MATERIALS
DRIVING CIRCULARITY
Motorsport has become a potent outlet for testing re-refined transmission fluids that support the future of EV efficiency – Siobhan Doyle speaks to one Formula E team at the forefront of this
T
he world of transport is going electric and EV fluids have a vital role to play in this transition. This is because
the demands on electric vehicle (EV) transmissions are more acute than conventional transmissions, with maximum torque delivered at low speeds and the increasing integration of electric motors. Furthermore, EV transmissions are now evolving from a separate electric motor to a combined system. As the market’s offering of EV
technology evolves, so must the industry’s testing capabilities to help support it. In fact, racing series Formula E is a testbed for British oil company Castrol which works with Jaguar TCS Racing, using their competing car, the all-electric Jaguar I-TYPE 6, as a fast-paced laboratory to trial the comparable performance of a more circular transmission fluid. Castrol has been the racing team’s
official EV fluid partner since 2019, working with the team to co-engineer advanced EV fluids and lubricants to realise the performance and sustainable solutions that can propel
the efficiency of future EVs. “The use of re-refined EV
transmission fluid is a great demonstration of circularity in action on the racetrack and supports the wider company ambition to adopt circular economy principles so we can reduce the use of virgin materials,” says James Barclay, Team Principal of Jaguar TCS Racing and Managing Director of JLR Motorsport. “We have a clear aim to achieve carbon net zero by 2039 and embed sustainability into the JLR DNA.”
TESTING FLUIDS Jack Lambert, Research and Innovation Manager at JLR Motorsport, provides further insight into the process. “Throughout Season 9 (2022-23), which was the first deployment of Formula E’s Gen3 car, we looked at this performance lubricant through a different lens to say, ‘can we do this in a more sustainable way?’,” he says. “Formula E has a tight-knit ecosystem – we [manufacturer teams] control our own cars, powertrains, our logistics, meaning everything is manageable
in this small space. This allows us to accelerate the process of exploring a more sustainable approach to managing fluid.” He adds: “We first look at the waste
fluids coming out of the car, or out of the powertrain, whether that’s from race activity, test activity, or from our rigs at our factory base in Kidlington, Oxfordshire. We view this waste product as feedstock rather than something that we need to dispose of. We then, with Castrol, looked at ways to get ‘the good stuff’ out of this waste that we can use again.” Jaguar TCS Racing has developed
a process, in collaboration with Castrol, to extract the base oils from fluids already used across the team’s operations. “We use the process of distillation to remove additives that are in the transmission fluids,” he explains. “After, we are left with base oil because it has a significantly higher cut point than a lot of the other additives in the mix.” Waste transmission fluid taken
from across the team’s test and development activity is collected and re-refined by Castrol to recover
Jaguar TCS Racing was the first Formula E team to introduce a more circular transmission fluid into its race cars
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