Racing goes green

The race doesn’t always go to the swiftest. Nowadays, some auto races go to the most fuel-efficient, or to the most environmentally friendly, or even to the best business plan.

That doesn't mean you should expect a NASCAR prize to go to a Prius anytime soon. But it does mean you'll see different kinds of scales for judging the cars that go onto the track - scales that you might even use when you buy your next car.

"Race cars actually move the technology of street cars in several ways," John C. Glenn, an environmental specialist with the Environmental Protection Agency, explained today in a news advisory keyed to a green-tech conference. "One, the technology of race cars develops at a much faster pace than the technology in street cars. And two, they form the basis of what kind of cars people want. They see cars racing on the track, and that's the kind of car they want to buy."

Glenn discussed the trend toward greener racing at the American Chemical Society's Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference in College Park, Md. His theme was that racers can be mean and green at the same time.

"We clearly did not want to change racing. We didn't want to make it boring and slow," he said. "We didn't feel as if that would accomplish our goal, which is to get people to use more energy-efficient vehicles and to stimulate the development of more energy-efficient technologies."

Glenn and his colleagues have been working with race organizers for years to move closer to that goal. In 2006, the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy joined up with Argonne National Laboratory and SAE International to form the Green Racing Working Group. The group notched its first big success last October when the American Le Mans Series conducted its first Green Challenge, a "race within a race."

Rather than holding a separate competition for green vehicles, the Green Challenge judges scored the cars already entered in the 1,000-mile Petit Le Mans endurance race at Road Atlanta, using a formula that accounted for the cars' energy efficiency, greenhouse-gas emission and petroleum-equivalent fuel cost.

The Le Mans race was the perfect place to start, Glenn said, because the rules permit a wide range of "street-legal" fuels including E10 and E85 ethanol blends, sulfur-free diesel and gas-electric hybrids.