NEWS FEATURE NATURE|Vol 447|21 June 2007

Power games

Can motor racing go green? Andreas Trabesinger asked Max Mosley, head of Formula 1, how he wants the sport to develop energy-efficient technology that will also work in road cars.

hen Robert Kubica moved to the speed seekers are reined in and the sport he is no expert when it comes to car technol- overtake a rival at the hairpin stays within sensible limits is a difficult task in ogy, but he has been active in motor sports as bend in the Canadian Grand a contest of such extremes. a driver and team owner since the mid-1960s, WPrix on 10 June, he lost control This task is the responsibility of the FIA, and has been president of the FIA since the of his Formula 1 car and smashed head-on which until recently worried mostly about early 1990s. Mosley’s vision of how Formula 1 into a wall in a truly horrific-looking crash. drivers’ safety while keeping the race excit- will contribute to green technologies is simple: SCHLEGELMILCH/CORBIS His BMW-Sauber was travelling at 280 kilo- ing enough to satisfy the tens make the research done in For- metres per hour as he tried to pass Jarno of thousands of spectators at “Brilliantly clever, mula 1 relevant to road cars, in Trulli’s Toyota, and after ricocheting off the the circuit and the tens of mil- amazing engineering particular reducing their emis- barriers, the car somersaulted along the track lions of television viewers. But but utterly pointless, sions of carbon dioxide. before coming to rest with only one wheel this heady mix of reason and So how does Formula 1 still attached. Remarkably, Kubica emerged adrenaline can have unexpected and irrelevant to the plan to get there? The FIA has from the crushed shell of his car with mild results. Last year, the FIA set out real world.” a powerful advantage in that it concussion and a sprained ankle. His slight a ‘green agenda’ for Formula 1, — Max Mosley can rewrite the technical rules injuries are a testament to safety improve- announcing its intention to for the championship every ments in Formula 1 cars, and to the commit- turn a sport in which cars guzzle 60 or 70 litres year. In the past, the FIA restricted the power ment made by the Fédération Internationale of petrol every 100 kilometres into a catalyst for a car’s engine was allowed to produce for de l’Automobile (FIA), the sport’s govern- greener technology for road cars. safety reasons, typically by limiting the engine ing body, to safety standards. Kubica almost Max Mosley is the man behind the wheel of size. For the race engineers, the task was to certainly would not have survived a similar the green agenda. In a penthouse high above extract the maximum possible power from a crash 15 years ago. ’s Trafalgar Square, he lays out goals given size of engine (see ‘Racing through the The Montreal event, as with all 17 races held for the FIA to reach by 2009 and beyond. Now decades’, overleaf), thereby ensuring that For- in this year’s Formula 1 championship, is about in his sixties, Mosley graduated from the Uni- mula 1 remains the fastest form of racing on the thrill of pushing automotive technology versity of , UK, with a physics degree, a twisted circuit. But by the start of the 2011 to the very edge of reason. Making sure that before going on to study law. He admits that season, Formula 1 teams will have to crack

