INCREMENTAL ENVIRONMENTALISM
British rallying has joined the sustainability conversation, writes Nick Garton
Take a deep breath, everyone. It’s time to talk about the dread word of these times and the greatest threat to our sport’s existence: sustainability. The headlines are dominated by it at World championship level, but even at the grassroots of British rallying, ‘sustainability’ is changing the sport forever – and hopefully for the better.
The western world is informed daily by the forces of political legislation, media coverage and Twitter that cars are the biggest cause of climate change on the planet. This prevailing logic decrees that commuting, doing the school run and even driving across the country to check on a vulnerable relative are an unacceptable carbon cost. Meanwhile ‘driving in circles’, as motorsport is often referred to, is increasingly demonised.
Recently, COP26 provided yet another opportunity to hammer home the message that we are killing the planet with cars. Volkswagen, Toyota, Renault-Nissan and Hyundai-Kia were publicly vilified for refusing to sign a COP26 commitment to produce only zero tailpipe emissions vehicles by 2035. Despite the outcry, their logic for taking this stand was simple: the world’s electricity supply is not clean enough to warrant the change, nor is it likely to be by 2035.
Such logic is heresy in the eyes of the sustainability movement until you consider that cars are not, in fact, the biggest threat to the survival of the planet. Collectively, all powered transport on land, sea and air actually constitutes just 16% of global man-made emissions each year. Road transport is indeed the biggest contributor, but even its emissions are around half of those currently produced by generating electricity.
Only 1% of all the vehicles worldwide are currently electric but, if that burden increases, more electricity will need to be generated and the carbon cost will rise. In fact, the United Nations Climate Panel calculates that if all electric motoring targets being pledged by politicians are achieved, they will reduce global temperatures by just one ten-thousandth of a degree Celsius. Meanwhile, the price and the practical limitations of electric cars represent insurmountable obstacles to mobility for millions of people.
It is conundrums of this kind that make a complex path towards enlightenment, and nowhere more so than grassroots motorsport. Indeed, when asked by Motorsport News to discuss the subject, neither the FIA nor Motorsport UK was able to do so.
In their defence, the priority that our sport’s leadership places on sustainability is commendably clear. Only last month, MSUK announced that it had become a signatory to the United Nations Sports for Climate Action Framework, about which the governing body’s CEO Hugh Chambers said:
“We have spent a lot of time this year carefully creating a comprehensive strategy with a roadmap containing over 50 objectives up to 2030 aimed at creating a sustainable future for UK motorsport. An important part in building our strategy was benchmarking what other sporting federations are doing around the world and ensuring we are aligned with global best practice.”
This was doubtless a sobering process to have gone through, because every sport has a colossal carbon footprint. When all of the contributors are factored in, such as travel, event catering or the construction and maintenance of venues, the total is astronomic. The forthcoming FIFA World Cup in Qatar is conservatively predicted to reach a total of 3.5 million tons of carbon emissions. This figure is dwarfed by the last Olympic Games to which international fans could travel, the 2016 Rio Olympics, which measured 4.4 million tons.
Motorsport is, on the surface of things, a comparative lightweight. In 2018, F1 audited itself and came up with a total of 254,000 tons of carbon emissions per season. This may sound like an absolute environmental bargain next to the World Cup, but the figures themselves only relate to the teams, administration and supply network required to build, transport and run 20 F1 cars. They do not factor in the cost of running each of the events on the calendar, which was estimated to have added a further
1.7 million tons of emissions to F1’s account in 2018 and will grow in line with the calendar. Nor indeed was the environmental impact of the support races which travelled with F1 through the season, the live entertainment, hospitality corps or merchandising factored in.
Only when all sports audit their data transparently will we ever get a clear picture. For example, most travelling football fans use scheduled flights and catch trains, buses and taxis that would have been running anyway, so how are these emissions their responsibility? Conversely, claims of being within sight of, or even having reached, so-called ‘carbon neutrality’ by some motorsport series may not stand up to rigorous independent assessment.
Rather than finger-wagging, however, let’s look at what’s being done. In motorsport, this hinges around the introduction of hybrid powertrains and the adoption of biofuels, which began at Le Mans, migrated to F1 and from next year will also be fundamental to the World Rally Championship. These are important developments with phenomenal engineering behind them but there is a basic trade-off in terms of the additional mass and physical bulk that the hybrid cars must carry.
