It was bound to happen: even racing has “gone green.” The American Le Mans Series (ALMS) announced in January its commitment to using alternative fuels in motorsports and partnered with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Society of Automotive Engineers International.
According to the ALMS’s President and CEO Scott Atherton, quoted on the series’ website, ALMS is the only series “in the world where all of its cars race not on one, not two, but three ‘street legal’ alternative fuels: clean diesel, E10 and cellulosic E85.”
The “Green Challenge” debuted on October 4 at this year’s Petit Le Mans, where members of the federal environmental agencies created a taskforce to develop guidelines and criteria for the competition. At the end of the race, cars were ranked by amount of energy used, greenhouse gases emitted and amount of petroleum used and dispersed. The first-ever green winners were Porsche, with the Penske Racing Porsche RS Spyder team in the prototype category and GM/Chevrolet, with the Corvette Racing team for GT entries.
Green matters to Black Swan Racing, a client of Kenny Shreves, too. “We were on the front page of the American Le Mans website for all of [owner] Tim [Pappas’] green efforts,” says Shreves. Still, given the Ford’s big turbo engine, they could do better with fuel efficiency. The fuel Black Swan Racing is using right now uses 10 to 20 percent ethanol, similar to what we buy at the gas station. “For the first race of next season we’ll be running cellulosic ethanol. We just need to change a few things,” Shreves says. “It smells horrible, though.”