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a new technological nut: making the most There are two areas in which Mosley thinks At present, the teams are not allowed to of a given amount of energy. From then, the Formula 1 can make a lasting contribution to recover braking energy because of concerns amount of fuel the cars can use in each race road-car technology, and that in turn will ensure about how the technology would perform will also be restricted. the lasting success of the sport. These will be under the extreme forces experienced by a For Mosley the link with road cars is to recover energy lost through waste heat and Formula 1 car. The technology that does this obvious: “This is precisely the problem that braking. About two-thirds of the fuel energy is called a kinetic energy recovery system the car industry is trying to solve and indeed in a car is lost as heat into the atmosphere — (KERS), better known to drivers of hybrid the world is trying to solve.” He adds, “As soon through exhaust gases and coolants. The other vehicles as ‘regenerative braking’. In a modern as you look at it like that, you say ‘why didn’t third propels the car forwards, but some of that hybrid car — which has both a petrol engine we do this years ago?’” The reason, he says, is kinetic energy is also lost, ultimately turned to and an electric motor — the motor’s batteries the same as why the road-car industry hasn’t heat, when the driver brakes. From 2009, new can be charged by either the petrol engine done it and that the public hasn’t demanded it, regulations for Formula 1 will allow, and thus or regenerative braking. The energy can be because energy is still very cheap. force, the teams to recover a restricted amount stored in different forms, but the most viable The links between Formula 1 and road cars of energy lost in braking, and use it to propel options for Formula 1 seem to be electrical have strengthened over the past decade. Of the car. The harder task of recovering the two- storage in batteries or capacitors or the use of the 11 teams racing today, six are sponsored thirds of heat lost to the atmosphere is deferred a flywheel. directly by major road-car manufacturers, only until new regulations are introduced for 2011. Although the 2009 regulations will not two of which — McLaren-Mercedes limit the cars’ consumption of fuel and — were running their directly — and refuelling will still be own teams in 1997, although many allowed during the race — the abil- manufacturers were involved in the RACING THROUGH THE DECADES ity to regain kinetic energy means sport as suppliers of engines and Formula 1 in the 1950s extra power for racing. In short, the other parts. The change came as the Fatalities: 8 car gains energy without having road-car industry embraced For- Engine sizes: 1.5–4.5 litres to carry extra fuel, and therefore Power: 270 horsepower in 1958 mula 1 as a marketing platform, and weight. Another advantage of KERS

its involvement has in turn benefited is that the stored energy can be used IMAGES PHOTOS/GETTY FOX the sport as the costs of racing started to improve performance, especially to outstrip the available resources. during acceleration out of corners Owning a Formula 1 team is a luxury or overtaking of other drivers, few can afford, with running costs of giving racing fans a more exciting up to hundreds of millions of dollars spectacle. Together, these factors a year. Thirty years ago, the change of make KERS extremely attractive to a single gearbox could require extra Formula 1 engineers. fundraising, but today the sport is flush with money from big-name Electric dreams Formula 1 in the 1970s sponsors and advertising. Fatalities: 10 Burkhard Göschel, chairman of Engine sizes: 1.5–3.0 litres the FIA Manufacturers’ Advisory Over-engineering Power: 485 horsepower in 1974 Commission and former board What has that money achieved? member of BMW, is the ‘technical According to Mosley, until the FIA brain’ behind FIA’s green agenda. froze engine development at the He expects that most teams will go end of last year’s season, an average for electrical storage systems, either IMAGES UK/GETTY ALLSPORT of 4 milliseconds of lap time were in the form of so-called supercapac- gained for every million dollars spent itors (which have very high energy on engine development, and 20 milli- density and can store and release seconds for every million dollars energy quickly) or new battery spent on optimizing the aerody- technology based on lithium-ion namics. Mosley is clear in his verdict: batteries. Formula 1 in the 1990s “Brilliantly clever, amazing engineer- Fatalities: 2 Long term, both Mosley and ing but utterly pointless, and irrel- Engine sizes: 3.0–3.5 litres Göschel are betting that the car evant to the real world, because the Power: 755 horsepower in 1997 industry will move towards using engines were inherently inefficient.” more electric power. “The electri- He points out that the teams have fication of the automobile can be massive wind tunnels, supercomput- anticipated, there is no way back. ers and model shops and they work We are exactly on the right track 24 hours a day just to refine known with Formula 1, and road cars will technology. “This I want to stop,” he follow this track,” says Göschel. He IMAGES M. BRANDT/BONGARTS/GETTY says. “Let’s get the really clever people is convinced that Formula 1 will working on the problem the whole make electrical energy-storage sys- world is trying to solve — which is tems more efficient, smaller and just as good for Formula 1.” lighter, and that the technologies

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One formula for zero emissions Can racing become emission free? several university A small Dutch company based teams to build fuel- in Amsterdam wants to create cell go-karts, and it a race series, called Formula has earned an FIA- Zero, that will be based on cars endorsed speed powered by hydrogen fuel cells. record for a Unlike conventional engines, fuel-cell vehicle fuel cells produce energy by that weighs reacting hydrogen fuel stored in less than 500 a pressurized tank with oxygen kilograms. taken from the air, so water is the Last year, its go-kart, only exhaust product. pictured here, reached

