The Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach has waved the green flag on sustainability.
More than 180,000 people are expected to descend upon Long Beach this weekend as turbo-charged cars, some roaring around at nearly 200 mph, take to city streets for three days of adrenaline-fueled races. The throngs of visitors, as they have for years, will also get to enjoy exotic cars on display, plenty of food and beverage options, and other activities.
Yet, if you pay attention, you may also notice the Grand Prix’s 48th iteration has some changes — all geared toward environmental sustainability.
The Grand Prix Association of Long Beach, which organizes the annual race, has put an added emphasis on sustainability this year, responding to concerns from environmentalists and some city officials amid wider discussions about how best to address the consequences of climate change. Separately, organizers of some of the specific racing events — such as the NTT IndyCar series — have responded to concerns from sponsors by implementing their own environmentally friendly initiatives.
“What we’re finding,” said Jim Michaelian, president and CEO of Grand Prix Association of Long Beach, “is that many of our vendors, our suppliers and even the sanctioning bodies that bring the racing series to the event here are also engaging in these same types of initiatives.”
The most obvious polluters are the race cars themselves, which can pump out three times as much carbon dioxide as the average vehicle, experts say. Adding to this are the emissions from transporting equipment between racetracks nationwide, and race team members, promoters and fans traveling to the various venues.
But the organizers of the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, which will take place from Friday to Sunday, April 14-16, say they and the sanctioning bodies have pledged to cut carbon emissions without compromising the excitement of the sport. Doing so stems from a consensus among the major stakeholders that went back several years, Michaelian said.
City officials also pushed the Grand Prix Association of Long Beach on sustainability during their most-recent contract talks, which saw the two sides ink a deal to keep the event — one of the biggest annual drivers of revenue in town — through 2028.
Long Beach has long worked to address climate change locally. The City Council even adopted a Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, which had been in the works for years, in 2022.
“It is our collective responsibility to implement climate friendly and sustainable options, not only for large-scale events like the Grand Prix but also in our daily lives,” City Manager Tom Modica said in a statement, “to ensure Long Beach continues to be a safe, healthy and viable city for people to live, work and play.”
The Grand Prix, specifically, has implemented multiple measures, both this year and during past events, intended to minimize its environmental impact, Michaelian said.
Recyclable aluminum containers, for example, will replace single-use plastic bottles this year. Fans can refill those or their personal water containers with filtered, city-sourced water at Long Beach’s “Quench Buggy,” thanks to the association’s partnership with the Water Department. Specialized bins will be placed around the concourse to collect reusable materials.
And while this isn’t a new initiative, all oil and petroleum from the race cars will once again be recycled through Safety-Kleen, an organization that specializes in returning used oil to its original state.
Grand Prix officials are also pushing hard for fans to take public transportation — Long Beach Transit, Metrolink, the Metro A Line, as well as GoActive LB Club — to the event, partially because parking is limited, but also because it will cut down on emissions.
“In many ways, there are less people driving to downtown Long Beach on race weekend than would be on normal weekends,” Michaelian said, “because most of the parking lots are taken up by racing activities.”
The NTT IndyCar Series, meanwhile, has unveiled a number of green initiatives, along with their partners Shell and Firestone, as part of its sustainability strategy, said Mark Sibla, chief of staff at IndyCar.
“If we want to be racing for another hundred years, if you would, we need to think about these things when we go into race markets like Long Beach,” Sibla said. “We have 16 different stops along the path of our season, so we need to be a good corporate citizen and be thinking about those communities.”
For the first time, race cars in the titular Grand Prix of Long Beach will use a 100% renewable race fuel from Shell. That fuel will help cut greenhouse gas emissions during the 85-lap race by at least 60% compared to fossil-based gasoline.
That represents a “good step” on the decarbonation journey of motorsports, said Bassem Kheireddin, Shell Motorsports’s technology manager.
“It consists of a significant mix of second-generation ethanol that is derived from sugar cane waste,” he said, “and that is blended with another renewable component to create this 100% renewable race fuel that does meet the needs of IndyCar engines.”
