CUM ON FEEL THE NOIZE ...

The cars might be quieter, but formula E chief Dodds insists the racing will make a din this year

FORMULA E might not have the roar of a combustion engine – but CEO Jeff Dodds vows that the series is going to make more noise.

That’s because Dodds (left) spent more than a decade working as chief marketing officer for the king of publicity Richard Branson at Virgin Media.

And he knows all the tricks on how to upset the apple cart.

FE returns to the track for their 10th season tonight in front of more than 40,000 fans in Mexico City – and does so with a bigger worldwide fanbase than ever.

But Dodds, who took over as chief executive towards the end of last season, knows that he will have to pull on some of the levers he did with Branson to help the allelectric series realise its full potential in a motorsport landscape dominated by F1.

Dodds said: “There are companies with deep pockets that spend fortunes on every media channel out there.

“Because they can do that, they worry less about the quality of the message and disruptive nature.

“Then there are businesses that are start-ups and, like Virgin, don’t want to spend masses on media.

“So their premium is on how good the idea is, how disruptive the idea is, how creative is the idea... and let’s focus on that.

“We are not going to take on Formula One in scale, we’re not going to spend what they spend, so it’s about how we use their scale to help us.

“How do we create very disruptive, creative ideas of our own to get more talkability and make more noise?

“If I learned anything from Richard, that was the one thing that really stuck with me.

“Virgin’s ethos was to go into an industry where there was an established way of doing things and properly shake it up in the interest of the customer – in our case the fan.

“Richard would speak a lot about being good for people, being good for the planet, good for employees.

“He wanted to run companies that were a force for good and a lot of that stuck with me.”

Formula E estimated that their worldwide fanbase was as big as 340 million at the end of last season.

But that is still just a fraction of the size of F1.

Although that is where wild differences end. Formula E boasts on-track entertainment unlike its rivals, with last year’s Portland E-Prix, which had over 400 overtakes in under an hour, a prime example.

And the performance of the Generation3 car, which Formula E currently uses, rivals any other top motorsport, as proven when it broke the indoor land-speed record before last year’s London E-Prix.

Dodds added: “We have two powertrains in the car, one is opened for propulsion, the other is not. If we open both for propulsion, we know the car will do 0-60mph in about two seconds.

“If you compare that to an F1 car, it’s 2.6 or 2.7 seconds. Compare it to an IndyCar too and it’s blisteringly fast... faster than any other world championship car.

“For us, because the technology is so new, we are still seeing these exponential leaps in technological benefits.

“The year Formula E was established, there were 300,000 electric vehicles sold in the world that year.

“Fast forward to now and there are around 11 million sold each year.”