It is still early days for Formula an average speed of 61 CREDIT HEERE Zero. Founded in 2003 by Eelco kilometres per hour over 200 Rietveld, an industrial design metres from a standing start. engineer, and Godert van But its long-term goal is more Hardenbroek, an environmental ambitious: a race series for car very wise move; the consultant, the company makers to showcase zero-emission world will move towards hybrid is planning a race series for technologies in full-sized race cars. cars, and Formula 1 should reflect hydrogen-powered go-karts, Van Hardenbroek says they fully that.” But he recognizes that the Formula 1 it would be very hard to which it hopes will kick off in 2008 support the FIA’s drive towards fuel technology has a long way to go to make a transition towards fuel cells, or 2009. So far it has persuaded economy: “Max Mosley made a compete with petrol engines: “For this is not an incremental step.” A.T. developed on the way will be directly relevant How long is it going to last? Nowadays, such the air flowing into the combustion chambers, to road cars. For example, the batteries used by components are expected to deliver at least and thus, eventually, allows fuel to be burned hybrid fuel–electric vehicles are still too heavy, 100,000 miles.” Whether the technologies more efficiently. and the amount of energy that can be put in developed for Formula 1 will deliver both per- Turbochargers were used by the teams dur- and taken out of a storage device is limited formance and durability, at reasonable cost, ing the 1980s, before being banned in 1989 — problems that Formula 1 research, with remains to be seen. because they gave engines dangerously too its short design cycle and high-performance much power. The changes to the FIA regula- goals, seems ideally suited to fix. Mosley is Heat treatment tions for 2011 onwards could provide a chance confident that the race engineers will deliver: Hybrid vehicles would benefit from improved to bring the turbochargers back, but they have “You can’t say you’ll have it ready in two years, regenerative braking, but the recovery of yet to be framed. What Formula 1 will bring to because the teams say they need it next week. kinetic energy is still playing with only a third turbocharger technology for road cars — widely The people in the next garage will have it next of the energy contained in the fuel that the used in vehicles from turbodiesels to high- week.” car burns. There is still the two-thirds lost as performance sports cars — is far from clear. So is Formula 1 heading in the same direc- heat to think about. Getting that energy back tion as the road-car industry? Paul Eisenstein, is attractive, says Göschel, but not as simple to Charging up publisher of TheCarConnection.com in address. Formula 1 cars have previously har- More speculative are new ways to transform Pleasant Ridge, Michigan, and observer of nessed ‘turbocharging’ technology to improve waste heat directly into electrical energy the automotive industry since 1979, has no the engine efficiency. In a turbocharger, by use of physicochemical processes, but doubt that the car business is under enormous exhaust gases drive a turbine that compresses Göschel notes that such devices have very low pressure to improve fuel economy; at the same time however, consumers are not willing to The heat is on: from BMW compromise on car size or performance. For 2011, Formula 1 teams these reasons, says Eisenstein, hybrids are not will be able to reuse doing as well in practice as on paper: “The cost waste heat from the is high, and the performance of many models car’s engine to boost mediocre, in particular in terms of fuel econ- performance. omy. Most existing hybrids don’t deliver what they promise; that’s not good.” The next breakthrough for hybrid vehicles will have to come from making the interplay between the electric motor and the petrol engine more efficient, says Eisenstein. What will race engineers contribute to hybrid tech- nology? “I see no reason why race-car tech- nology shouldn’t make it into road cars,” says Eisenstein, “but such technology will have to meet tough criteria: What is it going to cost?

