Fuel has been a focus, but the World Endurance Championship — including the Le Mans 24 Hours — now uses renewable fuel, while other series, including Formula 1, World Rally Championship, and MotoGP are using, or moving towards, fully synthetic fuels.
Le Mans is also looking to hydrogen power in future races, so attention is turning to making other areas of the car more sustainable.
At Le Mans this year, Goodyear was promoting its new tyre compounds which, in the coming years will comprise of up to 66% sustainable materials such as soybean oil.
The CO2-intensive process of making new carbon fibre sheets is an obvious area to tackle. McLaren estimates that using a tonne of recycled carbon fibre reduces carbon emissions by 27 tonnes compared with virgin material.
The F1 team has already used recycled carbon-fibre on its cars’ cockpit panels and aims to develop a completely ‘circular’ car by 2030; eliminating waste by reusing materials. Mercedes has produced “bio-based” carbon fibre for its F1 cars, and both teams aim to be net zero by 2040.
Fuel stop for the No20 BMW
BMW
It’s a landscape that will also be demanding sustainability from products derived from crude oil. Shell estimates that its Le Mans-spec lubricant using re-refined base oil from a range of sources, including used racing oil, reduced its carbon impact by 9%.
“You have this recycled base oil; you achieve the sustainability requirement, but then at the same time you are not sacrificing your performance and durability,” Jason Wong, Shell’s executive vice president of global lubricants told Motor Sport. “We want to be a net zero emission energy company. But while we are working on a sustainability agenda, it doesn’t mean that I need to drop the ball on the performance side.”
For Shell and its rivals, Le Mans continues — after more than a century — to be a testbed for innovation that trickles down to consumer products, providing a gruelling test of durability that’s equivalent to years of road use.
“When you actually keep running like this, for 24 hours, [you] keep having the heat cycle coming in, so effectively you compress the number of years into 24 hours,” says Wong. “The data will be able to tell us how our oil performs and we will then be able to take those as an input for you to refine the formula going forward.
“We can actually demonstrate and showcase, on the one hand, we can meet this sustainability requirement, but then at the same time, we are not actually losing a single drop of performance, as well as the durability requirement of the engine.
“With the recycled base oil, we should be able to validate this. It is important as we take it forward; it can also be translated into the commercial side of the family.
While the sustainability of the BMW’s oil may not have been at the top of Frijn’s mind in the final hour of the race as he overtook one Toyota for second place, then hunted down the leading car, he and his team-mates were impressed by the car’s reliability.
On the podium, from left to right: René Rast, Sheldon van der Linde, Robin Frijns
BMW
Moments after stepping off the podium, team-mate Rast, reflected on the team’s achievements, despite the disappointment of finishing second.
“It’s a huge success to our project because so far, until today, we’ve never finished in Le Mans without a technical issue,” he said. “We wanted to finish in the top five. Now we reached the podium and we were close to even winning the race.
“On the other side, obviously, if you can win, the more you want to win. We were close and that hurts of course, because you never know when you get this chance in your life back again.”
Rast’s hope, of course, is that next year will see him and his team-mates finish one place higher up.
He may also be a step closer to driving a net zero racing car too, with Shell and BMW announcing an extension to their current deal, to involve more initiatives to reduce carbon emissions.
“Motor sport has long been synonymous with performance, but a new era is emerging, where speed and sustainability are no longer mutually exclusive,” says Wong.
“Together we are on a mission to prove that eco-innovation and elite track performance go hand-in-hand – and we will not stop here.”