Electric race cars will kill the sport

If they adopt electric motors No-Doze will have to sponsor the series

A reader writes, Dear AR1.com, I read your recent article about silent electric race cars and could not agree more. If the sanctioning bodies let the engine manufacturers decide the future direction of their sport, they are sure to require silent electric motors at some point in the future. Staying 'relevant' to the car industry will be their undoing because I agree – race fans may come to a silent electric race once, but they won't be back.

I like your idea – make a screaming internal combustion the main propulsion unit to keep the 'sound' exciting, and work in a KERS/electric motor for Push-to-Pass. This way the racing sounds exciting yet still reasonably high-tech. Battery technology will still be important, as will the electric motor and its electronics. Who cares if the internal combustion engine is no longer relevant – get a Cosworth to provide a spec one for all cars and let the manufacturers supplement it with their battery and electric motor technology. Essentially a hybrid power unit, but an exciting one.

The cars should be as spec as possible. Driver talent should win races not design engineers. If engineering is what you want, check out the Society of Automotive Engineers race car design competition every year. You and 50 or 100 other people will be there. I want to see real men in awesome race cars compete for victory, not some nerdy engineer win by beaming some computer code to make the car go faster. That's not a sport. Duncan Derr, San Fran

Hi Duncan, thanks for writing. Let's hope the mental midgets that run these race series don't become so beholden to the manufacturers that they lose sight of what made racing exciting in the first place. Awesome sound is the #1 reason and the #2 reason isn't even remotely close. My bigger concern is autonomous driving. When driving isn't something humans do in say, 10 years, how will the youth of tomorrow even relate to motorsports. Driving will not be relevant to them – they will not view it as a skill. The metal midgets can't look that far into the future and come up with a solution. We proposed one that we think will work (get the NCAA to recognize go-kart racing as a sport – in high schools and colleges) but so far it has fallen on deaf ears because they only care about their paycheck now and not the future security of the sport. Mark C.