Lowe goes from F1 to '600 million years in three minutes'

BICESTER, England: Top engineer and former team boss Paddy Lowe spent decades measuring in milliseconds how to make Formula One cars go faster, but his tagline now is "600 million years in three minutes" as he focuses on consigning fossil fuels to history.

The 61-year-old, who left his job of Williams F1 team principal in 2019, has become a pioneer of synthetic fuels as co-founder of British-based Zero Petroleum.

On Wednesday he opened "Plant Zero.1", billed as the world's first fully-integrated facility to make synthetic fuel from air, water and renewable energy, at a former World War Two airfield near Oxford.

Lowe has had no talks with F1 and is not missing it - he says so unprompted - but the technology has huge relevance to a global sport with 72 per cent of its carbon footprint caused by air travel and logistics.

Zero entered the Guinness Book of Records at the end of 2021, with Britain's Royal Air Force as partners and providers of R&D funding, for the first flight powered by a fully synthetic fuel.

"Many people don’t believe things until they see them happen for real and that’s what we managed to do there," said Lowe, who worked for McLaren and Mercedes during dominant periods in Formula One.

"This is just the beginning of a very exciting forward journey to take this incredible technology to a huge scale," added the Briton, who said he had always felt "guilt on my shoulder about fossil fuels".

"Eventually, within just a few decades we anticipate with great conviction that all the fuel we use today as fossil fuel and more, because consumption will not reduce, will be made by synthesis."

The science is based on the 1920s work of Germans Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch, who came up with a process to produce liquid