It doesn’t look like food, and it doesn’t taste like food, but it is made of food and it will most probably fly past you in a flash at 200 km/h on the highway.

Confused? Well, let me clarify.

Following the recent turmoil in Formula 1 arising from the high cost of running competitive motor racing teams, and sponsors doubting the commercial value of being involved in exclusive motor racing, the University of Warwick’s bright minds at the Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre embarked on a journey to prove to the motor industry that is indeed possible to build a competitive racing car by using environmentally sustainable components.

At first, the team produced the EcoOne, the first environment-friendly racing car. Owing to its success and the public interest received, the team began building a bigger and better version, namely the WorldFirst.

The team built the steering wheel of the car from carrots and other root vegetables, the wing mirrors are made from potatoes, and the wing end plates are made from cellulose and flax composites.

Further, recycled aluminium and plastic are incorporated into the lightweight wiring loom and there are 3-D woven natural fibre composites in the bargeboard. The side pod’s glass fibre and resin are made from recycled plastic and an oxygen generating catalyst on the radiator cleans the air as the car moves.

The seat is made from flax fibre shell, soya bean oil foam and recycled polyester. Recycled carbon fibre is used for the engine cover and damper hatch, and preimpregnated woven flax fibre for the bib. Plant oil is used as lubricants, it has noncarbon disks with low embodied energy for the brakes and its livery is recyclable and its branding sustainable.

Not only is the car made of plants, but it can also run on them. It is fitted with a biodiesel race calibrated engine, which runs on waste chocolate and vegetable oil.

“It has been exciting working on the project and important for our team to deve- lop a working example of a truly ‘green’ motor racing car. The project expels the myth that performance needs to be compromised when developing the sustainable motor vehicles of the future,” says University of Warwick researcher and project manager James Meredith.

Now you may ask: How the hell do you build a steering wheel from carrots?

Cellucomp manufactures the steering wheel from Curran. It contains cellulosic nanofibres from carrot pulp combined with other resins, which together form a high-strength polymer with properties similar to a carbon fibre polymer. A mould was created for the steering wheel and the polymer paste injected into it to form the part.

The WorldFirst, however, was not built to reduce the overall cost of racing cars, but rather to improve the impact motor racing has on the environment.

“Typically, with environmental technology there is a higher price to pay, usually because the production volumes of the materials mean that there is no economy of scale. As green technologies become more wide- spread, their cost will reduce.

“In the case of WorldFirst, we have determined that recycled materials can be used to manufacture many components [more cheaply] than with virgin materials,” he adds.

Meredith notes that much of the techno- logy in this car has come from the pas- senger vehicle market. Seats made of soy foam are already in production by Lear.

Environment-friendly wiring looms are already being used by Yazaki, and BASF PremAir has been used on Volvo radiators for a number of years.

The motorsport indus- try has only been concerned with high- performance materials in the past and the challenge is to implement the environ- mental research done into motorsport to highlight the technology and promote its spread into all road cars.

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