F1 to Go Green With Kinetic Energy Recovery System

This should use less fuel over a race - are they going to limit the size of the fuel tanks (to keep the pit-stop interval about the same) - or just let the teams get on with it?

I suppose it was inevitable, "greenwashing" comes to motorsports.

There are some inaccuracies in the aforementioned article. The Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS), to be introduced with the 2009 Formula One season, are not limited to flywheels. (Although, most systems under development are flywheel-based.) The FIA has stated, "any type of KERS storage or transmission technology will be permitted." The specific flywheel-based system from the article is under development by Williams Hybrid Power LimitedWilliams Hybrid Power Limited.

More:
Brake energy regeneration in F1 by 2009

FIA sets out KERS plans for F1

Problems with KERS and its impact on F1

I read about this in "The Engineer" magazine, there are numerous rules and regs about how the driver can use this stored energy and the amount of energy stored etc...

BUT it does sound like it should make F! racing much more interesting... Over the last decade the rules have meant that the engines are all pretty much the same, so a race can be won on pit stop timing etc...

But with this novel idea the driver can gain a substantial advantage when he needs it most, say on a straight to avoid being overtaken, or to accelerate out of a corner faster etc...

So I'm looking forward to next year to see the results of this...

John.

I remember how just a few years ago everything was either Extreme or Monster, or worst of all, Extreme Monster. I got so tired of it.

Now it is Green. An ad for an upcoming TV series about the rebuilding of a town that was leveled in Kansas said something about how they are going to rebuild the town greener than ever.

These days if you express doubt about global warming you are a global warming denier and are made to sit on the Group W Bench right next to the mother rapers, father stabbers, father rapers and the Holocaust deniers.

The fact of the matter is that the leftist's and socialist's have found a home in the whole global warming, go green movement. The main aim of the whole green movement is to redistribute wealth and trash the US economy.

It started with the ozone scares. The truth be known that the ozone layer at the poles gets thinner in some areas and thicker in other areas and it goes in cycles. Oddly enough, the sun which is needed to make ozone also goes in cycles, and they coincide. It was not because of human activity and CFC's.

Now human activity (speciffically US economic activity) is blamed for global warming. If some all knowing body declared that we (the world) had to raise the temperature of the earth 1 degree in the next 5 or 10 years or we will all die we could not do it. If we can't do it on puprose I seriously doubt that we can do it on accident.

Now everyone is being shamed into reducing their carbon footprint. What about all of the volcanoe's that spew CO, CO2 and a whold host of other gas emissions? If a volcano was a factory it would flunk the emissions tests. One volcano erruption can change the climate and weather around the globe.

Worst of all the leading global warming cook is Algore and he is the biggest hippycrit of all. His energy usage at at the mansion he lives in would power several homes. He preaches against the evil SUV yet rides in a motorcade of SUV's. He claims to fly coach and or buy carbon offsets when he flies on a private plane but he has an interest in the very carbon offset business he gets the "offsets" from.

It's all a big sham and fan dance.

Now that global warming is in doubt with some of the coldest weather in memory behind us, now the environmentalist's are marching under the banner of climate change so they can play both sides of the street. I don't deny the climate is changing. It always has and always will. Go back to the volcano, the sun, the activity inside the earth it's self. They all go in cycles and always have. The climate change crowd can't explain how the last ice age came to an end without blaming it on human activity.

Travis

I cannot see how Formula 1 racing cars can ever be eco-friendly or "Green".

The Super-Flywheel was proposed some 40 years ago, as I remember the wonderful future we were going to have, with this Super-Flywheel technology.

As earlier examples of journalistic puffery, I was not taken in, even though the articles were in Scientific American Magazine, because a Super-Flywheel which could store useful amounts of energy would travel for some 20 miles across the country-side, if it ever got loose.

Those and other problems of large flywheels which are intended to "store energy", and release it quickly, but safely, have yet to be overcome.

Kind Regards....