INTERESTING to read the excellent column by Peter Whitten last week about Rallying’s inevitable shift towards embracing hybridity and biofuels (Moving with the times is the only way forward).
He is, of course, spot on; the sport needs to embrace the technology to keep it relevant in the eyes of the manufacturers but also, perhaps more importantly, the people who have the power to legislate it out of existence.
Each and every form of our sport is in a battle at the moment; a battle to embrace the new technologies and ideas that can make motorsport cleaner and more efficient while at the same time keeping fans engaged.
And the latter part is also key because there’s no doubt in my mind that if motorsport goes fully-EV it will lose all of its soul and certainly a large chunk of its appeal.
In the same way that people get drawn into live stadium-based sport by the collective roar of 50,000 people in a confined space (remember that?), in the same way people get suckered into motorsport when they feel the full force of a racing car passing them by at speed.
With reference to Peter’s beloved Rallying world, the thing that suckered me into that area of the sport when I was young was hearing the machine gun like bang-bang-bang of a turbo wastegate somewhere, a long way away, deep in the forest before someone like Neal Bates or Possum Bourne would burst into view, sideways.
You could hear them come from miles away and then when they flew past you could hear every throttle input, every minute change of engine revolutions as they found the grip and fired on towards the next gum tree.
From what I’ve read, it looks like Rallying is moving very quickly to embrace the new tech to ensure that the old can continue to function for as long as possible.
Motorsport is visceral, it’s energetic and it’s exciting to watch live even if the race itself isn’t that great.
Making sure it retains that, despite the ongoing push towards EV power around the world, is critical in ensuring it has a future.
There’s also a point to be made that the sport does do a generally terrible job of showing off its green credentials.
On the surface it looks like a smelly, noisy, polluting mess of a game and yet in reality the story is much different.
The Turbocharged, 1.6-litre four-cylinder engines that make up the internal combustion unit portion of a Formula One Power Unit are pound-for-pound the most efficient engines of their type ever created by mankind – and the relentless pursuit of more performance, more fuel economy and more reliability only makes them better.
The energy recovery technology developed in Formula One is remarkably efficient and has had legitimate spilldown into the cars you and I can buy today.
And it’s an old cliché but a good one: it’s well reported that the act of travelling the F1 circus around the world is much, much more costly in terms of CO2 expenditure than the Grand Prix itself. By a massive distance.
I just wish the sport was better at selling these advances, rather than consistently being the whipping boy for those who want to rush in a motoring world purely powered by volts and electrons.
It’s great to see the WRC shifting quickly to a 100 per cent renewable fuel source, too. I’ve written about that before on these pages thanks to Porsche’s efforts to switch to a fully renewable and carbon-neutral fuel source, created from hydrogen made from carbon captured from the atmosphere. It’s the work of genius.
For years Motorsport has led the world in technology advancement – from Carbon Fibre to the internal combustion engine and things like semi-automatic gearboxes, the sport has influenced much more than just racing fans.
Here’s hoping that it can do the same when it comes to the ‘going green’ argument as well – only this time, in a bid to keep what we have now – the noise, the feeling, the emotion of a high revving, loud, fuel powered internal combustion engine that grabs you every time it files past – relevant for as long as humanly possible.
Without wanting to sound too dramatic, I think the future of our sport depends on it.
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