In order to survive, Formula 1 must be ‘relevant’ especially with the advent of electric vehicles.
Tyres are crucial to F1 in connecting driver and car to the track. F1 uses a lot of tyres. But what if F1 cars could be run on fuel derived from tyres ?
F1 now recognises it needs to look at its environmental credentials and the authorities are now proposing to increase biofuel content from the small % used in 2019 to 20% by 2021. They’ll then increase by 10% per annum as reported by Sportsmole.
Arguably this could be ‘greener’ than electric cars, since electricity is still mainly generated using fossil fuels. Naturally this will change over time, but it will take several years.
2G BioPOWER has long fought for biofuels to be used more widely in motor sport and is highly supportive of this development, and continues to explore the technical and commercial viability of converting Tyre Pyrolysis Oil into transport fuel. This is getting closer to reality. It’s Swedish technology provider, Enviro, has commissioned tests on TPO via the Research Institutes of Sweden, which concluded that conventional refinery processes are capable of refining Enviro TPO to produce a transport fuel.
As my colleague Howard Jackson puts it ” Producing Transport Fuel from tyres provides a perfect synergy with the lastest aspirations of Formula 1. Finally we could make tyre recycling sexy, especially if the F1 cars own tyres were processed and the fuel used in the actual race cars”.