Cars powered by chocolate, steered by carrots with drivers sitting on soybean oil foam seats — it’s motor racing’s cheap, cheerful and environmentally friendly future. While Formula One stables have not hesitated to spend millions of dollars on the latest thing in ultra-high technology to gift the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button a few milliseconds per circuit, researchers in Britain envisage an organic future for motor racing.
The WorldFirst F3 car, designed as a riposte to Formula One’s “carbon excesses,” is the brainchild of experts at the Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre, who developed the prototype. The team, led by researcher James Meredith and investigators Kerry Kirwan and Steve Maggs, say they are determined to show the racing fraternity in credit-crunched times that “it is possible to build a competetive racing car using environmentally sustainable components”.
The car, based on a 2005 Lola B05/30 body, has a biodiesel engine which runs on vegetable oil and fuel from waste chocolate. Green credentials are further enhanced by a radiator coated in an emission-destroying catalyst, reducing the spread of ozone.
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