Vegetarian Racing

The greatest news I've heard in some time: The University of Warwick, UK has developed a new F1 (or F3 depending on who you ask) racing car. It gets up to 145 mph, has a lightweight body, and is excellent on fuel.

The catch: The car is made primarily from potatoes, carrots, and soy beans, and the fuel is a combination of vegetable oil and chocolate.

As a big fan of Mother Nature, I have to say this seems quite sketchy, especially with worldwide issues of poverty, hunger, and inaccessibility to quality food.

That said, the novelty factor is quite immense, and I almost fell off my seat when I read this. The developers of the car hope that the F1 committee will change their rules on fuel to allow this car to race, and are calling this the future of F1 racing. Something you need to know about racing, for those not fans of watching fast cars go very quickly in very small circles: they burn a lot of fuel. A lot. An F1 car gets about 75 litres/100km (or 3 mpg). Wiki says this on the length of a race: The race distance is equal to the least number of complete laps which exceed a distance of 305 km (190 mi) (although Monaco is 260 km (160 mi)), and are limited to two hours. In practice they usually last about ninety minutes. That's a lot of fuel, a lot of emissions, and a lot of money.

What all this adds up to is incredible pollution and waste of fuel, so even if in practice this may not be the best idea (though I think F1 fans would disagree with my idea of "best"), it is certainly an interesting idea and will certainly be gaining steam throughout the next few years, and then eventually those ideas will be trickling down to production cars.

It's interesting. I must say, I'm intrigued.