Todt: Full grid for 2010 and we need to be ‘green’
February 9, 2010 by Negative Camber
Filed under F1B Op-Ed, Negative Camber, Parc Fermé, Prime & Option
FIA president Jean Todt told Gazzetta dello Sport that he is sure there will be a full grid for the 2010 season despite current speculation that financial struggles may sideline both USF1 and Campos Meta for at least the first three races of the year if not more. The Stefan GP team has been shadowing the F1 teams in the event that one of them should fail in the hopes of claiming their grid position for 2010. Testing, hiring drivers, personnel and planning on attending the grand prix in Bahrain are just some of the measures being taken by the Serbian squad.
Todt made it clear that the FIA would determine who may take a vacant slot and that nothing is guaranteed for Stefan GP. These are nice reminders but it takes little imagination to figure out that commercial rights boss Bernie Ecclestone is behind Stefan GP’s strategic positioning. This type of endorsement is almost certainly a nod of approval in F1 parlance.
“Having less money may even be healthy, but in the meantime we’ll have 13 teams in F1 this year,”.
“In the final version of the Concorde Agreement it’s written that a team may be absent for three races. But if a team can’t go on, it’s not a given that another team comes in. It’s up to the FIA to decide who has the requisites.”
Ultimately, however, Todt couldn’t miss the opportunity to suggest that F1 just isn’t “green” enough. That it suffers from serious carbon-guilt as it uses fuel to make it around the track. Irrespective of Todt’s point on fuel usage, the F1 engine is the most efficient engine in the world. No other engine can make that amount of power with that little usage of fuel. We’ve argued for what we call the, Steve Matchett rule, which is to limit the amount of fuel an engine can deliver and this would force engineers to design systems to do more with less. This is relevant to road cars and current environmentalist initiatives.
“We need to cut costs, improve the show and draw investors,” he said. “F1 must understand that the world has changed. How can you explain that an F1 car needs 80 litres of fuel to cover 100 kilometres?
The remaining suggestion is the reduction of cost via a different vehicle than the one former FIA president Max Mosley suggested; the cost cap. Some new teams have used this cost-cap notion as the reason they entered the series but as it was not adopted for 2010, they now feel it is their undoing or at least very difficult to continue on. Oddly, no one said they couldn’t operate under their own imposed cost cap should they desire to do so. The Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) didn’t like the concept and Todt didn’t like the cost-cap idea either:
“I don’t like the cost cap; we must get to a reduction through clear rules, for example with a single aerodynamic package for the entire year. Will the cars slide more in Monte Carlo? [Perhaps, but] then the quality of the drivers will be heightened.”
He added: “It’s not acceptable to have given up with KERS. The teams complain that it costs too much? Then they must find the way to save money. The teams are sensitive when we talk about lap times, less sensitive when the environment is discussed.”
No aerodynamic adjustments throughout the year? This means that 2009 would have been the same series as it was when is started in Australia. McLaren would nto have made that terrific surge back up the grid to challenge Brawn GP for wins against Red Bull. Placing so much on a “one chance to get it right” concept is nonsensical. IF your team is a little ways off at Bahrain that means that your team will be a little ways off at Abu Dhabi. No chance to improve? Perhpas I am reading Todt’s quote wrong because I can’t imagine this is what we are suggesting.
Also mind-numbingly insulting is Todt’s position on “green” F1 and the continued shaming of F1 as a egregious abuser of the planet due to a lack of being “green”. The horrible carbon footprint that F1 places on the earth and the strain it causes. When can we all agree that being good stewards of our planet is a noble thing but that F1 is not the poster child of carbon abuse nor should it be the model of how to ruin a racing series by trying to pander to political and financial fads and skulduggery?
Todt reacts as if he is new to F1 when he most assuredly is not. He knows very well that the constant changing of regulations only adds to the cost and that KERS was a terribly expensive failure of epic proportions. Perhap Todt and the FIA can devise a way to make a KERS program that is inexpensive and effective but until that time, grieving its loss and accusing teams of being insensitive to the environment is just base behavior. If he feels the FIA has a duty to be eco-sensitive then create another program for a crony but leave F1 alone as it was and never should be used as a gimmick or tool to try to sate the eco-warrior’s and environmentalists who are trying to dig out from the coldest, most snowy winter in recent history.
Color me reactionary but I think Todt should be focused more on the F1 and WRC series being successful and less on trying to appease political hacks and their eco-sensitivities. F1 isn’t going to eliminate carbon emissions or render the use of fossil fuels obsolete so let’s not pretend that it is something it is not. Let’s not pander to politics in F1; lets race!
Loading ...
Green? Green? Todt shows he understand nothing about engineering. If the 170bph engine in your Camry (presuming you will still drive a car with braking and stuck accelerator problems)and transmission was made to F1 specs, it would have 1 cylinder and a sequential gearbox. Just one cylinder and a gearbox that was 50% lighter. And the engine/gearbox combo would be 85% lighter… increasing fuel economy of the car by 32%. Stick that in your pipe MaxTodt and smoke it.
Add this: Thuis is the same BS argument people always say about NASA “It’s just teflon and velcro”… yeah, sure. The 1st Gemini had a tube radio, the 1st Apollo to have a printed circuit was Apollo 9… the lunar modules had the 1st memory chips… and so on. Everything about our modern life was lead, developed, at NASA. But do the PR flaks there every tell anyone? Nope… to stupid.
Now MaxTodt is doing the same dumbing down at the FIA.
