BAT principles talk about IndyCar engines and safety

Bruce Ashmore and Alan Mertens of BAT engineering were recently interviewed for an article by Gordon Kirby

When asked about the engine dilemma for IndyCar, and the notion of the Global Racing Engine being used, Ashmore said "The problem with the 'World Racing Engine' is it doesn't produce enough power for an Indy car…It's around a 500 bhp engine which is not enough to have an exciting show on a road course. The current road course car has only just over 600 bhp and everybody that I've spoken to wants to see the road courses back where they used to be in the nineties which was 900 horsepower. So you need to be 750+ and you can't get that level of horsepower out of an in-line four-cylinder turbo and have it last 500 miles."

"If you believe you need more than 700 horsepower for the road courses that's not the in-line four 'World' engine. That engine doesn't really fit Indy car racing. It fits a lot of other series–Formula 3, touring cars and so on. There are a lot of applications where that engine would work. But it's not powerful enough for an exciting Indy car."

They go one to talk about the basis for the car design not being about one kind of car beating another, and that safety and other design considerations come to the forefront for that. Though the product of this is positive, we have to ask…isn't one car (and driver) beating another what this sport is all about?

We have to wonder if the direction racing is going is an evolution or simply the wrong direction. When we get there, will this even resemble what racing is supposed to be? This is not specific or critical of the BAT design, but more about the overall direction we see things going in almost all of racing in recent years.