This race car is made from plant fibers, volcanoes, … and seawater?

这辆赛车竟然是用植物纤维、火山材料……还有海水制造的？

To varying degrees, each form of motorsport combines sport, entertainment, and technological development. As Ars has explored, there are valuable lessons that companies can learn from competition, particularly when the pressure is as intense as Formula 1. 在不同程度上，每种形式的赛车运动都结合了体育、娱乐和技术开发。正如 Ars 所探讨的那样，企业可以从竞争中汲取宝贵的经验，尤其是在像一级方程式（F1）这样压力巨大的领域。

If you asked me last month, I would likely have said that when it comes to historic racing, it’s almost all about the sport and entertainment, with precious little tech development. But that was before I spoke with Matt Faulks, executive innovation director at Lola Cars, about the company’s new run of T70S. 如果上个月你问我，我可能会说，谈到历史赛车，它几乎完全是关于体育和娱乐的，几乎没有什么技术开发可言。但那是在我与 Lola Cars 执行创新总监 Matt Faulks 谈论该公司新推出的 T70S 系列之前。

The original T70 debuted in 1965, and Lola built more than 100, which in the latter half of the 1960s proved effective in short races like the Can-Am series as well as endurance events like Le Mans or Daytona. Latterly, T70S have proved popular among the historic racing crowd, and as Lola rebuilds itself after a 2022 bankruptcy, it’s joining some of the other storied manufacturers that will build you a continuation car. 最初的 T70 于 1965 年首次亮相，Lola 制造了 100 多辆。在 20 世纪 60 年代后期，这些车在 Can-Am 系列赛等短程比赛以及勒芒或代托纳等耐力赛中表现出色。近年来，T70S 在历史赛车圈中广受欢迎。随着 Lola 在 2022 年破产后重组，它也加入了其他一些传奇制造商的行列，开始提供“延续车型”（continuation car）的制造服务。

Lola will have 16 new cars, configured either for historic racing complete with the necessary FIA homologation papers as the T70S, or as a UK road-legal version, the T70S GT. But it’s the use of materials that makes the new T70S particularly interesting. Lola 将生产 16 辆新车，配置分为两种：一种是配备必要 FIA 同源认证文件的历史赛车版 T70S，另一种是符合英国道路法规的 T70S GT 版本。但真正让新款 T70S 变得特别的是其所使用的材料。

Take the magnesium, for example. “There’s a lot of magnesium [alloy] in that era of race car, and the way magnesium is generally processed and turned into usable parts is… pretty dirty,” said Faulks. “By the time you’ve got a part from it, it’s quite a dirty, carbon-intensive technology that uses some pretty nasty shielding gases in the casting process.” 以镁为例。Faulks 说：“那个时代的赛车中有很多镁合金，而镁通常被加工成可用零件的方式……非常不环保。当你最终得到一个零件时，这是一种非常肮脏、高碳排放的技术，在铸造过程中使用了相当有害的保护气体。”

So instead of getting magnesium that has been smelted via the Pidgeon process, Lola extracts the stuff from seawater via electrolysis, powered by solar. “What we end up with is magnesium ingots, which we can then go do whatever we want with at a massive amount less carbon cost and a massive amount less of, shall we say, general pollution cost than doing it any other way,” Faulks said. 因此，Lola 没有使用通过皮江法（Pidgeon process）冶炼的镁，而是通过太阳能驱动的电解法从海水中提取镁。“我们最终得到的是镁锭，然后我们可以用它做任何想做的事，而且其碳成本和我们所谓的总体污染成本，比任何其他方式都要低得多，”Faulks 说道。

That process also avoids the use of shielding gases in smelting, and Faulks says that for casting, Lola uses a shielding gas that isn’t environmentally damaging. Then there’s the bodywork; in the 1960s, Lola used fiberglass, as carbon fiber hadn’t yet caught on. Now, it’s using a new composite it developed itself. 这一过程还避免了在冶炼中使用保护气体，Faulks 表示，在铸造方面，Lola 使用的是一种对环境无害的保护气体。接下来是车身；在 20 世纪 60 年代，Lola 使用的是玻璃纤维，因为当时碳纤维尚未普及。现在，它使用的是一种自主研发的新型复合材料。

“It’s a combined fiber system with basalt outer layers, flax inner layers, which is acting kind of like an Aramid, and then a PFA resin system that’s derived from sugarcane. So rather than just being a material, it is a system that you can go make parts with, and we’re running this on cars now,” Faulks said. “这是一个组合纤维系统，外层是玄武岩，内层是亚麻，其作用类似于芳纶纤维，再加上源自甘蔗的 PFA 树脂系统。所以它不仅仅是一种材料，而是一个可以用来制造零件的系统，我们现在已经在车上使用它了，”Faulks 说。

