Future Vision

Toyota and other manufacturers have an unprecedented opportunity to shape the future direction of motor sport in a new era of social awareness. Improving motor sport’s environmental image is top of the agenda. As an example, the 2009 FIA technical regulations should include means to promote fuel efficiency, including waste energy recovery and re-use. Another important area is safety, a key project in Toyota research and development centre programmes. While much has been done in the past decade to improve driver security, more can be accomplished for a greener motor sport.

Greening motor sports

Longer term could see completely new engines for motor sport competition, possibly featuring turbocharged designs. Biofuel could also be a future option. And as the leader in Hybrid Synergy Drive®, Toyota is excited by the possibility of applying them to motor sport.

Some purists argue that the new direction is not what motor sport is about. But automotive technology has always advanced. A car in a showroom today has equal or better performance than a car of five years ago, but uses only 60% of the fuel.

Driver safety

Formula 1 has already demonstrated the great advances that can be made with safety. At the start of 2007, Tsutomu Tomita, former chairman and team principal of Panasonic Toyota Racing, presented a Toyota TF105 to the FIA Institute at the inaugural FIA Institute Safety Summit. The car will be used as a training tool for medical and safety officials to improve the techniques of driver extrication following accidents in single-seater racing.

Recently, Toyota has developed a computer simulation which recreates high-speed accidents and their effects on the human body. Using the new system, called Total Human model Safety (THUMS), the FIA Institute and Toyota have been able to study the kind of serious injuries that are difficult to measure with conventional crash-test dummies. The technology will notably help study high-speed rear impact crashes in the FIA Formula 1.