An Alternative Calendar Could Cut F1’s Logistical Carbon Emissions by Almost Half
On Tuesday, Formula One unveiled its new calendar for the 2023 season approved by the World Motor Sport Council. The talking point of the new calendar has been the addition of two new race weekends, bringing the number now up to a record-breaking 24 races, and with it, an additional ten thousand tonnes of CO2 compared to the previous 2022 calendar, an increase of 15%.
This environmentally unsustainable calendar is antithetical to a statement they released 3 months prior acknowledging they need to restructure their calendar to be more sustainable by making ‘plans to build future F1 calendars to improve freight and travel logistics so the sport is moving more efficiently around the world’. Yet, when F1 were drafting up their 2023 calendar they must have seemingly lost their plans_to_build_a_more_efficient_ f1_calendar.docx file and have released a calendar that has no regard for its environmental impact.
The file may be lost, but it is not forgotten. In this article, I propose an alternative 2023 F1 calendar that would reduce the sports logistical carbon footprint by 46% in line with the sports sustainability ambitions to go carbon neutral by 2030, all while considering environmental conditions and ensuring a familiar structure to which fans are accustomed to.
While most of the attention is focused on the cars, they are in fact only responsible for 0.7% of the sport’s entire annual carbon footprint. The largest contributor by far, making up almost half the sport’s total carbon footprint, is the logistics sector. This alternative calendar would therefore reduce the sport’s overall carbon footprint by more than 10%.
The F1 2023 calendar routes are geographically messy; packing, transporting, and unpacking on multiple continents in the span of a few weeks. The proposed alternative calendar is cleaner, taking the form of an arc, starting from Australia, sweeping over East Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America before crossing the line in Brazil. This would reduce the overall annual distance covered by 175,000 km, which is more than four times the circumference of the Earth.
In terms of carbon emissions, this change would drastically reduce the logistical carbon footprint from 80,000 tonnes of CO2 over the course of a season down to 43,600 tonnes. These figures also take into consideration the transportation from the team’s home bases (UK) to the first Grand Prix and vice versa for the last Grand Prix (given 7 of the 10 teams are based in the UK).
This could be further reduced by replacing air and sea freight with road freight for specific portions of the season, given that air freight contributes to 98% of the total logistical carbon footprint. By sectioning the season into regions, the proposed calendar now allows for freight to be transported by road instead of air and sea for the Abu Dhabi — Hungary and the Canada — Miami stints, which would reduce the carbon footprint by a further 20% from the proposed alternative calendar.
Three years ago, Formula 1 set new targets to transition to a more sustainable future committing itself by going NetZero for 2030, however, instead of waiting till then, the sport could become sustainable now if it chose to. The 2023 calendar was the perfect opportunity for Formula 1 to show its passion and commitment to sustainability but instead, it went down the route of expansion without any regard for its environmental impacts.
Methodology
For those that have read this far, this section is dedicated to explaining how the figures were calculated and also the limitations of the data.
The carbon emissions were calculated using the DHL carbon calculator, the logistics provider of F1, for sea, air, and road freight. The carbon emissions data is given as kgCO2e Wheel-to-Wheel (WTW). The carbon emissions were calculated to and from the closest cities/towns to the racetrack as the DHL calculator struggled to find routes to the tracks themselves.
The weather is taken from their respective national climate and weather institutions.
The way F1 ships their cargo around the world created a limitation barrier to the accuracy of my calculations. You see, F1 divide their cargo into ‘critical’ and ‘non-critical’. This is essential because every race weekend the F1 circus needs to transport roughly a thousand tons of cargo, with some races featuring on back-to-back weekends, meaning the freight needs to be packed up on a Sunday night, transported thousands of miles, unpacked, and set up ready for Thursday. Critical cargo is essentially all the equipment needed for the race to take place, such as pit stop equipment, computer servers, and car components. While non-critical cargo is all the other equipment that is not essential for a race to proceed, such as jacks, trolleys, and kitchen equipment.
For most race weekends, critical cargo is transported by plane while non-critical cargo is transported by shipping containers. The shipping has an additional step of there being 3 sets of 5 identical shipping containers, with each set being sent off in advance to the various tracks due to the time it takes for shipping. An exception to this is during the European stint, where all the freight is transported on road by trucks.
*F1 does not publish sufficient data for where the shipping containers are sent off in advance, therefore the calculations for shipping freight are worked out by using the weight and distance between the tracks.
One track that was particularly difficult to incorporate into the schedule for the right time of year was Canada. I have placed Montreal in early October when temperatures can get colder than the drivers and teams are accustomed to. But this is not unprecedented, Canada was once held before on the same date as proposed in 1978, making it the coldest F1 race to have ever taken place at just 5 °C, won by Gilles Villeneuve. I also think this would make for a more interesting race weekend as teams and drivers need to adapt to cooler environmental temperatures.
Results
