PADDY POWER!

Is carbon neutral e-fuel the silver bullet petrolheads are praying for? We speak to ex F1 engineer Paddy Lowe, who's leading the charge

- SAM PHILIP

In the early 1900s, an American astronomer named Percival Lowell spent 15 years of his life attempting to convince the world he'd discovered canals on Mars.

A passionate believer in intelligent extraterrestrial life, Lowell penned a series of books explaining why the faint pattern of lines he'd observed on the Martian surface through his Victorian era telescopes proved beyond doubt that the red planet had once been colonised by a tribe of enthusiastic canal builders.

Lowell wasn't a daft man. A respected mathematician and scientist, his astronomical research would later lead to the discovery of Pluto. But his desperate desire to fit the threadbare evidence to his 'clever aliens' hypothesis - to prove true the thing he desperately wished to be true - led him to ditch his critical faculties and become, well, Mr Martian Canals.

When it comes to e-fuel - manmade, carbon neutral liquid fuel that can power any existing petrol or diesel car without modification - I do worry we might have gone a bit Percival Lowell. By 'we', I mean people who like internal combustion engines: the noise, the excitement, the convenience, the fact they don't need to be tediously recharged every hour and a half.

And the promise of a technology that allows us to keep our lovely noisy exciting engines, but without any guilt, any compromise... well, doesn't it seem almost too perfect? Is there a risk we're suspending our objective judgement, cherry picking the evidence, because we so desperately want them to be the silver bullet?

In search of answers, I sought out Paddy Lowe, the former F1 engineer now at the vanguard of the e-fuel movement. After three decades building F1 cars that amassed a dozen world championships and more than 150 race wins at Williams, Mercedes and McLaren, in 2020 Lowe founded Zero Petroleum, a synthetic fuel startup based in Bicester, Oxfordshire.