Quote:
Originally Posted by MetroMPG
Before you even come up with a format to make "MPG racing" work, you'll have to come up with a pre-emptive explanation for why you are "wasting gas" to save gas.
That's the #1, knee-jerk objection that the non-FE oriented motorhead will lob at you before you even finish your first sentence describing what it is you want to do.
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It's a cliched question, and it gets a cliche answer: "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs."
Ask the manufacturers and they'll tell you, yeah, they do learn stuff from the racing programs. And some of that finds its way into road cars. But the racing programs are loss leaders, so that's a direct analog to exactly what we're discussing here: burn gas to learn how to burn less gas. The return on investment should be pretty good, if running one car from coast to coast on 100 gallons of fuel (easily doable by some of you guys, with nearly enough fuel left over to turn around and drive back) can improve 1000 other cars' fuel efficiency by 10%, then they all burn 100's of gallons less every year for the remainder of their useful lives.
Sounds like a fun win-win to me.