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NASCAR needs to look into alternate fuels
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Published: September 16, 2008
LOS ANGELES - NASCAR's venerable 358 engine is a dinosaur.
It's been the staple power plant on the stock-car tour since the early 1970s, when NASCAR's Bill France Jr. decided to kill off those 427s, 428s and 429s as not so PR-plus, given the oil shock, and go to smaller engines.
But who even knows what a carburetor is these days?
And with gas at $4 gallon, it may be time again for NASCAR to reevaluate what's under the hood of these race cars and get more in tune with the rest of America.
The guys in Daytona and in race shops around North Carolina may not be that good at thinking outside the box, and they've always got plenty of reasons why things can't be changed. But do NASCAR drivers really need 875-plus horsepower at their right foot?
That's been a question for a couple of months now, with gas prices at $4 a gallon or so and the U.S. economy on the skids.
And when a couple of General Motors' non-racing engineers rolled into California's Auto Club Speedway the other day in a hydrogen-powered SUV — an FCV, Fuel Cell Vehicle — and gave the keys to Kevin Harvick for puttering around town, well, the debate may have moved to another level.
Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. are to get their own hydrogen cars in a couple of weeks, to drive around Charlotte, in the next phase of a low-key rollout for a new line of alternative-powered vehicles.
Don't look for hydrogen-powered cars in the Daytona 500. How long did it take NASCAR to switch to unleaded gasoline?
But there are things NASCAR can do to appear more in step with the real world.
And NASCAR is as much about marketing as it is about racing.
NASCAR isn't so much about Detroit anymore, or anything tangibly related to what car makers actually put out on the street for the average American to drive, as much as it is simply about entertainment.
There's nothing wrong with NASCAR as entertainment. But that disconnect between Detroit and NASCAR that promoter Humpy Wheeler has been railing about lately, as the price of gas goes up, the U.S. economy tanks and car sales plummet, ought to be raising a red flag.
Maybe NASCAR execs need to start thinking in some new directions.
A modest proposal: NASCAR and its car-making business partners — Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Chrysler and Toyota — reshape the sport's pace-car programs to feature green power rather than monstrous gas-guzzling engines.
Toyota already has some plans in the works for that, and GM is considering that as well.
With car makers suddenly trying out all sorts of alternative fuel vehicles, what better way to test market some of those prototypes than as pace cars for NASCAR's big races?
NASCAR pace cars are nothing but marketing gimmicks anyway. A NASCAR promoter once even used a Jaguar as pace car, just to liven things up.
And if Detroit CEOs are pondering their NASCAR budgets, why not a "pace-car war," which could provide good bang for the buck?
It might be a good move here. This is the heart of the valley of smog, the I-10 corridor between the Pacific and the Ontario/Fontana gateway to the East. It would be a really nice PR touch if NASCAR could add a bit of green out here, if only at the front of the pack.
So into the California track rolled Michael Johnston and Alex Keros, two GM engineers who are part of Project Hydrogen, in an average looking soccer-mom SUV, with odd squiggly circles on the side, powered by a fourth-generation hydrogen fuel cell, from the $1 billion project.
Hydrogen?
Is it really a solution to smoggy Los Angeles, is it really a solution to $4 a gallon gas, is it really a solution to the oil crisis?
Maybe, maybe not. But at least it's something worth looking into, and NASCAR executives could make some brownie points by jumping in here.
Hydrogen? The first reaction might be Hindenburg.
But GM's Keros — senior project engineer, hydrogen infrastructure, field service & support — said with the safety aspects of the entire system, car and refueling, "You're not any more at risk with this than you are with gasoline today.
"We wouldn't be putting it out there if it wasn't safe.
"Right now this program is just to prove the technology, to drive the technology forward, to build the market, to get the data points."
The goal: to have this technology cost-efficient for general production sales by 2010.
"There's no reason you couldn't race these things," Johnston said. "Our goal right now is to get data for a commercial program.
"But if you want to race it, more power to you."
GM is working with Shell on this particularly project, and Shell is providing stations for the vehicles. It's not just the engine technology that's an issue, but the fuel-distribution system across the country.
Gasoline stations may not be such profitable ventures all by themselves (and that may well be one key reason for Texaco getting out of NASCAR racing after 20 years as a major sponsor). But the system of thousands of service stations throughout the U.S. makes that a crucial element in keeping Americans on the move.
Adding hydrogen pumps — such as E-85 pumps, electrical outlets or whatever — to these stations makes sense. Detroit won't sell any FCVs if drivers can't easily fill them. California has 25 such hydrogen refueling stations, and there are similar stations in Shanghai, Tokyo, New York City and Washington, D.C.
There are skeptics, wondering if hydrogen might be just a ruse by oil companies and car makers trying to lock up key patents.
And whatever happened to that E-85 initiative Detroit was pushing so vigorously a couple years back? There was even talk about running NASCAR's Trucks on that ethanol fuel. But there are today apparently only two E-85 stations in Southern California, and the E-85 may be dying on the vine.
But maybe it's just the shotgun approach — and obviously nothing has hit a mark in Daytona or Charlotte yet. But, giving the benefit of the doubt and considering that vehicles in the U.S. use the equivalent of about eight million barrels each day. That that not only depletes a scarce resource but also contributes to the incessant smog that blankets this valley, south of the San Gabriel Mountains. Maybe NASCAR executives ought to jump in here somewhere and use their marketing clout to make some points with the public.
Even Richmond and Loudon — always sellouts — have had empty seats this month. And California's Auto Club Speedway always has empty seats.
"Green" isn't something NASCAR gets very easily, unless it comes out of a wallet.
But that may be changing.
There are signs NASCAR is finally starting to understand.
It may be a while before NASCAR execs abandon these incredibly loud, gas-gulping monsters for anything else.
But Toyota is making big waves with its hybrids, and just yesterday GM was making headlines with one of its new alternative-fuel vehicles, the electric Volt, which is certainly not as high tech as this Fuel Cell Vehicle.
And down on Santa Monica Boulevard, near the 405, Shell has an odd-looking gas station, with "Hydrogen" on the pricing placard. At the moment there is no price point, because there are only about 100 of these hydrogen-powered FCV cars around.
But the general concept is clean and simple: Hydrogen in the car's tank is mixed with oxygen in the air, to make electricity, in a high-tech NASA-type fuel cell, which powers special electric motor wheels and which creates only water vapor and heat in its wake.
These first 100 machines have limited use because there are only a few fueling stations, and because the "four-gallon equivalency" tank gets only from 160 to 200 miles on a fill-up.
Still, the efficiency appears impressive — 40 to 60 percent, according to the engineers, compared to 30 percent efficiency for conventional cars. Keros said if a gasoline engine would get, say, 20 mpg in this SUV, the FCV would get an equivalent 45 to 50 mpg.
Mike Mulhern can be reached at mmulhern@wsjournal.com.
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