This race car is made from plant fibers, volcanoes ... and seawater? - Ars Technica

Overview

This race car is made from plant fibers, volcanoes … and seawater?

The T70S can be eligible for racing events or built to be road-legal.

Details

To varying degrees, each form of motorsport combines sport, entertainment, and technological development. As Ars has explored, there are valuable lessons that companies can learn from competition, particularly when the pressure is as intense as Formula 1. If you asked me last month, I would likely have said that when it comes to historic racing, it’s almost all about the sport and entertainment, with precious little tech development.

But that was before I spoke with Matt Faulks, executive innovation director at Lola Cars, about the company’s new run of T70S. The original T70 debuted in 1965, and Lola built more than 100, which in the latter half of the 1960s proved effective in short races like the Can-Am series as well as endurance events like Le Mans or Daytona. Latterly, T70S have proved popular among the historic racing crowd, and as Lola rebuilds itself after a 2022 bankruptcy, it’s joining some of the other storied manufacturers that will build you a continuation car. Lola will have 16 new cars, configured either for historic racing complete with the necessary FIA homologation papers as the T70S, or as UK road-legal version, the T70S GT.

But it’s the use of materials that makes the new T70S particularly interesting.

Take the magnesium, for example. “There’s a lot of magnesium [alloy] in that era of race car, and the way magnesium is generally processed and turned into usable parts is … pretty dirty,” said Faulks. “By the time you’ve got a part from it, it’s quite a dirty, carbon-intensive technology that uses some pretty nasty shielding gases in the casting process.”

So instead of getting magnesium that has been smelted via the Pidgeon process, Lola extracts the stuff from seawater via electrolysis, powered by solar. “What we end up with is magnesium ingots, which we can then go do whatever we want with at a massive amount less carbon cost and a massive amount less of, shall we say, general pollution cost than doing it any other way,” Faulks said.

That process also avoids the use of shielding gases in smelting, and Faulks says that for casting, Lola uses a shielding gas that isn’t environmentally damaging.

Then there’s the bodywork; in the 1960s, Lola used fiberglass, as carbon fiber hadn’t yet caught on. Now, it’s using a new composite it developed itself. “It’s a combined fiber system with basalt outer layers, flax inner layers, which is acting kind of like an Aramid, and then a PFA resin system that’s derived from sugarcane. So rather than just being a material, it is a system that you can go make parts with, and we’re running this on cars now,” Faulks said.

Other natural fibers have been incorporated into race car bodywork before. In 2008, the Eco Racing team used hemp fibers in its diesel-powered sports prototype, and more recently, a Swiss company developed Bcomp, which is heavier than conventional carbon fiber but with a fraction of the carbon footprint. Lola’s natural composite system isn’t intended for structural use, unlike Bcomp, but it outperforms fiberglass in tensile strength and stiffness. In addition to body panels, Lola will use it for interior trim and seat backs.

“The really fascinating thing is that we’re taking body work off this now and we’re building cars with it and the quality of the body work in terms of finish, stability out of the tooling, et cetera, is so far beyond an original GRP. We have an original Lola T70 at Lola that we can compare the two of them, park them side by side and panel gaps and stability of panel and everything is so, so much better [on the T70S],” Faulks said.

According to Lola’s lifecycle analysis report on the T70S, its efforts have reduced the car’s carbon footprint by 54 percent compared to one manufactured with traditional materials. In the end, the T70S’s cradle-to-gate footprint is just 4.6 tons of CO2e.

The road-going T70S GT might be a little harder to squeeze through US regulations than the UK’s more permissive approach to small-volume manufacturers. It’s kept a Chevy small block V8 in the back, but one of GM’s modern 6.2 L V8s that meets emissions and offers modern drivability, rather than the 5 L racing engine. The road car is down on power—500 hp (372 k W) versus 530 hp (395 k W) for the T70S—but up on torque, with 455 lb-ft (616 Nm) compared to the T70S’s 400 lb-ft (542 Nm).

And like the T70S, the T70S GT uses a Hewland transmission. The only problem was that the specific model of transmission was sequential, and that wouldn’t be at all in keeping with the mid-60s vibes.

The blue car is the T70S, the silver car is the road-going T70S GT.

“Also, I’ve kind of got this concept in mind that anything that was digital, I wanted to hide it behind the analog. I didn’t want it to be obviously digital. There’s some elements that we have to make digital—engine control and this kind of stuff, because you can’t pass emissions without it, but I didn’t want it to be in your face. I didn’t want a dashboard full of bar graphs in front of you,” Faulks said. “So we thought about this, and we came to the conclusion that the only way we could do this was a fly-by-wire H pattern. So it’s an H-pattern selector, but there’s no mechanical connection to the gearbox. So it’s a modern Hewland gearbox with all that that entails, but your interaction with it as a driver is via an H-pattern that feels like the original Lola T70.”

Since the transmission is sequential and electronically controlled, that means it won’t let the driver do something damaging like accidentally shifting into second gear when you meant to go for fourth, and there’s a mode for use on the track that lets you keep the accelerator pinned for flat upshifts that also blips the throttle on downshifts. “And it will also buffer gears on the way down. So let’s say that you’re hacking around Donington and you know that corner’s second and you’re in fifth, you can just pick second and then as you brake, it will select the gears for you. And again, it’s kind of helping people to be good in the car,” Faulks said.

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Key Takeaways

This race car is made from plant fibers, volcanoes … and seawater
The T70S can be eligible for racing events or built to be road-legal
To varying degrees, each form of motorsport combines sport, entertainment, and technological development
But that was before I spoke with Matt Faulks, executive innovation director at Lola Cars, about the company’s new run of T70S
But it’s the use of materials that makes the new T70S particularly interesting