Quote:
Originally Posted by niky
What a sad world we would live in if everything "wasteful" was banned. Grass huts man, grass huts... 
It's true that motorsports are wasteful of fuel, but the cost per minute of entertainment, considering the huge part logistics plays in the carbon footprint of any event, is not really any more than any other spectator event.
Perhaps I'm selfishly biased, being a modifier and a track-day addict before developing an enthusiasm for hyper-miling, but I firmly believe that advanced driving techniques learned on the track can be beneficial to the regular driver. Hell... they should be mandatory... (going the other way in terms of authoritarianism...  )
|
I agree with this.
I'm a car enthusiast that has to reconcile that with being an environmentalist. To me, a racecar spinning round the track to the awe of thousands of spectators, or even an amazing hot rod turning every little kid's head as it burbles down the street is, to some extent, ok because you're making people smile. The trouble comes when every redneck with an old car rips off the emissions equipment to make their 150HP crapbox just a slight bit faster and louder.
I don't have a problem, generally speaking, with high-end customs and hot rods running without emissions equipment. A hot rod would be a lot less of a hotrod if instead of dumping exhaust through one big pipe for each cylinder it ran through cats and such. However, despite my high-performance intentions with my V8 aspiring musclecar, I'm going to great lengths to retain emissions equipment. Why the difference? because I'm not taking anything away from the car by keeping emissions equipment functional, I'm going to drive it daily, and perhaps most importantly it's just not as special as a 32 ford with a flame paint job, for instance.
Forgive me for not reading through the whole thread, but I would also think that the actual fuel burned by the racing vehicles would be a relatively small part of the pollution and carbon footprint of a race. This would depend on the form of racing of course, but I guess what I'm saying is that in the grand scheme of things the difference between 50,000 people watching a football game and 50,000 people watching NASCAR may be rather minimal.
In more "grassroots" racing, I'd fully support, at a minimum, catalytic converters being added and the number of fuel stops being minimized where it was reasonable. Maybe not on full-effort sprint cars, or 'mountain motor' prostock drag racing machines, but on bottom-rung dirt track bangers and 'showroom stock' class drag racers.
Of course a nice first step would be for some of the people in the sport to acknowledge the damage they're doing and buy carbon credits or something similar to offset. NHL players have started doing this, and I seem to remember reading that the team-specific (ie. not arena or fan-produced) Co2 emissions are pretty much offset, for the league as a whole. It's a case where not flying these guys around or shutting down their practice facilities might not be palatable, but the harm can be reduced.
Another idea (again sorry if this has been covered in the thread) might be restricting the amount of practice and testing allowed. In F1 some teams basically spend all winter testing new cars. It not only wastes a lot of resources but makes the sport much less affordable for the 'little guy.'