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efficiency. Further developed is a steam tur- bine that BMW introduced under the name of ‘turbosteamer’ — who would have thought that one of those could ever be discussed in the context of a Formula 1 car? — which is pow- ered by the heat created by the petrol engine,

H. NELEMAN/GETTY IMAGES H. NELEMAN/GETTY so mechanical energy is recovered from heat. In a similar device, known as a ‘turbo-com- pound’, the exhaust gases drive not only the turbine of a turbocharger, but also a turbine in the stream of exhaust gases whose extra power can be used either directly or stored electri- cally. Unlike turbochargers, none of these devices is yet in production for road cars. How have the Formula 1 engineers reacted to these rule changes? “The teams don’t like it, because we ask them to stop doing things they understand, and do things they don’t under- stand,” says Mosley. Göschel has noticed a more positive trend: “In the very beginning, our engineers had some concerns, but now there is a lot of excitement in working on new technology.” Nick Fry, head of the Honda Racing F1 Team, hopes that the rule changes will challenge young engineers, in particular, to come up with new solutions: “It’s an invest- ment in people, in learning and in intellectual property. By pushing this type of technology Many hands make light work: short design cycles put Formula 1 engineers under pressure to deliver. where we have to perform publicly every two weeks, we must advance very quickly.” although a small Dutch company is trying to compares today’s environmental concerns launch a fuel-cell race series (see ‘One formula (See ‘Carbon credentials’) with the safety con- Alternate take for zero emissions’). In addi- cerns that dominated Formula 1 But why stop with efficient energy recovery? tion, the FIA has an Alterna- “We are exactly on when he first became president Formula 1 could switch to using biofuels, tive Energies Commission that the right track with of the FIA. “It’s a little bit like the maybe starting in 2011, says Mosley: “We organizes an annual cup race Formula 1, and road safety debate, in that you work would like to use a biofuel. The question is, with vehicles that use alterna- on safety because you don’t which one. There are so many competing tive energies. cars will follow.” want to kill anybody, you don’t biofuel systems.” What Formula 1 might end Mosley is planning to step — Burkhard Göschel want anybody to get hurt, but up doing is taking whatever fuel becomes down as FIA president at the also, society won’t permit you adopted more widely, rather than picking a end of his fourth consecutive term in Octo- to kill people like we did in the 1960s.” During fuel in advance. Fuel cells relying on hydrogen ber 2009, so is this green agenda all about his that period a driver died every year in Formula are not yet being considered for Formula 1, legacy? He admits that it plays a part, but he 1. “So, you’ve got two reasons: you want to do it yourself, but also you have to have regard to what society allows you to do.” Carbon credentials Will Formula 1 be perceived as a ‘green sport’ in the future? “I don’t know whether Since 1997, the Fédération to be around 20,000 tonnes Unlike other sporting events, the fans will like it,” says Mosley but he doesn’t Internationale de of CO — by supporting such as the 2006 World Cup 2 think that reason and adrenaline are incompat- l’Automobile (FIA), motor the ‘Scolel Té’ project, in Germany, the FIA does not racing’s governing body, which helps communities offset emissions caused by ible. As people become increasingly conscious has supported a research in southern Mexico to fans who travel to the events, about carbon emissions and fuel economy, project aimed at offsetting develop sustainable land so it can’t claim to be carbon he hopes they will still be fascinated by a the carbon-dioxide management and better neutral. David Ward, director very fast, very powerful — but fuel efficient emissions caused by livelihoods. general of the FIA Foundation, — Formula 1. In general, Mosley is pragmatic Formula 1 teams (from the As of December 2005, 888 says that the project’s about the effect of the rule changes: “If it’s tech- race cars themselves and farmers from 43 communities effectiveness will be reviewed nically interesting, that’s fun, and if it makes from transporting teams to across the states of Chiapas this year, and the foundation a contribution to society, that’s good,” but events) during a Grand Prix and Oaxaca were included will review the carbon ultimately he thinks Formula 1 needs public season. Through the FIA in the project, says Richard footprint for the Formula 1 support in order to survive. “The number one Foundation, a UK-registered Tipper, president of the teams to see whether it has thing is to make it so attractive and interesting charity, the FIA offsets annual Edinburgh Centre for Carbon changed since 1997. As yet, that the public continues to pay for it.” ■ emissions of the 11 teams Management, UK, which The FIA Foundation has no Andreas Trabesinger is an associate editor for racing — estimated in 1997 consults on the project. plans to go carbon neutral. A.T. Nature Physics.

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