Racing turns its back on heavy, expensive hybrids for sustainable fuel

November 18, 2024:

Over the past decade, spurred on by series like Formula 1 and the World Endurance Championship, the world of motorsport began to embrace hybrid powertrains. In addition to being a sport and entertainment, racing also serves as a testbed for new vehicle technologies, having pioneered innovations we now take for granted, like seat belts, windshield wipers, and rearview mirrors. But that dalliance with electrification may be nearing its end as two high-profile series announce they’re ditching batteries and electric motors starting next year in favor of sustainable fuels instead.

Formula 1 first officially allowed hybrid power in 2009, and by 2014, the series’ rules required every car to sport a pair of complex and costly energy-recovery systems. The more road-relevant discipline of sports prototypes also began dabbling with electrified powertrains around the same time, with the first win for a hybrid car at Le Mans coming in 2012.

The budgets involved for those programs were extravagant, though. Until it instituted a cost cap, F1 team budgets stretched to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In endurance racing, Audi and Porsche spent comparable amounts on their hybrid WEC campaigns, and while Toyota managed to make do with much less, even it was spending more than $80 million a year in the mid-2010s.

As the technology has matured, it made its way into other series—in 2022, both the World Rally Championship and the British Touring Car Championship adopted standardized hybrid systems with spec components that each team had to use. North America’s IMSA WeatherTech series followed suit in 2023 by introducing the new GTP class—cars built to the LMDh regulations similarly use spec batteries, transmissions, and electric motor/generator units.

But the addition of hybrid systems in those series had more to do with making it socially acceptable for automakers to participate in them rather than with any great improvement to the racing. Indeed, at the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona, team principals told me for a fact that automakers like Acura and Cadillac would never have greenlit their IMSA prototype programs were it not for the hybrid aspect.

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