No F1? No alloy wheels, no revs above 3000, no automatic gearboxes, … the list goes on and on.
Excellent stuff
You want F1 to be green?!
How about fixing the area’s surrounding the races as opposed to just the cars. 13 teams 26 cars that have to fly out/transport all of their equipment back and forth, between locations that make no sense. If he was serious about cost cutting, they would make a schedule that would make far more sense logistically.
For example, why are they starting the season in Dubai and ending in Abu Dhabi. It makes absolutely no sense logistically.At the end they go from Korea -> Brazil -> Abu Dhabi. The first step to making the sport cost less/greener is fixing this ridiculous schedule.
Good point Krys. Why not arrange a better schedule that would allow for economies of scale and travel. Reduce the logistics impact of transport and travel which we all know is the biggest environmental impact of F1…not the racing or the cars.
Absolutely right. If we figure that each car burns a max of 200 gallons of fuel per race times 26 cars = 5,200 gallons. That’s the amount of fuel one 747 freighter burns every minute going from place to place.
The Lotus is green…. is that good enough.
Also those “almost as bright as day” night races are not as green as a actual day race, at least you have free “green” natural light. I Agree with making the transportation schedule more efficient that seems fairly simple way of cutting out a lot of wasted fuel.
What a dolt I am!! I completely forgot about that angle. Great point mate and thanks for making me realize just how vacant my mind has become. :)
Cant tell if your being sarcastic,oh well. You mentioned in your post that these are the most efficient engines out there for power to fuel usage, what are the stats seems like something they would like to promote more.
In the end I would prefer if they just instituted the Matchett idea and unleashed cylinder count and maybe turbos and race, id love to have the opportunity to hear a v12 live.
I was being sincere in the fact that I had forgot about the lights. I was so intent on the labeling of the teams as eco-offenders that I had really just forgot the lights and tracks to be honest. Nope, I am sincere, thanks for bringing that up.
I echo you on the Matchett idea. I think it makes a heck of a lot of sense and would be a real engineering challenge that directly translates to the road not to mention it reduces our dependency on fossil fuel as we learn to use less and less while we develop alternative fuels. That Steve is a sharp guy. :)
Guess ive seen to many forums like speeds to see a enthusiastic sincere post lol.
Heck i remember a while back people moving in next to monza were complaining about the noise at the track and wanted it shut down, what if they opened the rules of for audi to come in with their clean tdi diesel motors? That is probably the only way to maybe entice them to come into f1 to show off their motors unless maybe quattro as well. I drive one and would love to see the rings back in f1.
“How can you explain that an F1 car needs 80 litres of fuel to cover 100 kilometres?”
Easy… Mention that on some circuits it can cover those 100 kilometres in well under half an hour.
The problem seems to be two-fold… F1 can’t change its absurd schedule for fear that ticket sales and sponsor/local interest would suffer disproportionately. So the real problem is ignored.
Furthermore, those that would criticise the sport’s environmental credentials only see the cars – they don’t care or think about the rest of the series. (With NASA, as Peter was mentioning, they only see the fiery lift-off, it’s the same deal.)
So F1 is too greedy (or is that needy?) to genuinely try to correct its more serious ecological problems, while its critics are too disinterested in the sport to even recognise them.
As others have pointed out, the problem is not in the engines. I’m not familiar with the F1 numbers, but here’s the equivalent for MotoGP:
Each bike has 21 liters to do between 110 and 120km with (the typical length of a race), which averages out around 5.5km/l, or 13 mpg (US). That’s about the same as a top end Range Rover. Of course their traveling at slightly different speeds: the MotoGP bike is hitting 210mph and averaging over a hundred, while the Range Rover is tootling around at 25mph in Kensington.
So, for a 17 bike grid, the entire amount of fuel consumed is 357 liters. Include practice, and it’s not going to be above 2000 liters for the entire weekend. Add in the support classes and the bikes have burned around 10000 liters (2641 gallons) over the course of three days.
However, for those 10000 liters to be burned, it requires 70 riders, 500 mechanics and crew, another 500 to 1000 support staff, and 500 assorted media types to be transported to the circuit. There is also about 20 tons of equipment to be shipped from the last race to the next.
That would seem like a lot of fuel. But it’s only the beginning. At most European rounds, there are between 70,000 and 120,000 people who turn up, most of whom have to travel over 100 miles to get to the track. Some of them travel several thousand miles, most several hundred miles, a few 20 or 30 miles.
Just for ease of calculation, let’s say 100,000 have to travel an average of 100km to get to the track. that’s 20 million kilometers (there and back, remember) which needs to be traveled to attend the event.
20 million kilometers, with an average of 2 people to a vehicle is between 1 million and 500,000 liters of fuel burned, around a quarter of a million gallons of fuel.
Those are huge numbers, and they have nothing to do with motorcycle racing. The same is true for a major rock concert, a football game, a political rally, any event where large numbers of people congregate.
The point is, it’s not the sport that is the problem. It’s the attendance. So instead of banging on about the sport’s image, F1 and MotoGP should merely point out the truth of the matter, which is that it’s live attendance at the races which is the problem.
I haven’t even begun to calculate the energy use of the hundreds of millions of TV sets tuning in to watch the races yet either …
Oh, and I have treated the question here as a Fermi problem. More info on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
The most cost effective way to become green is to put some green stickers on every cars out there(every other consumer electronic company seems to do them with great effect), as Grace would point out, it is the image to try to appear green.