THE POWER TO SURPRISE
If Formula E leaves you cold, try Extreme E. A sceptical Colin Goodwin is won over
MY PRE-DRIVE VIEWING OF THE YOUTUBE FOOTAGE OF the Extreme E round in Saudi Arabia earlier this year provided a couple of insights. Firstly, this electric off-road series is actually very entertaining to watch and interesting in its format, and second, it appeared to be extremely easy to roll the car.
We’re at an off-road track near Narbonne in France that’s used by a number of manufacturers to test WRC cars. France’s answer to Wales’s Sweet Lamb but with more dust and the heat turned up. Veloce, the Extreme E team run by Daniel Bailey, son of F1/tyrrell driver Julian, is here with the team’s only car. Rolling it would be a significant inconvenience for them. Also here are drivers Lance Woolridge from South Africa and Christine GZ, who is half Italian and half Spanish (full name Christine Giampaoli Zonca).
Woolridge is going to take me around the course and explain how to drive the Extreme E car (full name Odyssey 21) without putting it on its roof or worse. The car is built in France by Spark Racing Technology, which also builds Formula E cars. Veloce’s car is run by French rallying experts ART (think Cockermouth’s own M-sport) but from thereon in it’s Union Jack waving time with batteries supplied by Williams Advanced Engineering, electronic controls and ECUS by Mclaren and the digital dashboard and controls by Cosworth.
The Odyssey 21 weighs a few bags of sugar under 1800kg, is 4.4m long and 2.3m wide. Ground clearance is a generous 450mm. There are two 240kw e-motors, one at each end, and the batteries have a useable 40kwh capacity. Plenty for Extreme E’s short sprint races. Total power in pistons and con-rod terms is 550bhp. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of options for apportioning power axle-to-axle and also settings to reduce overall power. This is a very good thing from Woolridge’s point of view as he will be sitting next to me when I drive it.
I am also keen to not roll the car into a ball as getting into the thing is hard enough but extracting oneself from it in a state of agitation halfway up a tree would be even harder. It feels like I have been shrunk and inserted into a Tamiya model. It’s left-hand drive with the steering wheel close to the chest even though the steering is powerassisted. Two pedals, obviously, and a large handbrake lever to my right. Woolridge has already demonstrated how the use of this is essential in tight turns.
With power turned up full, the Odyssey will hit 62mph from rest in 4.5sec. Woolridge reckons he’s wound it down to 400bhp for my drive. It feels quick, but not ridiculously so, though acceleration is almost irrelevant here. For an amateur it’s all about trying to read the surface, anticipate bumps and steer the car in roughly the right direction. In the first year the cars had only two dampers at the back but they’ve been doubled up to control rebound and to cure the car’s habit of pitching forwards. Huge 37-inch Continental tyres on 17-inch rims do as much to soak up the bumps as the 350mm of suspension travel.
I once drove a Peugeot 206 WRC car for an evo feature and you could really feel all the sophisticated systems apportioning torque and quite literally getting you out of trouble. This car feels very different. Because it is heavy and tall you have to really work at driving it. The handbrake is essential in tight corners and in faster corners the car is less responsive than a rally car – a quick lift off the throttle doesn’t neatly tuck the nose in and remove understeer. I found using the terrain’s ruts and berms could help keep the Odyssey 21 on track.
The lack of internal combustion engine? Never thought about it. It could just be that the off-road environment is the perfect arena for EV motorsport. As any of you who have ridden an electric mountain bike or trials bike will have already discovered, the lack of a piston engine makes little difference to the enjoyment or challenge. Formula E bores me to death and holds no fascination. Driving this Extreme E racer has opened my mind to the concept that electric rally cars might also be exciting to drive – and to watch.