Honda's F1 team is swapping the usual corporate sponsor logos that are plastered all over their new F1 racer for that of a great big green earth image. Honda says that they are trying to raise awareness of environmental issues, which is pretty much a first among the racing fraternity, or at least at this level.
While all this sounds good, I can't help but think that there's a certain amount of irony here in that we're talking about promoting environmentalism on a race car that probably gets well under 10 mpg under normal usage.
Full story here ...
ateixeira says:
09:33 AM, 02/27/07
I'll be surprised if they stick with it for an entire season.
actualsize says:
10:32 AM, 02/27/07
Smug alert.
carlisimo says:
06:43 PM, 02/27/07
F1's trying to go green to avoid political persecution in Europe.
In 1997 F1 went carbon neutral (just means paying lots of money towards environmental projects around the world). In 2009 they're going to change the rules to try to encourage R&D in technology that's useful to fuel economy and emissions in road vehicles. Regenerative braking, exhaust energy recuperation (turbos?) and not sure what else is on the horizon.
I think it's a good plan - last year the big teams spent hundreds of millions of dollars researching two things: increasing revs from 19k to 20k rpm, and finding out what spindly little attachments gave an aerodynamic advantage. Not very transferable to normal cars.