Accelerating sustainable innovation: How the FIA is driving the future of hydrogen power through motor sport

From the introduction of disc brakes in the 1950s to the creation of the world’s most efficient hybrid power units with the 2014 generation of F1 regulations, motor sport has always been a hothouse for advancement, a place where the pursuit of competitive advantage relentlessly drives innovation.

The will to win is a strong lever, but when it’s joined by an even stronger imperative – a societal demand for change – and boosted by the arrival of new technologies ripe for exploration, that’s when motor sport’s ability to push the boundaries of development really kicks into gear. 

In June, that was demonstrated in Macau, with the ratification by the World Motor Sport Council of the first ever set of technical and safety regulations for liquid hydrogen-powered vehicles. The rules not only protect drivers and teams by establishing a clear set of standards that allow for safe, high-performance use of liquid hydrogen (LH₂), they also serve as a platform to accelerate innovation around the fuel source. And in a world where the demand for sustainable solutions is increasingly vocal, that desire to innovate is particularly strong, as FIA Head of R&D Nicolas Aubourg explains. 

“The FIA is always seeking to become more sustainable, to decarbonise motor sport, and hydrogen is possibly the ultimate expression of that because you put H₂ and oxygen from the air in your power unit, and the only byproduct at the exhaust is water provided that the combustion process is properly controlled and completed,” he says. 

“We also have several manufacturers that are highly interested in this technology. Currently, no one is quite sure if the future will be hybrid, electric, sustainable fuel, or hydrogen so research into hydrogen is very much on the radar of companies such as Toyota, who already have a hydrogen road car, the Mirai, and BMW who are about to launch one. Hyundai has hydrogen models, Alpine has shown some demonstrators, and even Ferrari is interested in this technology, as they see potential for hydrogen to be used with internal combustion and not with a fuel cell. 

“Finally, as the FIA, we have a very interesting set of tools — with some championships also very interested in hydrogen as a future option. The ACO (Automobile Club de l’Ouest) and the 24 Hours of Le Mans, want to be pioneers with this technology and they think that there is a way to make a step forward and to change motor sport.”

Expert Coalition 

Initiated in 2021, the project first focused on compressed gaseous hydrogen, the form most commonly used in road vehicles. However, as development deepened it became clear that gaseous hydrogen presented problems. 

“If you want to design, let’s say, a hypercar, which was our first objective because of the ACO’s strong interest, you have to have big, pretty heavy tanks and that makes the design of a race car quite complicated,” says Aubourg. “Also, the time for refuelling is long—it’s very difficult to do it below two minutes or even three minutes because you have a lot of changes of temperatures, materials. It’s quite complicated to deal with.”

With liquid hydrogen featuring higher energy density and lighter storage requirements, ideal qualities for a racing environment, the decision was taken in the winter of 2023 to make the switch. There was, however, one additional issue – this was largely uncharted territory with few previous applications. Faced with a blank canvas and a largely unfamiliar new technology, the FIA took the radical step of seeking expertise from every area of hydrogen power, a move that brought onboard some surprise contributors and which also proved transformative. 

“What we discovered with H₂ is that it is a fascinating environment, one really made for development and one with some very interesting stakeholders,” says Aubourg. “It was natural for us to involve Toyota and BMW as they already have hydrogen-powered road cars, but then you start to look at who is working with liquid H₂, and there is one above all others – rocket science and the space industry. And in Europe that means Arianespace and the Ariane group. They have an enormous amount of expertise, so we looped them in, and they are still very much involved. 

“Beyond that we are talking about industrial companies such as Air Products to supply hydrogen and FORVIA for tanks… And quite rapidly, you begin to build a very interesting ecosystem of people.”

Aubourg also found there was a willingness to embrace motor sport’s potential to deliver rapid advances. 

“People working in rocket science, on road cars, on trucks, in the army, on planes – for them motor sport is a liberating environment. In this phase ​we really don’t care about reliability, about comfort. It’s only about performance and only about prototypes. With planes you need 10, 20 years to bring things to market. In motor sport, it’s a five-year plan. For them, motor sport is a kind of refuge, a closed environment, and it is pure development.”

