Sleep deprivation jokes aside, Zadig and his teammates are now as serious about using E85 as they are about winning races. What’s more, they plan to burn cellulose-based E85 whenever possible, and at the 25 Hours of Thunderhill in early December, they did. The endurance race is held each year in Willows, Calif. This year about 70 cars and 280 mostly amateur drivers raced for a title that, by duration if not prestige, trumps even the famed 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Rolex 24 at Daytona, Fla. “It’s the poor man’s version of those races,” Zadig says.
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In 2006, Zadig’s team finished third overall at Thunderhill, running a car with a gas-guzzling rotary motor—a good engine but one that consumed a lot of fuel, Zadig explains. “I liken it to pouring gasoline on an open flame,” he says. Zadig and his team returned to Thunderhill this year with a new name, a pair of new cars and a new fuel, making history with cellulose-based E85. They didn’t win, but the No. 87 GAM car finished second and the No. 28 car, the one Zadig helped drive, recorded the fastest lap. No one was surprised that the fuel performed flawlessly. Serious racing enthusiasts already know ethanol is a high-performance fuel—Indy Racing League’s total switch to ethanol from methanol in 2007 proved that. What Zadig’s team demonstrated, however, is more applicable to the public. GAM confirmed that E85, a fuel consumers can buy, performs as well on the track as it does on the highway. Second, it advertised the fact that cellulosic ethanol, with more than 80 percent fewer lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than conventional gasoline, is real. “We’re showing people that there are technologies out there today, cellulosic ethanol in particular, that when brought to a certain level of scale and consumer adoption, provide solutions,” Zadig says.
Conflicting Passions
Despite his longtime fervor for car racing, Zadig has always been an enviornmentalist. “As a child, I got all sorts of wonderful exposure to the country and the mountains, which imbedded in me a strong sense of caring about the environment,” he says. In addition to his deep-seated respect for the nature, Zadig, an engineer and entrepreneur, has an appreciation and talent for business and invention. He now oversees the global operations for Telegent Systems, a start-up semiconductor company that’s bringing mobile TV to cellular phones and portable media devices. “I wouldn’t typify myself as someone who is a fanatical environmentalist, but one who sees the need for balance between reducing the human mark on the world and the need to make the economies of it all work,” he says.
“Going green” is no flight of fancy for Zaidig. He holds a patent for a wave energy converter for use in offshore and deep-sea locations. So how does Steve Zadig, the entrepreneurial inventor, become Steve Zadig, the environmentally conscious race car driver? As it turns out, he’s been interested in racing longer than he’s been successful in business. In fact, Zadig dropped out of college in 1970 to pursue racing full time. He planned to work principally to finance his need for speed, but ended up in another race: the booming semiconductor business. In the late ’70s, he decided to focus on his career and his family. “I stopped racing for the better part of three decades,” he says.
Then, in 2001, after guiding a few companies through initial public offerings, Zaidig retired. But he didn’t slow down. “I decided to take up the sport of racing again,” he says. “It was an unfinished piece of business for me.” This time around Zadig got his fix from endurance racing, otherwise known as road racing. “I got hooked on the team aspect of it,” he explains. Working with teams is one of his many talents, and it’s something he enjoys as much as racing itself. “That’s really what I do best,” he says. “I build teams. In my professional career it was building teams to develop chips. In this case, it’s winning endurance races.”
Bear in mind that the type of racing Zadig is involved with is characteristically amateur. These drivers pay to play. With the exception of the world’s elite racing leagues—Indy, NASCAR, Formula One, etc.—auto racing is not a sport in which wealth is created, but burned up. “The best way to make a small fortune in racing is to start with a big one,” Zadig quips.
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