Chocolate? Rico wants one

The New York Times has an article by Jim Motavalli about a car that runs on chocolate:

A team from the Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Center at the University of Warwick in Britain said it had built a Formula 3 car, running on thirty percent biodiesel derived from chocolate waste, with a race-spec steering wheel partly made of carrots and other root vegetables. Parts of the front wing and the mirrors are made of potato starch and flax fiber. No gingerbread or jelly beans were harmed in the making of the car.
James Meredith, who heads the project at Warwick, worked in alternative fuels (including natural gas) at Ford of Britain before his university appointment. “The car isn’t on the track yet, but the engine is running well on a dynamometer and we plan to take it out for track testing in two weeks,” he said. The goal of the project, he said, is “to show what is possible. People love motor racing, and the trick is to do it in a more environmentally responsible manner. A racing car doesn’t have to harm the planet.”
Warwick has fifteen partners in the venture, including the racing team Lola Cars. Lola supplied a 2005 chassis and considerable expertise in parts fabrication. Mr. Meredith said the F3 car (with a much-modified BMW 2-liter, 4-cylinder turbodiesel engine) should be capable of hitting 135 miles an hour, but he acknowledged it might not be competitive with the latest track cars.
Chocolate fuel? “Anything with a fat in it can be turned into diesel, and that’s what we’ve managed to do,” Mr. Meredith said. The waste chocolate is from Cadbury’s in Birmingham. The team reportedly does not sample the raw material. “It’s waste, so I assume it’s not good to eat,” Mr. Meredith said.
The steering wheel incorporates nano-scale cellulosic fibers extracted from carrot pulp left over from juicing. It comes as a red paste that can be molded and sets to become a hard polymer, Mr. Meredith said. According to the World First Racing Web site, other environmental materials going into the car include seats made with soybean oil foam and recycled polyester, plant-based lubricants, a side pod made from recycled bottles, a recycled carbon-fiber engine cover, and radiator coatings that transform ozone to oxygen.
Formula 3 rules do not allow for chocolate-derived biodiesel fuel, Mr. Meredith said, but the team is working on eligibility. “This is not a pipe dream,” said Simon Bergenroth of the Britain-based marketing firm Life Agency.

Rico says it's just this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that's gonna save the planet...