Extreme E: the future of motorsport?
But is ambitious new electric race series Extreme E part of the solution or part of the problem? We were in Saudi Arabia to watch the first ever event
Jenson Button and Sébastien Loeb save the planet in electric buggies. Obvs
You join me in the Saudi Arabian desert, where nature has created a soaring and tumbling racetrack threading its way between vast sandstone rock formations. Marshals have warned me to be careful of snakes and scorpions, and I’ve discovered the skeleton of a long-dead camel just off the racing line. You don’t get this at Silverstone or Spa-Francorchamps. Approaching at speed is the eldritch hum of a jacked-up EV; a giant dust cloud stretching in its wake. Extreme E is The Blue Planet meets Mad Max. Here, in AlUla, electric SUVs are doing battle across jaw-dropping terrain. But Extreme E (or XE, for short) goes beyond that. The Desert X Prix is the first of five rounds in this year’s championship, with Senegal’s Ocean X Prix next up, followed by the Arctic X Prix in Greenland, the Amazon X Prix in Pará, Brazil, and the Glacier X Prix in Tierra del Fuego, at the foot of Argentina.
These locations have been chosen to draw attention to the climate crisis. XE has pledged to leave each venue better than it was found by creating ‘legacy programmes’ tailored to aid the natural world and the communities that live here. In AlUla, the series is contributing 25,000 acacia trees and establishing a year-long conservation programme to track and protect the endangered hawksbill sea turtle. In Senegal, it’ll plant one million mangroves. In Brazil, its philanthropy will benefit agro-reforestry. The championship provides opportunities for atmospheric, ecological and oceanographic research, and gives experts a platform from which to deliver their urgent message.
Diversity is also at the core of the XE concept, insisting that all teams run both a male and a female driver – a motorsport first. It’s all very woke, but it’s timed to perfection to engage with millennials who are campaigning for carbon reduction and gender equality through social media.
The women competing include Britain’s Jamie Chadwick and Catie Munnings. ‘Normally we girls are all spread across the world in various championships, so it’s really good for so many of us to come together and encourage each other,’ says Munnings, 23. The average age of the men is much higher, and includes bona-fide GOATs Sébastien Loeb and Carlos Sainz. Jenson Button is both a driver and team owner. That must be extra pressure, right? ‘Definitely,’ agrees JB, ‘and I worry about the car more because I know what the repair bills are. But it’s great to be among some seriously professional teams. You’ve got Nico Rosberg’s team, Lewis Hamilton’s team and Andretti United, which is co-owned by [McLaren’s] Zac Brown. So it’s F1, basically.’
The car, the Odyssey 21, is built by Formula E veterans Spark, and costs £1.2m in parts, so no wonder Jenson’s worried.
Brown calls Alejandro Agag, Extreme E’s CEO, a visionary. (Agag remains chairman of Formula E, the series he created eight years ago.) ‘When Alejandro first pitched Formula E I laughed, and I was wrong. I wish more people in motor racing were as commercially-focused as Alejandro. We’re in the business of sports entertainment, but most motorsports start with the technical blueprint. Alejandro starts with where he wants to go commercially and then thinks about how it’s achieved technically.’
To keep the events’ carbon footprint to a minimum, there are no more than a few dozen spectators at XE races. Teams are restricted to just five ⊲
IT’S ALL VERY WOKE, BUT TIMED TO PERFECTION TO ENGAGE WITH MILLENNIALS
on-site technicians. Many of those involved in the live broadcast are back in a gallery in London or producing graphics in Amsterdam. It’s effectively mixed in the Cloud. There’s a medivac helicopter on-site in case something awful happens, but overhead shots of the racing are recorded by drones.
There are two paddocks, and the first is floating 200 miles away in the Red Sea. The St Helena is a former Royal Mail ship which has been refitted to transport the race cars and logistical equipment, plus half a dozen BMW X5 PHEVs, across 59 shipping containers. With 62 cabins, it also hosts the drivers and staff in the days leading up to the race (yes, they have to bunk together, four to a room). It’s convivial and helps everyone to bond quickly.
The ship’s engines are not electric, but they have been newly converted to run on low-sulphur diesel. Nevertheless, the ship – which sails from one race to another – is by far the championship’s biggest carbon contributor. Its two 54-litre engines take 10,000 litres of fuel per day at sea, and 2500 every day it’s in port. The ship has its own lab. Scientists are invited to take a residency onboard for each leg; tracking bird migrations, for instance.
Each evening, those on board hear presentations from leading scientists and sustainability advocates. These take place in the Tintin Lounge, a drawing room decorated with reimagined Hergé prints that feature the boy reporter and Captain Haddock digging XE cars out of sand dunes or boarding the St Helena in tropical harbours. One shows Agag propping up the bar with the cartoon characters. Tintin fired the Spaniard’s passion for travel and adventure as a child. And his decision to buy the ship was inspired by Jacques Cousteau and his research vessel, the Calypso.
