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The 100% electric racing series Formula E has announced its intention to sprout another EV series called Extreme E last week. The new series of green races will focus on electric cars that look more like the ones we drive every day, even though they will compete in intense conditions in places around the world threatened by climate change. This is the craziest idea of the founder of Formula E, Alejandro Agag.
The first season of the new series will begin in 2021. It will have 12 teams. The races will pit two drivers against each other in a round robin in a round robin style at each location. The cars will be custom-made for the series on a technology similar to Formula E, but with the possibility of making them look like road cars of the participating manufacturer. This allows them to directly promote these cars in a way that they can not use with Formula E, which uses more traditional (but hyper stylized) race cars.
Formula E has met a lot of expectations for a series of races going beyond the use of electric cars. His races are short. They almost all run in the streets of the city. Fans can use social media to give a temporary boost to their favorite drivers during the race. This season, there is even a new Mario KartStyle feature on each course that gives drivers a few minutes of increased power.
This new series, however, will be even further. According to the series, not only will races take place in remote places, such as the Himalayas, the Sahara desert, the Amazon rainforest and even the Arctic, but they will not be televised live or to the public either. Live broadcasts have become an important source of revenue for almost all major racing series beginning in the 1980s, but in-person presence has been the lifeblood of motorsport for much longer. Extreme E will instead produce a series of ten documentaries directed by former actor and filmmaker Fisher Stevens (who is the artistic director of Formula E) and will be broadcast at the end of 2021.
Formula E is currently three races in its fifth season. Launched in 2014, this series aims to promote awareness of green energy and climate change, but also to help automakers advance electric vehicle technology. When the series was launched, Agag introduced it as a site for leading global manufacturers to develop and test efficient EV technologies, which would then be reflected in dozens of electric road cars. that they had planned for the future. years. (This is an argument similar to that of the Formula E fighter, Formula 1, which is considered a test bed for advanced automotive technologies.)
While it is difficult to quantify the impact of Formula E on climate change awareness, the series has certainly been successful in attracting automakers. Audi, BMW, Nissan and Jaguar are all field teams in the series. Mercedes-Benz and Porsche plan to be part of it next season. This exceeds the two or three manufacturers in other major racing series such as NASCAR, IndyCar and Formula One.
The participation of so many automakers has helped transform Agag's unusual idea of a series of 100% electric races in major urban centers into an unusual success. (Money has done the same, Agag has collected and injected hundreds of millions of people into the sport.) The founder and CEO of Formula E has also helped to organize a series of sub-series where competitors fly Jaguar I-Pace electric SUVs on the same urban circuits launched this year. There is also Roborace, a prototype Formula E racing series that is still taking off.
The strange format of Extreme E could have some advantages over these other activities. Overhead costs should be low, without it being necessary to equip each race with a full live broadcast team, or the infrastructure needed to host tens of thousands of fans . But it seems that this is of little interest to some of the manufacturers currently in Formula E. If that happens, Agag's new series of races could help answer a new question on this issue. famous eternal question: if a race takes place in a forest and nobody can look at home or in person, does the winner's choice really count? ?
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