No More Motor Sports

I think the time is long overdue for a global moratorium on motor sports.  Do I say this because Dan Wheldon was killed yesterday in the final race of the IndyCar series?  While his death is tragic it is not the reason why I think that the age of motor sport should be ended.  Drivers know the risks when they enter the profession and occasionally risk becomes reality.

No, the reason I think motor sports should be banned is that they are no longer worth the trouble they cause.  Today, they serve only one function -- entertainment.  I don't even consider racing a sport.  It's merely a spectacle, like a circus.  Drivers are just like trapeze artists who can be considered athletes, as can astronauts.  Certainly the rigours of their trade require extreme levels of fitness and skill.  That isn't enough to make flying through the air with the greatest of ease or launching into orbit a sport, so why racing?

And all this spectacle costs us is massive amounts of pollution.  How much?  A Formula-1 race car burns about 225 litres of fuel in a single race.  That's about 1 1/2 barrels of petrol. There were 19 races in the 2011 season each roughly 300km  in length.  Between 20 and 24 cars (twelve teams of 2 cars apiece) start each race.  Using the lower of these numbers (to make a conservative estimate and) to account for cars that do not finish the race, the races themselves consume almost 550 barrels of oil.  Doesn't sound like much to you?  It can be restated in terms of tons of oil, more than 68, actually.  If you count all the practice sessions, qualifying sessions and testing sessions, each of the 12 teams use about 200,000 L of fuel.  That's almost 2000 TONS of fuel per racing season.

2000 tons seems like an awful lot, but that number is just for Formula-1 racing.  If you include the other forms of racing and regulating racing bodies (including 'minor leagues'), like IndyCar, NASCAR, Formula-3, or the National Hot Rod Association, and touring car, sports car, endurance,  production car*, one-make, stock car,  rallying, drag, off-road, kart, motocross, motorcycle, monster truck, demolition derby... really the list is almost endless!  It would not surprise me in the slightest if millions of tons of fuel were burned each year in the name of racing.  Even if it was only one million it would be equivalent to 2-4 supertanker ships at full deadweight capacity.  (It is also worth noting that some racing series do not burn gasoline or even necessarily petroleum derivatives, but fuels like ethanol which can be produced from biomass.  This is mostly irrelevant since the issue is not about 'dependence upon foreign oil' but air pollution which is produced by burning any hydrocarbon regardless of its origins.)

* I have nothing against production car racing.  What is learned in this activity is directly translatable to everyday life and can be considered research...with a paying audience.


Before the gearheads out there slam me for not putting these numbers in perspective, 1 million tons of fuel isn't an enormous amount in terms of global consumption.  Based on 2005 estimates, the entirety of Spain and the United Kingdom would only take 2-3 days to burn a million tons of oil.  You might conclude that this means that the carbon output of the racing industry was insignificant.  You're entitled to your opinion, but I think that people that make this conclusion are either ignoring a lot of details or looking at the issue in a highly subjective manner, one where the goal is to justify racing.

That million tons of fuel allowed (about) 100 million people to go about their daily lives, conduct their businesses and heat their homes for two to three days.  In economic terms, roughly between $17.4 and $26.1 billion (production parity) was produced in the UK and Spain for an average 2-3 day period in 2005.  So 1 million tons of fuel allowed 100 million people to conduct their lives and allowed them to produce between 17 and 26 billion dollars worth of goods and services.  That seems like a reasonable return on investment for the use of the fuel.  In contrast, racing provides entertainment.  There are an infinite number of other forms of entertainment that the people that watched those races could have spent their time doing that they would have found just as entertaining if they no longer had racing as an entertainment option.  In other words, racing could end today and ultimately no one would really notice.  Quality of life would remain completely unchanged, with the one exception being that a million tons of fuel wasn't consumed and wasn't converted into pollution.  (It should be noted that humanity enormously overemphasizes the importance of entertainment as a whole and is even worse when it considers the value of specific forms of entertainment.)

"What about the other benefits of racing," you may ask.  Sure, in earlier days all the efforts put into engineering the race cars resulted in some advances that would benefit the world at large.  Other than the few racing series that use basic production cars I don't think the innovations being made are that useful in everyday life anymore.

The primary engineering innovations in racing are of more and more efficient engines, but it's not the kind of efficiency that the public needs.  Racing efficiency is measured in terms of power -- how much power/acceleration can be squeezed out of each unit of fuel.  Everyday efficiency is a measure of distance traveled per unit of fuel.  Increasing power efficiency usually lowers traditional fuel efficiency, so this really doesn't help the real world at all.

Advances in materials science are limited mostly because the regulatory boards keep having to slow the cars down!  As such, advances in materials science are usually banned preventing further testing and further advancement.

Advances in aerodynamics are of limited utility since the dynamics are contingent upon rate of speed.  Fortunately (for safety reasons), everyday use vehicles do not go anywhere near as fast as most race cars so these advances are more useful to aerospace engineers than automobile engineers.

The one area where advances could be made that would directly translate to real life would be in terms of braking.  Most of the brake force at extremely high speeds comes from (aerodynamic & friction) drag, bot from mechanical brakes but it is still possible that something might be learned about making better brakes for everyday use vehicles.  I would love to know how much of today's braking systems have their origins in professional racing.

The question then becomes "Is all this pollution worth the limited number of practical advances in technology that arise from the activity?"  I doubt it.  I'd love to be shown to be wrong.

Is there anything else that racing provides that could justify its continued existence?  I can only think of one thing.  Racing provides a venue for incorrigible speed demons to indulge in their addiction.  Stated that way it doesn't sound very positive, but it saves lives.  Inexplicably, many humans revel in speed so completely that one would think life itself depended upon it.  Hollywood knows it --  just look at the number of movies and television shows that have come out in the last 20 years with racing, speed or race cars as the main theme.  By and large, they were all significant financial successes too which goes to show how widespread this primal urge is.  These people will simply not be denied.  If they are not provided with safe venues for going as fast as technology will allow them they will do it wherever it is convenient for them.  That means (your) public roads where more sensible, less impulsive people, including children, are just waiting to become innocent bystanders and unfortunate statistics.  Keeping these nut bars off the road possibly the only non-technological benefit of having organized racing.  However, the extent of the benefit is not really measurable, in large part because the spectacle/sport itself encourages this dangerous behaviour at the same time that it provides an outlet for it.  In other words, we don't really know whether lives would be saved or lost in the long term if racing was eliminated, so I guess we can't really call this a benefit with any confidence.

So, I call for an end to all racing that does not directly contribute to engineering advancements applicable to everyday driving.  I know it will never happen.  As I stated earlier, humans ridiculously overvalue entertainment, it is even more highly valued than health, so virtually no one will admit the logic in this argument. It conflicts with their choice of entertainment and that is all that matters to them.  The inmates are running the asylum, let all beware!