It’s debatable whether America runs on Dunkin’, but it’s a given that love runs on chocolate. The undeniable proof is Valentine’s Day, which this past week showed us yet again that true amore is a box of chocolates, typically topped with a red bow, and maybe the odd dozen long-stemmed roses tossed in for hopeless romantics.
OK, so maybe love’s a little deeper and complex than that. Maybe. But chocolate’s powers are indisputably splendid and powerful.
Case in point: In 2009, researchers at the University of Warwick (England) took the waste product derived from making chocolate, transformed it into diesel fuel, and used it to power an eco-friendly Formula 3 racecar up to 135 miles an hour.
You want a power bar? There you go, 135 m.p.h. worth of it, revved by chocorocket fuel. Not your granddaddy’s Three Musketeers there, my pedal-to-the-metal friends. Even Betty White’s beloved Snickers didn’t pack that kind of punch.
“I am completely fascinated,’’ said Richard Tango-Lowy, a chocolatier and physicist in Manchester, N.H., after recently viewing a YouTube clip of the Warwick-made car. “It makes sense from a fuel perspective. But from a chocolate-business perspective, I think they could probably pick any number of other things that would make more economic sense than cocoa butter to fuel a car with.’’
To be fair, it was more than just the chocolate-based racing fuel that had lots of people intrigued by the Warwick car. It was an all-around true “green’’ eco-friendly initiative, including a steering wheel fashioned from carrots, the seat from soybeans, and the bodywork crafted from potatoes.
The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things: of carrots and beans and potatoes . . . and whether racecars can be made of such things. In a sport few would deem eco-friendly, it was an attempt toward building a sustainable racecar, an effort that obviously fell on deaf ears — the latter perhaps the byproduct of the noise pollution inherent in the industry. Biofuel, even with the magic of chocolate the basis of its potion, has yet to make its way on to racing’s main menu.
“Yeah, can’t say I’ve heard of a Sunoco bar yet,’’ mused Tango-Lowy, who considers chocolate-making a serious science, and constantly develops new creations at his Manchester shop, Dancing Lion Chocolate. “I think it would be cool to drive in that car.
“But if I was going to use the cocoa butter, I’d rather use it for eating.’’
More recently, there have been significant strides made in steering the race biz toward electric energy, which, among other things, cuts the noise pollution by more than half. Electric racecars could indeed be the future of the industry, with VROOM! replaced by WHIR! and WHOOSH! Yet still with enough punch under the hood to burn rubber and jack speeds to Formula levels.
Round 3 of this season’s Formula E circuit, a 10-city international tour of battery-charged cars, was staged Saturday in Buenos Aires. The tour has a two-day stop (July 15-16) in Brooklyn and wraps up in Montreal (July 29-30). Video clips are easily accessible online (www.fiaformuale.com) and a fun watch.
Warning: It takes a while to adjust to the lack of the big-engine, chest-thumping rumble that comes with Formula E. It’s cool, but from an auditory experience, it’s initially like going from 21st century cinema to the silent movie era.
If there is a car race in the woods, and no one hears it . . . is that really a race? WHOOSH!
In 2014, as the electric Formula cars were ready to debut in a Beijing race, an enthusiastic Kyle Moyer, director of racing for the Andretti Autosport team, told the Globe, “It’s like ‘The Jetsons.’ This is how the future was supposed to be when I was a little kid.’’
Perhaps if the EV racers were more developed and broadly accepted, IndyCar Boston could have avoided its head-on crash last year with City Hall politics and Seaport activists. Noise pollution was high on the list of the NeverRacers, who from the start were dead set against all the ruckus and myriad other inconveniences of staging a true international heavy metal sports event.
In the end, Indy folded faster than the Edsel, and it could be years before all the yelling and screaming from jilted sponsors and bilked ticket buyers fades into the distance. The Hub was on the verge of big league car racing until it hit the mother of all Southie potholes.
Maybe a biofuel pitch would have helped. You know, please come to Boston, where the Harbor is blue again, the Charles is potable, and our racecars run on chocolate. Who could resist such a sweet, sweet vibration?
Tango-Lowy, for one, would worry about the price of making the fuel, the potential for cost overruns. Does that sound like a Boston thing or what?
“It’s really actually very precious,’’ he said, noting the high price of cocoa butter. “It’s perfect for cosmetics and lotions and all that sort of stuff. To use it as fuel, as a byproduct, it would be an ungodly expensive use of a really, really very precious resource.’’
Watching the video of the car rip up the course on cocoa butter, said Tango-Lowy, was both funny and impressive. Not to the point, though, that he would consider giving up his countless hours in the chocolate shop, or traveling the world for new beans.
“I think I’d get the cheapest beans I could get my hands on,’’ he said, asked to estimate the cost of chocolate fuel to get a car racing at 135 miles an hour. “You do that in Madagascar beans, you might as well try to get it to lift off into space because it’s going to cost you about the same.’’
Love runs on chocolate, a perfect fuel for the heart. But gentlemen, start your cars with something else.
Kevin Paul Dupont’s “On Second Thought’’ appears regularly in the Sunday Globe Sports section. He can be reached at dupont@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeKPD.
