Formula One will eventually have to face up to the environment, writes Justin Hynes
The snorts of derision that greeted the launch of Honda F1's 2007 livery at the beginning of this year weren't very hard to understand. In the absence of a title sponsor the manufacturer had turned to its newly appointed image-makers in search of direction - the "earth car" was the result.
Slathering the RA007 with a photo of earth from space and making the team's drivers replace old-school lightbulbs with energy efficient new ones would, it appeared, bounce the planet back onto an even ecological keel.
Formula One, unsurprisingly, laughed up its sleeve. It was a move as cynical as the journalists who snorted at it. But Honda may have the last laugh. The eco gospel is spreading and it looks as though Formula One will have to, sooner rather than later, clean up its act.
Last week Max Mosley, president of the sport's governing body, the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), announced that by 2011 he wants the sport to fall into line with prevailing opinion and go green.
To do this he is suggesting that the current 2.4-litre V6 engines (down from 3-litre V10s of a few years ago) are reduced further to 2.2-litre turbocharged V6 units and new cars must also feature energy recovery systems which will harness energy released under braking and reapply it under acceleration.
In short, he has suggested that the F1 cars of 2011 must lead the development of green technologies for road cars rather than adhere to the current situation whereby F1 cars have almost nothing to do with road cars - where because of current rules governing F1 technology road cars have more toys in most areas than race cars.
So, are we on the brink of a massive change in car racing? Is a sport seemingly founded on profligacy in all things about to develop a conscience?
The answer is a big fat no. In the minds of F1 grandees, consciences are for weak-minded fools, for losers. Mosley's comments of last week are, for the teams, merely bargaining chips in the ever raging war of attrition that is the formulation of the rules governing the sport.
The rules of Formula One, tedious as they are, form a written representation of a battle that has been at the heart of the sport since the inception of the modern definition of F1 in 1950: the teams' desire to find an unfair advantage against the organisers' attempts to limit how fast the cars can go.
The changing of fuel specification in the 1950s, the limiting of wing heights in the late 1960s, the banning of ground force cars in the late 1970s, removing turbos, getting rid of active suspension, banning traction control, moving to grooved tyres - it has been a constant fight against technological progress in the most technologically aggressive arena in sport.
Bringing down the engine size from 3.0 V10s to 2.4 V6s was designed to prevent lap times dipping into realms where serious crashes could occur. Likewise this year's rev limitation to 19,000rpm was designed at chopping back speed. The move to a single tyre supply ended the Michelin/Bridgestone war which saw the FIA reduce speed each season only for the tyre companies to get the teams back to the same lap times as each tyre company tried to outdo the other in terms of grip.
Mosley's suggestions for 2011 are surely rooted in the ecological (he has trumpeted green issues for several years) but the political aspect cannot be underestimated.
The energy recovery systems, which would seem a good idea, were first mooted last year and strenuously resisted by the teams and eventually pushed back to a nebulous "future" introduction. It was the same with reducing engine size - the suggestion was greeted by the teams as some kind of betrayal and was put off for several years before it could be ignored no longer.
It would be wrong however, to paint F1 teams as total villains in this. The FIA's plans, while apparently caring and sharing, involve enormous costs for the teams. To shift from 2.4-litre engines to 2.2 would seem a simple enough premise but this is F1. It isn't as simple as limiting the engines by a couple of hundred ccs.
It will involve the development of completely new designs, run on dynamos, thrust into redesigned cars which will be tested in wind tunnels run 24 hours a day, seven days a week using vast amounts of energy.
The FIA has countered this by suggesting that access to wind tunnels will be limited. The teams will wail and offer something else in return for their precious aerodynamic toys.
However, despite all this bargaining it is just possible that some of Mosley's suggestions will go further than mere green rhetoric. His insistence that green F1 should lead the way for road cars will chime with the sport's major manufacturers, Fiat (Ferrari), Mercedes (McLaren), BMW, Renault, Toyota and Honda. Selling Toyota Prius cars will get a whole lot easier if it can be done on the back of a bio-fuel burning, podium-getting F1 car.
But that insistence is another lever in Mosley's quest to keep control of the teams, a group of squabbling children, who will agree to nothing for fear it will hand an advantage to their closest rivals.
The eco war in F1 will carry on well past the 2011 date Mosley is envisioning for the introduction of such pipe dreams as bio-fuel-powered F1 cars. The paranoia of the team bosses will see to that. And until the FIA can crowbar changes through the tiniest cracks, F1 will continue its profligate global tourism - shuttling 1,000s of people back and forth from factory to track from test session to race, across 17 countries in ever far-flung locales.
Mosley can try to paint F1 as green as Honda have but in the end it will always be the apogee of conspicuous consumption and in a weird way that's the appeal for many.