NASCAR should look at going green

LOS ANGELES -- NASCAR's venerable 358 engine is a dinosaur.It's been the staple power plant on the stock-car tour since the early 1970s, when NASCAR's Bill France Jr. decided to kill off those 427s, 428s and 429s as not so PR-plus, given the oil shock, and go to smaller engines.But who even knows what a carburetor is these days?And with gas at $4 gallon, it may be time again for NASCAR to reevaluate what's under the hood of these race cars and get more in tune with the rest of America.The guys in Daytona and in race shops around North Carolina may not be that good at thinking outside the box, and they've always got plenty of reasons why things can't be changed. But do NASCAR drivers really need 875-plus horsepower at their right foot?That's been a question for a couple of months now, with gas prices at $4 a gallon or so and the U.S. economy on the skids.And when a couple of General Motors' nonracing engineers rolled into California's Auto Club Speedway the other day in a hydrogen-powered SUV -- an FCV, Fuel Cell Vehicle -- and gave the keys to Kevin Harvick for puttering around town, well, the debate may have moved to another level.Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. are to get their own hydrogen cars in a couple of weeks, to drive around Charlotte, in the next phase of a low-key rollout for a new line of alternative-powered vehicles.Don't look for hydrogen-powered cars in the Daytona 500. How long did it take NASCAR to switch to unleaded gasoline? But there are things that NASCAR can do to appear more in step with the real world. And NASCAR is as much about marketing as it is about racing.NASCAR isn't so much about Detroit anymore, or anything tangibly related to what carmakers actually put out on the street for the average American to drive, as much as it is simply about entertainment.There's nothing wrong with NASCAR as entertainment. But that disconnect between Detroit and NASCAR that promoter Humpy Wheeler has been railing about lately, as the price of gas goes up, the U.S. economy tanks and car sales plummet, ought to be raising a red flag.Maybe NASCAR execs need to start thinking in some new directions. A modest proposal: NASCAR and its car-making business partners -- Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Chrysler and Toyota -- reshape the sport's pace-car programs to feature green power rather than monstrous gas-guzzling engines.Toyota already has some plans in the works for that, and GM is considering that as well.With carmakers suddenly trying out all sorts of alternative-fuel vehicles, what better way to test market some of those prototypes than as pace cars for NASCAR's big races?It might be a good move here. This is the heart of the valley of smog, the I-10 corridor between the Pacific and the Ontario/Fontana gateway to the East. It would be a really nice PR touch if NASCAR could add a bit of green out here, if only at the front of the pack.So into the California track rolled Michael Johnston and Alex Keros, two GM engineers who are part of Project Hydrogen, in an average looking soccer-mom SUV, with odd squiggly circles on the side, powered by a fourth-generation hydrogen fuel cell, from the $1 billion project.Hydrogen?Is it really a solution to smoggy Los Angeles, is it really a solution to $4 a gallon gas, is it really a solution to the oil crisis?Maybe, maybe not. But at least it's something worth looking into, and NASCAR executives could make some brownie points by jumping in here.Hydrogen? The first reaction might be Hindenburg.But GM's Keros -- senior project engineer, hydrogen infrastructure, field service and support -- said with the safety aspects of the entire system, car and refueling, "You're not any more at risk with this than you are with gasoline today."We wouldn't be putting it out there if it wasn't safe. Right now this program is just to prove the technology, to drive the technology forward, to build the market, to get the data points."The goal: to have this technology cost-efficient for general-production sales by 2010.GM is working with Shell on this particular project, and Shell is providing stations for the vehicles. It's not just the engine technology that's an issue, but the fuel-distribution system across the country.Adding hydrogen pumps -- such as E-85 pumps, electrical outlets or whatever -- to these stations makes sense. Detroit won't sell any FCVs if drivers can't easily fill them. California has 25 such hydrogen-refueling stations, and there are similar stations in Shanghai, Tokyo, New York and Washington.But maybe it's just the shotgun approach -- and obviously nothing has hit a mark in Daytona or Charlotte yet. But, giving the benefit of the doubt and considering that vehicles in the U.S. use the equivalent of about eight million barrels each day, that not only depletes a scarce resource but also contributes to the incessant smog that blankets this valley, south of the San Gabriel Mountains. Maybe NASCAR executives ought to jump in here somewhere and use their marketing clout to make some points with the public."Green" isn't something that NASCAR gets very easily, unless it comes out of a wallet.But that may be changing. There are signs that NASCAR is finally starting to understand.E-mail Mike Mulhern at mmulhern(at)wsjournal.com.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)