Jun 25 2008
Is Really Green Racing in the Future?
Via the Scientific American Observations blog comes news that during its 2009 season the American Le Mans Series will be introducing a Green Challenge. Details can be found on the ALMS website.
I must admit that I like racing. Not because I’m a fan of watching car drive in circles using internal combustion engines that produce unnecessary CO2. Or that the fuel they use could be used for many other more useful purposes. I don’t know why I like it; I imagine its for similar reasons that I like other sports such as baseball. It’s just fun to watch sometimes.
That said, I’m really not a big fan of NASCAR or other series that drive around oval shaped tracks. For me, it seems that for those types of courses the skill of the driver isn’t as important as other factors. I particularly like the road courses. Unfortunately, given my limited time for TV viewing, I don’t get to watch many races. But the ALMS is probably my favorite.
The Green Challenge will introduce a new set of rules that will score cars based on the “amount of energy they use, greenhouse gases (GHG) they emit, and amount of petroleum they displace”. In essence, they offer a race within a race. They have their calculations online. The rules make it appear they are looking to make modest changed in the amount of CO2 produced.
One of the things that I think should be available now, but isn’t, is practical fully electric cars. But would it be possible to someday have a fully electric race car. There are electric cars that perform in drag racing, and the top speeds of the cars (not motorcycles) is around 100 miles per hour.
Looking over the records in the ALMS, I note that the fastest race lap for the GT2 class averaged 108.537 miles per hour for the race in 2007. That’s the fastest lap, and it’s an average over 3.7 miles and 17 turns. So it’s not really fair to compare the two values. But it does appear that the maximum speed would not be a large obstacle to overcome.
Then comes the question of endurance. How are you going to drive an electric car for 24 hours straight (in the case of some races)? The same way that internal combustion engines run for 24 hours straight: they refuel. But instead of adding gasoline, the batteries would need to be recharged. Realistically, there would need to be fully-charged batteries ready to replace the depleted ones.
To give an estimate of how far these cars go in a race, let’s consider their event at Sebring International Raceway. This race is 12 hours, and the fastest average speed was 115.882 mph. This comes out close to 1400 miles.
At race speeds, I don’t know how long the batteries would last. Probably not very long. But if a battery could be produced that could propel a car to over 100 mph and last for 100 miles, that would be a green race car and be a fun car to watch. Tesla motors claims a top speed of 125mph and a “highway” estimated range of over 200 miles. I’d bet that number is based on going 55 rather than 125.
But it does raise the question, when will we see fully electric race cars? Hopefully soon.
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3 Responses to “Is Really Green Racing in the Future?”
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Back in the 60’s Road and Track had a series of parody stories about two drivers that raced for an Italian car manufacturer. One of the stories involved the owner of the Italian team having a slot car track secretly laid in the Indy track with the drivers racing a car with a sewing machine for an engine (it was a really small car). All I remember of the story is that the sound the car made was “stitchita, stitchita…” There’s your endurance racing.
[Deleted. Stupidity not allowed.]
A range of 200 miles is probably not needed. F1 cars sometimes make 3 pit stops in a 200 mile race, so a 50 mile range for an electric race car is not unreasonable.
Indy cars (especially when they were running on methanol) generally have a similar range.