Building ‘bricks’

With a direction of travel established and expert support in place, Aubourg says the next step for the FIA Technical Department was to assemble the ‘bricks’, the key technical specification and safety requirements needed to construct the new framework. 

Among the bricks are safe storage and temperature control, weight minimisation, refuelling procedures. And it is tank design and heat reduction that have occupied much of the process. 

“The working point of liquid H₂ in motor sport is very specific,” says Aubourg. “It’s extremely, insanely cold and the issue is that when you want to keep it liquid, you have to store it in something that is isolated from heat—any heat. And if there is one thing a race car generates it is heat. As soon as you put it in ambient conditions it starts to get hotter, and you get what’s called boil-off.”

Boil-off must be carefully controlled, and any resulting over-pressure must be properly managed to avoid leaks and potential flash or jet fires. Ensuring that LH₂ is kept sufficiently cold and that pressure-control systems operate effectively is of paramount importance

“The good news is that the solution is relatively simple,” says Aubourg. “As soon as you put what we call a vacuum jacket around the tank it can be very, very efficient. We are also aided by the fact that in motor sport we don’t need to store the liquid in the tank for a long period, as you do in a road car, so we are finding some new solutions to have the right level of isolation, the right dormancy time [where stored fuel evaporates over time, building pressure] and to make the packaging and the design much better for a race car.”

The FIA Technical Department has also collaborated with its sister Safety Department to take the design into the real world through a series of physical tests. 

“We began testing in October and they are ongoing,” explains Aubourg. “These consist of building a storage system with 20 kilograms of liquid H₂ on board, the maximum limit we have specified in the regulations, and the tanks overpressure system is tested, or we check what happens when pipes are cut. The next step is to destroy the storage system and to check what happens when you have a full liquid H₂ spill going onto the ground.”

Weighing in

As with every motor sport category, weight reduction is a primary goal with hydrogen competition and Aubourg is certain that the research being undertaken to evolve the regulations will yield massive real-world improvements – particularly in the areas of tank and fuel pump design. 

“Instead of the 100 or 120 litres required for a race car using fossil fuel, with LH₂ you would need around 300 litres. We can find some solutions in terms of design, and we could also envisage more hybrid solutions to lessen the LH₂ load on board. Plus, the weight of the storage system is decreasing every day. The more we engage with manufacturers, the lower the weight goes. Some suppliers have started to create composite LH₂ tanks. So, everything is decreasing.

“Another issue is the weight of existing LH₂ pumps. If you want to find a pump just to raise the LH₂ to 70 bars to put it in an ICE, the existing pumps on the market are, like, 30 kilograms. Compare that to a 500-gram fossil fuel pump. There is a lot to do there, but again prototypes are being designed by the manufacturers.”

Finally, refuelling is another “technological brick” the FIA working on as research continues and the regulations evolve. 

“There is a protocol which is a bit complex, but we are working with TotalEnergies who are in charge of delivering the LH₂ for future endurance racing,” says Aubourg before explaining that existing refuelling methods are not suited to racing.

“In Germany, some LH₂ refuelling stations for heavy-duty trucks already exist and can refuel a vehicle with around 1,000 km of autonomy in roughly ten minutes However, for motor sport we need to go well beyond this performance: instead of ten minutes, we need to achieve 40 seconds, meaning a refuelling rate of one kilogram per second. It’s challenging, but according to first simulations it seems possible.”

This, for Aubourg, is the reward of creating the first set of liquid hydrogen regulations – a vast sandbox in which the potential to take rapid innovation to the race track and into wider society is a very real prospect.

“it’s been a long time since I have seen that motor sport can be such a laboratory,” he insists. “And honestly, work like this is more and more important,” he insists. “People, especially young people, are extremely concerned by sustainability matters in motor sport, and beyond. We have to anticipate this. If we want to race tomorrow, we have to do it. It’s our duty – but a happy one.”