The MotoGP World Championship will face a new era from the 2024 season with the use of biofuels in its three categories, something that will not worry Honda too much because for this they have the best possible travel companion in the championship. And the fact is that Repsol’s sponsorship of the official team of the golden wing is much more than a conventional sponsorship, because in turn the Spanish oil company It provides its prototypes with the fuel with which they fight for every title and victory.
They have attested to it today so much Marc Márquez What Pol Espargaro, the official pilots of golden Wing, at the Repsol Technological Center located in the Madrid city of Móstoles. There they have played at being chemists who design biofuel and synthetic fuel, with elements such as goat feces or traces of wine, to name just a few. For this they have had the help and advice of Dolores Cárdenas, advisor product design (product design consultant), who has given everyone present a master class, starting with helping us understand why biofuels arrive.
“A very important detail to understand why biofuels are used is climate change, which is related to the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. It is a planetary problem and to mitigate this problem, solutions that do not emit CO2 are as valid as those that emit zero emissions, no emissions, but they are associated with a withdrawal of that CO2 that is emitted and that is when renewable fuels come into play. “, Cárdenas began by saying before specifying more: “Biofuels can be used in combustion, competition, MotoGP engines. When we use it in the engine, combustion occurs and CO2 is emitted, but that CO2 is nothing more than what was previously removed from the atmosphere in a previous phase in which the biomass absorbs thanks to nature, photosynthesis, CO2 from the atmosphere, from whose waste we make these fuels. In the combustion there is an emission, but it is compensated with the withdrawal in a previous phase to produce those fuels”. And he finished off with synthetic fuels, which “are another type of fuel that also help us neutralize CO2 emissions and are created by producing renewable hydrogen and capturing CO2 industrially. What nature does with photosynthesis in biofuels, in synthetics we do it naturally with raw materials”.
And the final summary and the real essence of Repsol in the races, beyond the publicity involved in sponsoring the official Honda team since 1995: “These products are already available to the competition, which is the perfect bank to be able to evaluate them, design them and then transfer them to commercial products”.
For Márquez it was not the first visit to the CTR and he knows very well what they do in these facilities: “I have come here a few times and I know that they help us directly to the competition team, because it is where they develop all the fuels. It’s amazing to see how they do it. It’s inexplicable. For me it is far from understanding, but it helps us a lot for the competition team”. And a final pearl and maximum essential in the races: “Together we all seek the greatest possible efficiency”.
Pol, for his part, is very clear that “we are going to a much more sustainable way of life and, those of us who are parents, trying to leave a better legacy for our daughters. The competition is the best point to investigate and obtain more sustainable fuels, which consume less, which is something very important for us, to be faster but also to do more laps. The future is greener and I like to be part of it.”
While the biofuel for 2024 arrives, in this laboratory they are already working on the fuel for 2023, with a single-cylinder engine of which there is only one equal copy in Saitama, at the Honda factory, self-confident because the one for 2022 is ready and tested so that Márquez and Pol can step on the top of the podium from March 6 in Qatar, which is when the new course starts that has Marc “with butterflies in his stomach”.
