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Racing Green - Kit Chapman ****

It's a perfectly reasonable assumption that a book about a topic you (and most of the world) have no interest in will be uninspiring - and for me, motorsport is on a par with watching paint dry without the aesthetic content. However, David Sumpter's Soccermatics had proved to me that it was possible to take a similarly boring subject and make an enjoyable popular maths title based on it - so perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised that I enjoyed Racing Green.

In part, this is down to Kit Chapman's skill as a storyteller. I often moan about a lack of narrative in popular science books - this book oozes with it. If anything, there's almost too much. Where Sumpter gave us quite a bit of detail on the maths of the 'beautiful game', Chapman gives fleeting glimpses of the science and technology involved in this most technical of sports, sometimes with no more science content than a shampoo commercial. Even so, I can forgive that for the range of technologies and their applications explored here.

Along the way, Chapman brings in simulation, safety design, aerodynamics, battery technology, the physics of brakes, autonomous vehicles, new materials and more. Some of it is fairly predictable - carbon fibre technology, for example - in other cases there are real eye-openers, such as the use of flax as a more environmentally friendly substitute for carbon fibres (sustainability and the environment are common threads throughout the book, hence, that 'green' bit).

As someone with an airline background, I was amazed at how late motor racing realised simulators would be useful - but as with most of the technology employed in the field, once they did, they took it very seriously. Another surprise was the sheer amount of data flowing from Formula 1 cars during a race - far more than even 5G can cope with. I knew how much CERN had to juggle data when searching for particles, but not the extent to which it now dominates motor racing.

All the way through, we get stories to put the tech into context. Not infrequently, given the risks involved in the sport, these stories involve crashes, lessons learned and the use of technology to reduce fatalities. It's a dramatic book that is likely to appeal to a good few readers who rarely dip their noses into popular science titles. 

I do need to mention two issues. The smaller one is that Chapman's storytelling drive is so strong that occasionally it warps reality a little. This comes through in the very first sentence. 'Romain Grosjean has 27 seconds to live.' Well, no, he doesn't. But I can forgive that as dramatic licence. What's less forgivable is when Chapman describes the development of graphene. There is no doubt that of the two key players, the life and work of Andre Geim makes by far the best tale. But to not even mention his co-Nobel Prize winner Konstantin Novoselov, is, to say the least, not very nice.

The bigger issue comes through in the book's subtitle 'How motorsport science can save the world.' This is that classic fallacy, justification by spin-off. NASA often does this. Yes, we've spent all these billions, but this amazing everyday technology is a spin-off from our work. Putting aside the fictional ones like Velcro and Teflon, we can allow NASA memory foam, but the claim, for example, that the need for small computers on Apollo led to the microcomputer revolution is a total misunderstanding of how economics and technology work. It was cheap microprocessors for everyday uses like controlling traffic lights that led to the PC, not bespoke multi-million pound computers.

In Racing Green, the claimed spinoffs are an attempt to launder motorsport's reputation as a money-burning, environmentally damaging waste of resources. It's true there have been some interesting spinoffs - but if the money spent on motorsport had been simply been put into R&D to deal with these problems, it would have achieved far more. Spin-offs are not a justification, unless you are already a fan. The ultimate example of the misplaced fan view in the book for me was the claim that Mercedes is a successful brand because of its motorsport successes. No it's not - the majority of Mercedes drivers couldn't care less if they have a racing team. And credulity is stretched to the limit in suggesting racing autonomous cars will iron out the issues they face on the ordinary roads - because those issues are all about the non-controlled, non-standardised environment of real roads, the very opposite of a race track.

The spin-off justification was a constant irritation throughout the book, but it just shows what a good piece of writing Racing Green is that I could overlook it and still get lots out of the experience.

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Review by Brian Clegg

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