Although no longer justified, the diesel's reputation for being slow, smelly, noisy, unreliable and difficult to start in cold weather has lingered since the 1980s, when Detroit rushed out half-baked designs in response to the oil crisis.

ECONOMIST: Tech.view: Unbearable lightness? | The

Although the races attract hundreds of thousands of spectators, most of them snatch only brief glimpses of the noisy four-wheeled inverted aeroplanes scudding around the tarmac, their aerofoils upside down to glue them to the track rather than lift them off a runway.

ECONOMIST: Mr Formula One