. Think of traction control, transmission and braking technology.
How the F1 engineers learn to utilize regenerative braking may have an impact on the hybrid cars available to the general public. Similar for biofuels.
Thinking that going to a smaller V6 engine is going to slow these cars down is silly. Look at what happened when they went from V10s to V8s: the cars got faster.
Racing improves the breed. The pace of development, level of competition and quantity of engineering talent in formula 1 is such that it has the potential to deliver improvements that will filter down to road cars far faster than in less competitive environments (such as the engineering department of GM).
Formula 1 rules have been changed to ensure that performance advantages are limited to green areas, such as the development of hybrid drive-trains (which you will see on F1 cars next year). Not only will you see technical innovations applicable to road cars come from this, it will also make green technologies far easier to sell - “This car comes with F1 derived hybrid technology etc..”
Final note: the carbon emissions of each race are calculated and fully offset. And if you divide those emissions by the massive television audience of a Grand Prix (measured in the hundreds of millions) then per capita it’s environmental negligable.