Bob Barnard Track Engineering

Back in the early seventies when vehicle emission controls were first introduced I was working as the Aide to the Head of the State Road Authority. Australia had two major car makers at that time Ford and GM, with Nissan, Mitsubishi and maybe Toyota also producing there. We were such a small market that even today it seems crazy for Australia to make it's own cars, but of course Governments like that sort of thing. But, the manufacturers were of course loath to retool, and GM for instance still ran a 179 cu in, 6 cylinder "grey" motor from pre WWII. So they just bolted stuff on and changed the timing and cam to meet the emission standard, resulting in poor performance, burnt valves etc.

Around this time the Government asked my boss, i.e. me, as I did all the work, to put a committee together to advise them on removing lead from gasoline, also a hot topic in those days, particularly as we had a very large lead mine in our State. We had all the usual suspects represented; Health, Energy, Mining, and Environment. What was intriguing to me was the objective of the environmentalists. Yes they wanted to get rid of lead, but they saw this as a way of forcing the manufacturers to bring in to Australia their latest engine designs that we knew they were running overseas and which were meeting emissions without all the downside with better economy, and it worked.

The point of this story is that in the course of these deliberations we naturally were looking at alternatives to gasoline. The Club of Rome, a meeting like the climate change in Copenhagen, had predicted that gas would run out before the turn of the century. They also said we'd all starve to death by then too so it was not a problem. This all sound familiar? One of the fuels that Environment believed was the most promising was hydrogen, and that has always stayed in my mind as the most likely. Fast forward to today's discussions on what fuel to use in the future.

In this months Road & Track is an interesting article by Dennis Simanaitis on who is going to have the first hydrogen filling station network, Japan, Germany or the US? My original belief was that we would burn hydrogen in an ICE instead of gas, but it seems that using it in fuel cells, a reverse electrolysis I presume, to produce electricity is the way to go. Hence FCEV. Most of the world's car makers have FCEV vehicles and plans to go into mass production by 2015, with Germany having a target of 600,000 on the road by 2020. To serve them they are planning 1000 refueling stations by 2018, and Japan plans to have that many by 2015. So this is serious stuff, and a much better answer to electric vehicles than plugging them into the already overloaded power grid system that burns carbon based fuels anyway. The hydrogen is produced by electrolysis using renewable energy, so at last we have a really green fuel.

In the article Southern California or Hawaii are suggested as the best test sites in the US for this technology, with GM stating that an investment of only $100-200m in infrastructure would support 15 million vehicles. It is a good article and you should try and find it. I am encouraged that this technology is so far advanced, and it reinforces my belief in our ability to meet the challenges of preserving resources, protecting the environment, and maintaining our transportation needs, not to mention racing!

That takes me nicely to the Le Mans 24 hour which actually starts this Sunday with the traditional inspection of the cars in the Town Square, and yes it is Sunday this year. Le Mans as I have told you started as a demonstration of automotive technology, and has continued as such all it's history. It has had an "Index of Performance" prize, a fuel economy trophy since I was a boy, and probably beyond that. Of course it favored the small engined French Cars, but hey, it's a French race. It truly introduced alternative engines when it had a prize for the first gas turbine car to finish, which Rover duly won and was never seen again. Then came the diesels with Audi and the Peugeot, and I know in the US everyone looks down their nose at diesels, but we are really missing out here compared to the rest of the world in not pursuing this more.

I mentioned the Porsche Hybrid nearly winning the Nurburgring 24 hour. Now it and nine more alternative fuel cars and hybrids will be shown off at Le Mans in 2010. The following is from the Le Mans newsletter.

"10 avant-garde cars with sporting tendencies will put on a demonstration on the big Le Mans 24-Hours circuit on Saturday 12th June at 12h10. They will then be on display in the 24-Hours support paddock from 14h00 on Saturday to 16h00 on Sunday.