Other natural fibers have been incorporated into race car bodywork before. In 2008, the Eco Racing team used hemp fibers in its diesel-powered sports prototype, and more recently, a Swiss company developed Bcomp, which is heavier than conventional carbon fiber but with a fraction of the carbon footprint. Lola’s natural composite system isn’t intended for structural use, unlike Bcomp, but it outperforms fiberglass in tensile strength and stiffness. 此前也有其他天然纤维被用于赛车车身。2008 年，Eco Racing 车队在其柴油动力运动原型车中使用了大麻纤维；最近，一家瑞士公司开发了 Bcomp，它比传统碳纤维重，但碳足迹却小得多。与 Bcomp 不同，Lola 的天然复合材料系统并非用于结构件，但在抗拉强度和刚度方面，它优于玻璃纤维。

In addition to body panels, Lola will use it for interior trim and seat backs. “The really fascinating thing is that we’re taking body work off this now and we’re building cars with it, and the quality of the body work in terms of finish, stability out of the tooling, et cetera, is so far beyond an original GRP. We have an original Lola T70 at Lola that we can compare the two of them, park them side by side, and panel gaps and stability of panel and everything is so, so much better [on the T70S],” Faulks said. 除了车身面板外，Lola 还将其用于内饰和座椅靠背。“真正令人着迷的是，我们现在正在用它制造车身，而且车身在表面处理、脱模后的稳定性等方面的质量，远远超过了原始的玻璃钢（GRP）。我们在 Lola 有一辆原始的 T70，可以将两者进行对比，并排停放时，T70S 的面板间隙和面板稳定性等各方面都要好得多，”Faulks 说。

According to Lola’s lifecycle analysis report on the T70S, its efforts have reduced the car’s carbon footprint by 54 percent compared to one manufactured with traditional materials. In the end, the T70S’s cradle-to-gate footprint is just 4.6 tons of CO2e. 根据 Lola 关于 T70S 的生命周期分析报告，与使用传统材料制造的车辆相比，其努力将车辆的碳足迹减少了 54%。最终，T70S 从摇篮到大门的碳足迹仅为 4.6 吨二氧化碳当量。

The road-going T70S GT might be a little harder to squeeze through US regulations than the UK’s more permissive approach to small-volume manufacturers. It has kept a Chevy small block V8 in the back, but one of GM’s modern 6.2 L V8s that meets emissions and offers modern driveability, rather than the 5 L racing engine. 相比英国对小批量制造商较为宽松的态度，公路版 T70S GT 可能更难通过美国的法规。它在后部保留了雪佛兰小缸体 V8 发动机，但使用的是通用汽车现代化的 6.2 升 V8 发动机，该发动机符合排放标准并提供现代化的驾驶性能，而不是 5 升的赛车发动机。

The road car is down on power—500 hp (372 kW) versus 530 hp (395 kW) for the T70S—but up on torque, with 455 lb-ft (616 Nm) compared to the T70S’s 400 lb-ft (542 Nm). And like the T70S, the T70S GT uses a Hewland transmission. The only problem was that the specific model of transmission was sequential, and that wouldn’t be at all in keeping with the mid-’60s vibes. 公路版车型的功率有所下降——为 500 马力（372 千瓦），而 T70S 为 530 马力（395 千瓦）——但扭矩有所增加，为 455 磅-英尺（616 牛·米），而 T70S 为 400 磅-英尺（542 牛·米）。和 T70S 一样，T70S GT 使用了 Hewland 变速箱。唯一的问题是该型号的变速箱是顺序式的，这与 60 年代中期的风格完全不符。

“Also, I’ve kind of got this concept in mind that anything that was digital, I wanted to hide it behind the analog. I didn’t want it to be obviously digital. There’s some elements that we have to make digital—engine control and this kind of stuff, because you can’t pass emissions without it, but I didn’t want it to be in your face. I didn’t want a dashboard full of bar graphs in front of you,” Faulks said. “此外，我心中有一个概念，任何数字化的东西，我都想把它隐藏在模拟仪表之后。我不希望它看起来太数字化。有些元素我们必须数字化——比如发动机控制之类的，因为没有它就无法通过排放测试，但我不想让它太显眼。我不希望仪表盘上全是条形图，”Faulks 说。