Driver to Race Dakar Rally on Cooking Oil
By MARI YAMAGUCHI Associated Press Writer
2006 The Associated Press
TOKYO -- A Japanese research team plans to create environmental awareness byentering a race car in the Dakar rally that runs on cooking oil used to frytempura.
The turbo-engine Land Cruiser 100, sponsored by Toyota, will be the first carcompletely powered by biodiesel to enter the prestigious event, said HidefumiOnaka, a lecturer at the Osaka Sangyo University, which helped test the fueland provided technical support.
"We want to show what tempura oil can achieve, as a way to raise environmentalawareness," Onaka said this week. "We're not doing it just for fun, so wedecided to enter an internationally acclaimed event and appeal to the world."
Driving the car will be former Formula-One racer Ukyo Katayama.
The Dakar rally starts in Lisbon, Portugal in January next year. The racetests man and machine over 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) of rough terrainand parched desert to Dakar, the capital of Senegal, the westernmost countryon the African continent.
Onaka said the team will need about 10,000 liters (2,600 gallons) of tempuraoil, which will be donated by students, the school cafeteria, as well asneighborhood restaurants. He said it will be reprocessed by biofuel maker RevoInternational Co. in Kyoto.
Katayama's racing unit, Team UKYO, and Osaka Toyota Corp., a Toyota-affiliatedregional car dealer and repair service provider, are also taking part.
Biodiesel fuel is still rare in Japan, though it is used in some buses,garbage trucks and other vehicles in several cities.
"The idea is to drive on biomass fuel, which is easier on the environment,over the dessert that is severely affected by global warming," Katayama wroterecently on his Internet blog. "I want to be the first to complete the Dakarrally on non-fossil fuel."
Although biodiesel fuel generates about 20 percent less power than regulardiesel oil, it creates less black smoke and almost no sulfur oxides, achemical that causes acid rain, Onaka said.
If cost-cutting is achieved through mass-production, tempura oil could be thefuture fuel for resource-poor Japan, he said. A small drawback, however, isits odor.
"The smell isn't as appetizing as tempura," he said. "After intensive fueltesting in my lab, I had heartburn and didn't even want to look at tempura fora few days."