Hotel Mount Pleasant

Motor Racing and the Enviroment

I’ve always been quite a fan of Formula 1 motor racing (and not just for the sex scandals). Beyond the entertainment, it looks like F1 is now poised to do more for the environment than the carbon neutral crowd every did.

Formula 1 is incredibly competitive, with teams backed by major manufactures (Mercedes, BMW, Toyota, Renault, etc.) spending $500 million a year fighting over fractions of a second per lap.

Recently F1 has made some rule changes to all cars to include “Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems” (KERS). The idea is the extreme competitive pressures of F1 could be employed to create environmental innovation. Other environmentalists have tried to get F1 and motor racing banned altogether due to their carbon output. But we can all agree the total impact of that would be negligible. Having the best automotive engineers, in an extremely competitive racing environment, forced to make environmental innovations, however, could have a tremendous impact.

Early results are in, and they look promising.

It’s called a flybrid, a combination of flywheel and hybrid. Rather than capture and store braking energy as electricity in batteries as most hybrids do, it stores that energy mechanically in the form of a spinning flywheel. You know those toy cars you push along the carpet so the wheels will get an internal flywheel spinning, then let it go and watch it scoot across the floor? It’s the same idea, only fancier….

During braking the car is slowed down by the energy that’s mechanically diverted into the flywheel and the effort that goes into getting it spinning. As a result, it spins with ferocious intensity. The flywheel, which is a small cylinder made of carbon and steel that only weighs about ten pounds, is encased in a vacuum and spins up to 64,500 rpm….

What I find so intriguing about the flybrid is that it can easily be configured to use in everyday vehicles. Indeed, the companies that have developed this system claim it can boost the fuel economy of a vehicle by 27% based on the EPA driving cycle (FTP75). They claim they can offer a hybrid package that is half the size and weight of a battery-based system, at one quarter of the cost. It’s also made from fairly common materials that can be readily recycled.
(Autoblog.com)

The innovation here is not unrelated to the sport. One of the big issues dragging down the adoption of battery based hybrids have been their expense and weight. Even with tax credits and Toyota taking a loss, Hybrids still have a price premium that most studies indicate would take about a decade to make up for in reduced costs. The batteries themselves are very heavy (there by reducing their efficiency gains), difficult to produce and toxic.

F1 cars are dramatically influenced by weight. Entire race strategies revolve around timing refueling, as “running light” (carrying slightly fewer gallons of fuel) can give a driver a half to full second lap time advantage. Given that the top competitors are often separated by hundreds of a second, the success or failure of these strategies alone often decide races. Additionally, the extreme operating conditions of races (where is isn’t unusual to burn through an engine or clutch box every few races) demand mechanical elegance. Hence the “flybrid”.

The fact that the teams are almost universally backed by major car manufactures makes me hopeful that we will see rapid downstream adoption of the technologies. It isn’t hard to image simple, reliable and effective technology like this becoming standard on most vehicles in a few years. Good thing environmentalists didn’t get their way and F1 wasn’t banned.