When more than 50% of global new-car sales are electric, why would motorsport continue spending billions racing – and improving – internal-combustion engines?

Our projection remains that battery-electric vehicles will likely reach 50% global car sales by 2028.

That transition will reshape motorsport, because racing has never been only entertainment. It has also been a brutal laboratory for testing performance, efficiency, durability and reliability—and transferring those lessons from racetrack to road.

Horse racing helped produce the thoroughbred. Motorsport helped produce the modern car.

But if internal combustion is a technology on exit, why keep directing racing’s engineering effort towards improving it?

Some motorsport traditionalists say EV racing is boring. Automotive commentator Mike Costello put it more forcefully: “Speed without noise is like food without seasoning.”

We understand the sentiment. Sound, vibration and mechanical drama have been central to motorsport’s theatre—and embedded in more than a century of car culture.

But “boring” is not an engineering characteristic. It is a judgement shaped by familiarity, presentation and the rules of competition.

Glider pilots, skydivers, speed skiers and sailors pursue speed and danger without combustion noise. 

The noise is not the performance; it is an artefact of one means of propulsion that a century of car culture taught us to hear as power. In a combustion engine, most of the fuel’s energy is discarded as heat, with more lost through friction and vibration; only a minority reaches the wheels as forward motion. 

Electric drivetrains reverse that equation: much more energy becomes movement and much less becomes waste.

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