Another highlight is an eco-friendly tire from Firestone that is partially made with guayule shrub, a natural rubber sourced from Arizona that requires less reharvesting than Hevea brasiliensis, the traditional source that usually comes from Southeast Asia. Guayule renews itself every three years and doesn’t take up a lot of water, Sibla said.
The special tire is still relatively nascent, developmentally, and is first being rolled out at the few IndyCar races that take place on street courses, such as Long Beach.
Guayule tires are distinguishable by their green sidewall, Sibla said, and will be used as alternate race tires, which have less durability than primary tires but improve the speed on an IndyCar.
But despite these and other efforts, environmental experts said, the Grand Prix — and car racing in general — remains a fossil fuel-intensive sporting event.
While fuel economy has improved over the past several decades, sports cars still require a lot more fuel than the average vehicle because of the speeds at which they travel.
During races, IndyCars get roughly five miles to the gallon, and have no catalytic converters or any other pollution-reduction method, said Jack Eidt, cofounder of SoCal 350 Climate Action, the local chapter of 350.org, a global grassroots climate change movement.
In comparison, most street cars operate at about 20 miles per gallon and some hybrid cars top out at 60 miles per gallon.
In general, a gallon of gasoline produces close to 20 pounds of carbon dioxide when it’s burned, according to the Energy Information Agency. This means a single sporting event such as the Grand Prix, which has around 130 cars participating in nine races, can send loads of carbon dioxide into the air.
“Unfortunately, any sport that focuses on single vehicles going at advanced speeds for long periods is always going to have a significant impact on the environment,” Eidt said. “But in the end, the moving around of their cars and equipment all around the world makes it one of the biggest super-polluters out there.”
In 2019, for example, Formula One estimated its carbon footprint to be 256,511 tons, — bigger than the annual carbon dioxide emitted by some small countries. The tiny Caribbean nation of Saint Vincent and Grenadines, for example, had a carbon footprint of roughly 290,000 tons in 2014, according to a CNN analysis.
IndyCar, often referred to as the “American version” of Formula One, is still gathering data on its annual carbon footprint throughout this race season, Sibla said, and will probably have a clearer picture during the first quarter of 2024.
But one could take Formula One’s data as a rough guide, said Greg Dingle, a sports management lecturer at La Trobe University in Australia.
“Whilst the Acura Grand Prix is an Indy Car event and not a F1 race, nor is the race a circuit of car races like the Indy Car or F1 Championships are,” Dingle said in an email, “it seems logical to conclude that motor racing per se is inherently fossil fuel-intensive, and so the same could be said about the Acura Grand Prix.”
But a bulk of the emissions, at least for Formula One, doesn’t come from the actual racing.
Only 0.7%, in fact, resulted from the car races, according to Formula One, while 45% stemmed from transporting equipment between races.
“If the F1 Environmental Sustainability Strategy represents a reasonable approximation of the different aspects of the greenhouse gas emissions of Indy Car racing,” Dingle said, “then decarbonizing the emissions of team logistics and transport would be the area most likely to yield a meaningful reduction in the carbon footprint of the event.”
That would also mean sustainability would be less of a problem the Grand Prix of Long Beach has to solve and more of an issue the sanctioning bodies of the various races must address.
IndyCar, for its part, seems aware of that.
All IndyCar team transporters, for example, uses renewable diesel, Sibla said. And the organization has started to look at using fully electric trucks to transport race cars between tracks.
And some experts say the very nature of competitive racing provides a reason for optimism.
An inherent part of professional car racing is innovation, working to make vehicles faster and more efficient. The industry, then, is primed to find innovative solutions to address environmental impacts, said Jenney Hall, an environmental studies lecturer at Cal State Dominguez Hills.
“The Long Beach Grand Prix takes place during Earth Week and near areas affected by the Port of Los Angeles (and the Port of Long Beach) in the ‘Diesel Death Zone,’” she said. “This is the perfect venue to showcase environmentally conscious technological advancements in racing and in large-scale sporting events.”
Environmental innovations should be encouraged and made a standardized part of motorsports competition, Hall said. The industry also needs to adopt a zero-waste approach to all of their sporting events.
“It is my sincere hope that the Long Beach Grand Prix continues to strive to meet environmental challenges in an authentic way,” Hall said, “and acts as a global leader for motorsport.”