The pollution caused by Montreal’s Formula One Grand Prix causes heart attacks, asthma, even deaths.

The pollution caused by Montreal’s Formula One Grand Prix is negligible, trivial.

The former assertion comes courtesy of Daniel Green of the Société pour vaincre la pollution (SVP), while the latter is from Diane Boulet, the chemist responsible for Montreal’s Réseau de surveillance de la qualité de l’air (RSQA).

Does the truth lie somewhere in between?

Laurie Schraenen, spokeswoman for Montreal’s F1 event, said that “unfortunately, on our side, we don’t have any technical information” about the emissions of race cars and referred questions to individual carmakers.

One of the reasons the impact is hard to quantify precisely, however, is that the toxicity of the cars’ emissions is a closely guarded secret by all manufacturers.

Each car is allowed 100 kilograms of fuel for the race (like in aviation, fuel is measured by weight rather than volume). Beyond that, hard data is scarce.

“The modern fuel is only allowed tiny quantities of ‘non-hydrocarbon’ compounds, effectively banning the most volatile power-boosting additives,” the official Formula One website states.

Racing’s official body takes pains to note that the fuel the race cars use has evolved over the years to the point where it is now “surprisingly close to the composition of ordinary, commercially available petrol.”

“It was not always so,” the website notes. “Early Grand Prix cars ran on a fierce mixture of powerful chemicals and additives, often featuring large quantities of benzene, alcohol and aviation fuel. Indeed, some early fuels were so potent that the car’s engine had to be disassembled and washed in ordinary petrol at the end of the race to prevent the mixture from corroding it!”

That’s partly true, said Green — the gas used in F1 has indeed improved.

But the Grand Prix race, along with Montreal’s fireworks display, are major contributors to the Montreal’s “bad air days”, he said.

“In the spring, you get what’s known as a thermal inversion — it’s colder up, it’s warmer down and the bad air gets sandwiched in between, and stays,” Green said.

“So when you get one of those during the GP, plus the fireworks, plus the cars (of spectators to the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve), you will get a very, very bad air day that will go over the 15-minute standard for ozone, fine particulate matter and NOX — nitrous oxide.”

“That’s when you get your asthma and your heart attacks. Studies have been done in Montreal showing increase in emergency room admissions from respiratory distress and heart problems during bad air days.”

During thermal inversions, people have died, Green added.

“I’m not using the term lightly,” he said.

Green called for Directeur de santé publique de Montréal “to have enough guts” to monitor the emissions from the race in real time. Two monitoring stations are downwind from the track and could measure concentration of pollutants every 15 minutes as the race unfolds.

“That would be revolutionary.”

Boulet said that real-time monitoring has not been conducted during the race because Montreal has no mobile station “to measure it. … But (the two-hour-plus race) is a short time span, and we don’t think it has much of an impact on Montrealers.”

She called Green’s statements “too-broad brush strokes.”

Her department has a monitoring station adjoining the Décarie autoroute, and readings of various toxic emission consistently show they are below the accepted norms, Boulet said.

“I don’t think a car race would surpass those norms.”

Boulet agreed with Green that tires of race cars, which shred into tiny, invisible particles over the course of the race, do give off poisonous dust.

But they disagreed on their effect.

Green said that the wind carries it over the city, particularly over the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district downwind. Boulet said the effects would be confined to “the track and the spectators — very, very local. Not so much Montreal.”

“Actually, the pollution the race causes comes much more from noise than from any other emissions,” Boulet said. “That’s what people complain about.”

One stat may put things in perspective: many of the F1 drivers fly to Montreal by private jet — as does F1’s billionaire boss Bernie Ecclestone and other well-heeled race aficionados. One of those flights spews in the air a multiple of the toxins emitted by all the race cars during the 305.270-kilometre race as well as all the cars driven to the track by people who attend the race.

Stéphanie Lepage, spokeswoman for Aéroports de Montréal, said that several private flights were booked to land at Mirabel and others at Dorval during Grand Prix week. But other flights were booked with FBO’s — fixed-based operations, privately owned charter jet operators like Starlink and Innotech Execaire — and no public record of those exists.