You are pretty much showing your ignorance of F1 racing. Every year, the electric component of their engines makes up a greater proportion of the power train than the combustion engine. Kinetic energy recovery systems have improved in leaps and bounds due in a large part to the R&D done on the F1 racetrack.

To put it in perspective - Even in the heady days of F1 racing in the 80's. All the fuel used by every car in every team on every racetrack each year (including all practices, qualifying and races) still used less fuel than a single 747 on a transatlantic flight.

wow - do you have any sources for your example with the 747 on the transatlantic flight. I dont' think you're wrong, I just would like to check the facts. I know that transatlantic flights are VERY bad for the environment and for the carbon foot print someone leaves behind.

Well the 747 is pretty old-tech by today's airliner standards ( mockingly called a gas-guzzler ) but a 747-400 burns roughly 9,600 to 11,500kg of fuel per hour in the cruise per public-domain figures.

If we round the latter to 12,000 per hour and convert to litres at a density of 1.23 for kerosene, that's 43 litres per passenger for a British Airways -400 with 345 seats, which is fairly low density due to a large number of suites and business seats:

https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/British_Airways/British_Ai...

That 43 litres propels that passenger 510 nautical miles in one hour, 945km. 22km per litre.

Now, an Air Canada 777-300ER which is a generation on from the 747-400 burns about 8,500kg per hour with 458 passengers... And an A350-1000 should beat that by about 15% when it enters service.

The efficiency of even semi-modern airliners is remarkable.

To extrapolate the excellent stats above from @dingaling - Lets compare the 777-300ER with a modern F1 car.

All F1 cars (under 2017 regulations) start a 45-55 lap (2 hour) race with 100Kg of fuel. No more can be added. Given that the cars will probably do another 50 odd laps during the 3 practice sessions and qualifying sprints, then each car will use about 200Kg of fuel per race meet. Lets round it up to 250Kg to allow for idling/testing in the garage, in/out sequences into the pit lane etc.

There were 20 cars competing in the 2017 season (10 teams with 2 cars each), across 20 different tracks:

250 x 20 x 20 = 100000Kg of fuel used over the 2017 season.

The time to fly from London to New York is around 8 hours, so the 777 would burn:

8 x 8500 = 68000Kg

So, a modern airliner would save a little more fuel on a transatlantic one way flight, but we are still around 2/3rds of the entire F1 season's worth of fuel - and that is just ONE plane out of the hundreds that make that flight every single day. (and don't forget that I added about another 25% of fuel load onto the F1 figures to allow for errors, but I don't think many cars will do more than 100 laps on a race weekend - so ACTUAL usage may be 25% LESS than I extrapolated, making them almost equivalent figures for both plane and F1 season).

Thank you for your calculations. Great stuff!

You're talking about F1, the sport that is showing you can smash lap records after downsizing from large V-10's to smaller V-6 hybrids? That F1?

The way you write it, it almost reads as if it comes as a revelation that smaller, turbocharged engines can compete with larger, naturally aspirated ones in terms of power output. How can that be: F1 cars already boasted much more powerful small turbo engines 30 years ago than what has since been fitted into them.

In any case, that lap records were beaten this year tells an altogether different story: the engines used don't matter that much for the lap times after a point. After all, they were running almost the same engines last year, a little development notwithstanding, and were much slower: what has changed, and what dominates the gains in lap times, is aerodynamics – which are severely restricted by the rules. That was also the case a dozen years ago when we had the similarly powerful, larger but lighter N/A V10 engines (no hybrid part to lug around back then), accompanied with a narrower track and grooved tyres to reduce the cornering speeds. Thus the comparison is moot: everything around the engine dominates the equation anyway, but that is hardly news.

No I think gains this year are dominated by tyres, but that's neither here nor there - my point is that painting F1 as this anti-climate-change group is odd. As others have pointed out F1 car emissions are ridiculously low on the list of causes of climate change, but my point is more that F1 has pushed efficiency and alternate technology at the expense of a lot of pushback from fans. Of the criticisms one can make of F1 in particular, it's a pretty silly one.

And now they can try and total each others cars on purpose, and not be in a morally dubious place.

Total yourself.

Oh wait you might survive thanks to F1 technology in your car

Could you please not post like this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don’t ever travel for leisure anywhere ever.

Otherwise you’re a hypocrite.