► Should motorsport follow the road car agenda?
► Does it get a free pass?
► Mark Walton’s thoughts
I was in Venice recently and saw how this great medieval city is slowly sinking into the mud. The beautiful Ca’ D’Oro – a fabulous, ornate palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal – is now 70cm lower than it was when it was built in 1437. Crazy to think that Venetian nobleman used to arrive at the palace in their private gondolas and step up onto a grand stone staircase; now, the front door at the top of the steps is lapped by waves. Depressing. Literally.
Anyway, then I came home and learned that Warwick University has developed an LMP3 car that runs on sewage. I have to admit, it all put me into a bit of a funk.
You may be wondering how the two are connected and I admit it’s all linked in my head like some giant BBC arts programme – a grand, 12-part opus on BBC2, presented by Simon Schama or Mary Beard, exploring the rise and fall of Western civilisation with celebrity vox pops from the likes of Gary Lineker and that woman from Holby City.
So good luck understanding my brief, ranting synopsis, below…
I’m sure many readers will agree when I say the world feels broken, post-Covid, and there are signs and manifestations of decline everywhere you look. In the past, when the world has felt chaotic and out of kilter, motorsport has always provided us with a beacon of hope – an arena of human ingenuity and fighting spirit. There’s always been something heroic about the big engines and the big balls, epitomised by the likes of Fangio or Senna or that other great world champion Steve McQueen.
But now even that swashbuckling bravado is under threat from net zero and the cheesy, razzle-dazzle launch event that Formula 1 put on at the O2. In the past, Britain created the Cosworth DVF, the ground-effect Lotus 79, and Nigel Mansell’s moustache. Now we build a car that runs on poop.
Maybe I’m being a little harsh on the project. The LMP3 car that the University of Warwick has built is really a showcase for another, more significant technology. Back in 2021 there was a study into finding a more energy-efficient way of treating waste water. The focus turned to what are called microbial electrolysis cells. These were already understood – these cells use ‘electroactive bacteria’, micro-organisms that naturally generate tiny amounts of electricity, to break down organic matter, producing clean water and hydrogen as a result.
Previously, experiments to ramp up the scale of this effect beyond the laboratory bench have been prohibitively expensive because the cells used costly carbon membranes to nurture the microbes. The big breakthrough was made by a British start-up called Wastewater Fuels, which replaced the carbon with a mesh of stainless-steel rods. As the wastewater passes through, the microbes colonise the rods and the hydrogen ions they produce then diffuse into the steel. Hydrogen gas is produced in the core of each rod and harvested.
‘From flush to fuel’ they call it – and producing clean, green hydrogen through the bio-treatment of wastewater is obviously very, very clever. We should applaud it! It’s so resourceful! So environmentally friendly! Blah blah blah! (My face is hurting from so much earnest smiling.)
But it’s not exactly a twin-turbo V6, is it? I want my racing cars to be like the space race – gleaming rockets on wheels, tipped with armour-piercing titanium, burning 80,000 litres of liquid oxygen in a white-hot inferno of raw power. Instead, the University of Warwick has developed a car that runs on poop.
And I’m sorry, but some of the details are so tragic. The Warwick team tell us that their Ginetta-based sports racer has some parts that have been ‘adapted with sustainable materials’ including a wing mirror made from beetroot waste. The chief engineer at Wastewater Fuels, Dr Daniel Carlotta-Jones, commented on the project: ‘Recovering value from waste streams is going to be an essential part of any future net zero economy.’
Argh, please shoot me now. I don’t want to disagree – but can’t we just give motorsport a free pass and let them burn old fashioned petrol instead? Surely there are bigger fish to fry.
Which made me reflect on those beautiful Venetian palaces on the Grand Canal and the fact that I flew there on an EasyJet plane, along with 10 million other tourists – half of whom seemed to be from China.
All civilisations sink into the mud eventually.