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Alcohol fuel was used in Brazil some years ago. From what I understand it was used mostly for economical reasons. First of all, they wanted to give the agricultural (specially the sugar indistry) a boost and second of all they didn't want to depend much on other countries for their fuels. However, it didn't turn out to be a very succesful measure. In fact, I think that the program was dropped and every car in brazil now runs with petrol again (though I'm not sure). Anyway, from what I understand, the biggest problem with alcohol is it's cost. I think I read somewhere that Methanol (like the one used in CART) costs 14 dollars per gallon (prio to any taxes that could apply). However, I guess you could consider a government policy in which takes gathered from petrol would act as a mean to slash down methanol prices and therefore encourage people to switch to that fuel.
I think I once heard a statistic some years ago that said that only about 2-5% of the contamination production in F1 is the resposability of the cars during race-qualifying-etc. The other 95-98% is mainly due to the transportation (trucks, planes, etc) and another part to the making of the car itself.
But regarding your question Sparky, that's not a very easy question to answer. Certainlly an F1 car is not exactly an "eviromentaly friendly" machine......but, I guess you could say that they're just 22 cars compared to millions around the world and that it really doesn't add up to much....but....I don't know, I'll have to think it over.
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