LONG PARTNERSHIP Shell has supported Enzo Ferrari from the very first day he started racing

By Leow Ju-Len

IF FERRARI’S FORMULA One team had to buy fuel like the rest of us at Singapore pump prices, the team would be spending over $400,000 a year on V-Power at Shell. Just imagine the amount of rice you could redeem with the Escape Points.

In any case, Ferrari doesn’t actually pay for its fuel, or for the 40,000kg of lubricants sponsored by Shell each Grand Prix season, thanks to a cosy relationship between the energy giant and F1’s most famous team.

“Shell started supporting Enzo Ferrari right from the very first day he started racing,” says Eric Holthusen, who leads fuel technology research in the region for Shell. In fact, the oil giant first sponsored Ferrari (the man) in the 1930s, and were there for him when he rolled out the first racing car to bear his name in 1947.

Mr Holthusen was in town this week to give a talk at the Science Centre about the fuels that Ferrari uses in Formula One. He worked in F1 fuels and lubes research in the 1990s, and is himself a car and bike racer, with a few campaigns at the Nurburgring 24 Hours under his belt.

Apart from an association with motor racing’s most prestigious outfit, Shell’s technical sponsorship of Ferrari allows it to use Formula One machines as high-speed equipment, says Mr Holthusen. “An F1 car is a complete test lab on wheels,” he says.

While the casual viewer merely sees Ferrari brim its cars and then send them off, some fascinating stuff actually goes on behind the scenes.

At Monaco one year, for instance, Holthusen says Michael Schumacher decided he wanted a last-minute fuel change when the weather turned wet before the race. The reason? One of Shell’s fuels gave less aggressive acceleration, and in the days before traction control was allowed, this provided a more controllable car. Schumacher, of course, went on to win.

After winning the French Grand Prix earlier this year, Ferrari’s Felipe Massa made it a point to specifically thank Shell, and there was probably a lot we didn’t get to see to that.

Shell actually blends up to a dozen fuels for Ferrari in the four months between seasons, and the team tries them out on the engines it is developing.

There are 200 different compounds in petrol, and blending them in varying ways is what produces varying results. “The components are the same,” says Mr Holthusen. “It’s the composition that makes all the difference”

Some fuels give lots of top end power for the fast tracks like Monza in Italy, while others might be blended to give instant acceleration for tracks with slow corners, like Singapore.

At any given time, the oil company sends three engineers to work full-time with Ferrari, along with a mini-lab housed in a 22-foot container that is flown out to every race.

This means that the Shell guys could extract a sample of engine oil, measure the metal content in it, and tell Ferrari about any abnormal wear, and do it all trackside. “I did that for a year,” says Holthusen. “It was exciting but you didn’t get any sleep.”

Of course, Shell is really in the business of selling fuel to you and me, so all this F1 stuff has to be relevant to that goal. According to Mr Holthusen, there’s a direct link to the stuff that goes into Raikkonen’s company car and the V-Power that you can buy.

While preparing for the 2006 season, for example, Shell came up a friction reducer that allowed Ferrari to convert more of the energy within the fuel into useful work. The secret ingredient found its way into commercial fuel, and was introduced here in V-Power, in 2006.

In other words, within a matter of months a new fuel blend that gave Ferrari an advantage on the track had found its way into petrol stations here. Something to think about, perhaps, the next time you have to fill up.