The female racers are primarily here to race, but the elder statesmen I speak with claim the eco element is a major draw. ‘I have two little ones, and your views definitely change,’ Button says of the climate crisis. ‘I’ve always lived in the moment, but when you have kids you start to think about what you’re leaving behind.’
Following a publicity-orientated beach clean-up, where I follow Nico Rosberg around with a bin bag, we make our way to the race location. The coach journey from the port of Yanbu to AlUla should take four hours, but it takes eight due to our driver’s dubious sense of direction. Going the wrong way, we pass several imposing prisons, a reminder that a lot of the people locked up are Saudi dissidents. This is a country where free speech is repressed, homosexuality is illegal and women are second-class citizens. It jars with XE’s progressive and egalitarian ideals. Also, Saudi is the world’s second largest oil producer. State-owned Aramco is top of the list of firms with the highest fossil fuel emissions since 1965.
Isn’t this a case of sportswashing?
‘If we were to only race in a perfect place, we would race in the Vatican,’ Agag parries. ‘We come from countries that haven’t imposed sanctions on ⊲
Saudi Arabia. If you don’t like that, talk to your government. I wouldn’t go to a country that has sanctions. We will not race in Iran or North Korea.’
Brown argues: ‘We’re here to race and entertain. If these countries want to use our sport as a way to transform themselves, that’s a positive. You can decide to help, or not.’
Saudi Arabia allowed women driving licences three years ago, and the right to vote in 2015. Self-described ‘dirt girl’ Sara Price, who’s racing for Chip Ganassi, says she encounters plenty of misogyny in her US homeland: ‘Guys have said I shouldn’t be on a motorcycle. I love being put in cultures that I’m unfamiliar with. We’re saying we respect you, but come and look at what we do and why. We’re opening new eyes.’
Qualifying is on Saturday and races are on Sunday. Each is just two laps of the 5.5-mile course, one for each driver. Normally there would be five cars in the final, but the dust is causing such visibility problems that in AlUla we’re restricted to three abreast. The course has 10 gates, creating pinch points. The dust means that whoever gets through the first gate first is more than likely going to lead for the remaining nine.
The course is perilous. Drivers describe the cars as unpredictable. Mounds of camel grass might easily launch a car or tear a wheel off. Deep sand and ruts may flip a car when cornering. That’s exactly what happens to Veloce’s Stéphane Sarrazin and Abt’s Claudia Hürtgen. Both walk away from spectacular accidents, which go viral (to Agag’s delight). Veloce is unable to compete on Sunday because the accident has wrecked the chassis. Spark hasn’t brought a spare, which means Veloce is out for the rest of the event and thoroughly fed up. Hürtgen suffers a second scary accident the following morning when, unsighted in the sand-stream, Ganassi’s Kyle LeDuc smashes into the back of her car, ending what had been a thrilling duel. As the teams and drivers huddle around data screens in the Command Centre, it feels a bit like the Robot Wars studio.
There are a number of mechanical elements which need tweaking.
The three-click suspension is not up to scratch, batteries are overheating and there are several power steering failures. ‘After going out in the car I reported immediately some issues,’ Sainz tells me. ‘Racing in WRC and the Dakar we become very sensitive to the set-up of the cars, and I think there’s some important work to be done on that side.’
The final comes down to X44’s Loeb and Cristina Gutiérrez against Rosberg X Racing’s Johan Kristoffersson and Molly Taylor and, elevated thanks to ‘Gridplay’ (a power boost gifted by fans and rival teams), Andretti’s Munnings and Timmy Hansen. This is in no small part due to Munnings’ tenacious drive in qualifying trailing a tyre.
‘There was never a question of pulling over,’ she says. ‘It was, okay now I’ve got three wheels. In a weird way, I enjoyed it.’
In the end, RXR is victorious, rallycross ace Kristoffersson building a mighty lead and Taylor maintaining it. Rosberg’s team triumphs against Hamilton’s. ‘How funny is that,’ Nico tells me. The 2016 F1 champ has reinvented himself as a sustainability tsar. ‘The bigger the rivalry, the better it will be to get Extreme E’s message across. The more visible this sport is, the more impact it will have. The power of sports is unbelievable.’
The competition between the sexes is perhaps the most enthralling element. ‘What we’ve seen from the female drivers has been extraordinary,’ says Agag. ‘We’ve built a platform where they can shine. And they deserve it because they’ve shown incredible talent and courage.’
Some of the issues which beset the cars are likely to be solved before the next event, on 29-30 May, and, as Hansen says, ‘Senegal will be a completely different race with a completely new set of challenges, and that’s what this championship is all about.’
The aim has been to race without a trace. The Extreme E site is pulled down, and all evidence of the event is taken away. The local camels re-take their rightful place as ancient AlUla’s traditional off-roaders.
THE SUSPENSION IS NOT UP TO SCRATCH AND THERE ARE POWER STEERING FAILURES