For F1, this means that in 2022 the cars will be consuming sustainable biofuel at a rate of around 3.8-3.9 miles per gallon, which is on par with the fuel mileage of 3.5-litre V10 and V12-engined cars from 30 years ago – although running the cars is the smallest part of F1’s carbon footprint, measuring just 0.7% throughout the season. In rallying terms, Toyota’s WRC technical director Tom Fowler recently stated that the extra 8% of heft in their hybrid Rally1 test car showed that “you need to accelerate and decelerate more often” in slippery conditions: in other words, their competitive MPG is going to suffer in order for the cars to run without tailpipe emissions in the service park.
An additional factor for rallying is the impact on the stages themselves, requiring much more post-event repair work and thereby incurring even more emissions. This is unavoidable but it is also a cost
“It is under the radar... tyres make a valuable contribution”
Mike Broad
worth paying because protecting these environments is no less significant a part of ensuring the sustainability of the sport than cutting tailpipe emissions. One WRC rally official that MN spoke to stated that for now the priority is on getting service parks ready for the hybrid era and marshals trained to deal with the new technology, but once the cars are running the agenda will swiftly move towards repairing the road surface.
The forestry commissions in Wales and Scotland, and the Parliaments to which they answer, have made clear their intent to conserve natural resources and use them to contribute towards our national sustainability. Allowing hundreds of rally cars to chew up their delicate ecosystem would therefore seem contradictory, were it not for the measures already being put in place.
“I’m chair of the Rally Tyre Group now,” says Mike Broad, president of the BTRDA. “The idea was that we take the FIA’s regulations for tyres, including closed patterns etc, and get rid of the open pattern tyre. They are more expensive, but they will do four or five times the competitive mileage. Forestry organisations now understand that the tyres we use are considerably less damaging than those we used to have 10 years ago. There are competitors who would prefer that we hadn’t done that, who complain that they can’t get their cars to turn-in, but it’s the same for everyone and there is a bigger picture.”
While the sport’s upper echelons pursue sustainability through big-budget projects like hybridisation, the role that the sport’s grassroots must play is equally important. The increments may be smaller, but the combined difference can be profound. “I’d love to see a time where you have a 45-mile event, as most British gravel rounds are, with one set of tyres and two spares – which is what the WRC is already doing,” adds Broad.
“While it’s under the radar compared with, say, running electric cars, tyres make a valuable contribution to sustainability. I spoke with the Welsh Forestry people on the Nicky Grist Stages this year, and obviously there being no spectators was a bonus for them, if not for the sport. But when
I said that there no were chase cars, they immediately said: ‘so, you’re saving fuel and saving tyres – that’s good!’ I didn’t need to explain it and they were very impressed by steps like that.”
This is not to say that British rallying is thinking small. The introduction of biofuels is high on the agenda, with the introduction of hybrid and/or electric rally classes to British series following soon afterwards. Unlike manufacturer-backed F1 and WRC programmes, however, the burden of cost to implement these changes at a domestic level will fall upon the competitor, which inevitably slows the process down.
In the interim, some events and even individual competitors in British rallying have taken matters into their own hands by investing in carbon offsetting – in other words planting trees to compensate for their emissions. In Mull, this meant planting sufficient trees to sequester 136 tonnes (134 tons) of emissions incurred by travel to and from the island as well as the competing cars and roving fans and officials on the event.
“This is just the beginning of our journey to ring fence – from an environmental perspective – the future of the event,” said clerk of the course, Andy Jardine.
“Every year the rally runs, we have a team of volunteers and officials who go around the route to check we’re leaving the highways and byways of
Mull as we found them. Now we’re doing the same with the environment. And, crucially, we’re working locally to deliver on that policy.”
For the time being, however, the sport needs to focus on building up those incremental gains and working with concerned bodies such as the forestry guardians to showcase the value of the work done.
Whether it is ensuring that there are clearly marked recycling bins in the service park or wholesale changes to the fuels used, that sense of people looking for opportunities to improve is all-important.
“I would love it if we could get to the point where we could enforce a blanket ban on chase cars and management cars on events, but we need to be clear on how that can be achieved,” says Broad. “One argument against it from competitors is that they need fuel bringing to them because they’ve fitted smaller fuel tanks – which is stupid. My reaction to that is:
‘put the bigger tank back in again!’”
Bold proclamations may be the choice of many, but it really is the little things that matter. COP26 has shown that there is no silver bullet to solving humanity’s sustainability quandary at any level.
The onus falls upon us all, particularly ‘expendable’ activities like motorsport, to chip away by every means possible.