Gunning for the greenest 200-mph racecar

This year, the American Le Mans-style sports car circuit is featuring a “race within a race,” with Acuras, Audis, Ferraris, Porsches and yes, even Corvettes, vying to win recognition as not just the fastest but the greenest things on four wheels. As drivers jockey for the lead, computers are monitoring fuel consumption to determine which vehicles are burning it most efficiently.

Fans might not be able to tell any difference just by watching the race, but that's the point, says John C. Glenn, a specialist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who helped spur this green shift.

“This is about making the best use of energy,” Glenn said, “but these are still 200-mile-per-hour racecars.”

A race fan himself, Glenn said the idea for greener racing came to him as he struggled to square the sport's conspicuous fuel consumption — the cars average 3 miles per gallon — with growing concern over climate change. About four years ago, joined by representatives of the Department of Energy and the automotive engineering society, Glenn said he told racing executives that their sport risked losing its fans and its lucrative commercial sponsorships unless it cleaned up its act.

“They're on the wrong side of two major issues, energy security and global warming,” Glenn explained as he outlined the new racing trend at a recent Green Chemistry conference in College Park, Md. But the EPA specialist said he told racing leaders they could be heroes instead, by helping government find solutions to those problems.

Auto manufacturers pump millions of dollars a year into souping up engines and cars to win these races, Glenn pointed out, and the technology developed for the track quickly finds its way into car showrooms.

“What we want them to do is focus all that creativity, all that money the car companies are putting into (engine) power, into energy efficiency,” he said. “If they had done that earlier, we probably would've all been driving hybrids 20 years ago.”

Glenn said the message hit home with the American Le Mans Series, which stages a dozen sports car endurance races around the United States and Canada every year. “My heart skipped a beat the first time the call came in,” Scott Atherton, president and chief executive of the Georgia-based racing organization, recalled of being contacted by the EPA. But once he realized what the government officials wanted, Atherton said his group's leaders embraced it.

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