Extreme E: Electric Racing on Untested Terrain - Long Read

There were some championships that went through the COVID-19 shutdown with some trepidation, given that their business models were based around mass transit, around going to heavily populated parts of the world, and around holding big, expensive races that would require enormous levels of development on the part of the teams in order to be successful. On a practical level, most forms of motorsport require either access to a race track, the building of that track on a temporary basis in a city, or the creation of a course in a natural environment for rallying.

All of these traditional forms of motorsport suffer from the same issues when hit by one, or more, of climate change, an economic crisis, or a global pandemic. They all involve, usually, the attendance of spectators, they all use enormous amounts of fossil fuels on air or sea freight, and involve some degree of independent travel for teams, fans, and media, and they stand accused of damaging the planet, and even of promoting the damaging of the planet, being, as they are, marketing tools for the motor industry.

Motorsport, then, is at a quandary. It’s always had maximalist tendencies - check out the numbers involved in transporting an F1 paddock from one country to another. That isn’t sustainable when people are increasingly of the view that the internal combustion engine, and fossil fuels, are two of the main causes of climate change.

Formula E has kept team sizes, and car development, to a minimum, ensuring it can streamline the delivery loads transported by DHL from race to race. There are some people who feel motorsport can do even better. Alejandro Agag, founder of Formula E and CEO of Extreme E, is one of them.

What is Extreme E?

Extreme E is a new form of motorsport that takes purpose-built electric off-road vehicles to relatively inhospitable parts of the planet, racing on rally-style courses, with the aim of providing entertainment, but also educating a captive global TV and online audience (on-site spectators are severely restricted by design) about the dangers of climate change, and providing help, support, and scientific research while visiting. The whole circus will travel together, by boat.

The Odyssey 21 in action (photo: Extreme E)

Drivers’ Programme

Another place where motorsport can do much better is in representation, and in the diversity of its competitors. Extreme E has gained many headlines for trying to tackle this problem, by ruling that each car entered should be driven by one male and one woman driver. Each driver will drive one lap of the course, with a swap taking place after it has been completed.

So far the only confirmed drivers for any team are Chip Ganassi Racing’s Sara Price, a Californian driver who is an Off-Road Truck champion and a medallist in the X-Games extreme sports contest, and her teammate Kyle Leduc. 29 other drivers are on the official Drivers’ Programme list, meaning teams are welcome to contact them - though team bosses may choose freely from other drivers, too.

Whoever is not driving the car over a particular ten-kilometre lap will be navigating for the person who is driving. While it is certain that a rally driver will know their way around a set of pace notes, for a racing driver coming from asphalt circuits, these may present something of a culture shock. It should provide plenty of viral content for “Best Team Radio” conversations.

Each driver pairing, rather than competing against each other, will be helping each other to achieve the fastest possible time, and they will have to work out signals and processes between themselves to ensure that they each are on the same page in the car, literally and figuratively. It’s a lot of pressure, and a lot to cope with, considering everyone is new to Extreme E. While only one driver announcement has been made, rallying experience will presumably be at a premium in order to provide that grounding in writing and reading pace notes.

This may make 2016 Australian Rally Champion Molly Taylor, one of the entrants to the Drivers’ Programme, a pick on the minds of several teams. Another who will be keen to promote her rallying credentials is former European Rally Championship driver Catie Munnings, who steps up to the World Rally Championship’s J-WRC category in 2020. Munnings is one of the drivers who was interested enough in this unique motorsport startup to put her name down for the Driver Programme, which features people from all motorsport disciplines, from Formula E to rallying to rallycross.

Munnings’ ERC drives were limited due to a tight budget. “There’s always limiting factors, for me it was always [previously] budget. Last season we had reliability issues, and we covered 200km, the same distance as one total WRC event, and it was very difficult, because you always need to be keeping your eye in. To not have that consistency is very difficult as a driver, but I have to say, it’s something I’m used to - it’s not like, as a driver, I’ve been testing every weekend or had the budget to do that.”

For many women in motorsport, the problem is a lack of track or stage time, and a lack of budget. The reasons for this are multiple and complex, but a well-funded championship like Extreme E has taken a step in the right direction by mandating that each driver pairing should be a man and a woman.

Extreme E, if Munnings is selected, would be a guaranteed programme, with multiple national TV deals currently being concluded, including one with Channel 4 in the UK. Sometimes the battle for a racing driver or a rally driver is to put themselves in a place where potential sponsors and employers are able to see their abilities. For Munnings and many others, Extreme E presents an opportunity like no other.

Legacy Programme

Extreme E takes the format of a short-form rally stage, uses electric-powered cars suited to cross-country raids such as the Dakar Rally, and sends the whole effort to some of the regions most threatened by climate change. These are places that have never before, in the main, hosted any form of motorsport.

In order to add to the damage as little as possible, Extreme E will be travelling to these places using the RMS Saint Helena, once a Royal Mail vessel that performed an essential role transporting passengers and cargo to and from the island of Saint Helena, a British Crown Dependency which is one of the most isolated places in the world, and was the final resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte. The ship is being repurposed not only to accommodate drivers, teams, and event staff, but also a team of scientists.

It’s all part of what is called the Legacy Programme, the aim of which is to piggyback on Extreme E’s travels and provide insight into the effects of climate change, and give the opportunity for research into how to curb its effects in the future.

As Munnings explained, a lot of the reason she is so enthusiastic about Extreme E is the Legacy Programme. “I’m looking forward to the work we’re going to do in the communities we’re going to visit - that’s something I’m very passionate about,” she said.

Of course, racing drivers want to race, and Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky potentially has a head start on the other drivers, having been employed by Continental, the supplier of control tyres to the championship, as a test driver. Ahlin-Kottulinsky has seen at first hand how electric power, and instant torque, means the Odyssey 21, Extreme E’s car, produced by Spark Racing Technologies, has different, but enjoyable, dynamics.

‘Enjoyable’ is not normally a guarantee when you’re talking about something 2.3 metres wide, but the car’s Williams Advanced Engineering battery produces 400kw (about 550hp), and in spite of its heft it can go from 0-62mph in 4.5 seconds. When Continental, who the Swede had worked for long-term in Sweden, contacted her, she “thought it sounded crazy, but also really, really exciting.”

“What I really like is you can turn the car and control it using the throttle, and you get this instant torque.” She may be a touring car driver by trade, but Ahlin-Kottulinsky comes from Sweden, and so her formative driving experiences were in an Audi A6, on ice. This, she felt, has given her an appreciation of how to find traction on a changing, natural, surface. “On the ice, I learned how to control the car using braking and acceleration. Sometimes when you don’t have that grip you’re expecting from the tarmac, you’re missing the acceleration, but in an electric car, you get full power straight away, and therefore once you get used to the car, it’s easy to handle.”

“I can say that I’m really thankful to have driven so much on the ice,” Ahlin-Kottulinsky continued. “In the end, the car is more like a rally or rallycross car - I did an event in rallycross back in 2014. In my experience this is a bit like ice-driving. You need to work a lot with the load change of the car, and the pitch of the car.”

“From my side it took me about half a day to realise how to work with the car, but once I understood it, it was a really great drive. It’s a huge car, but once you’re in it and you know how to work with it, you really feel like you’re one with the car, placing it in the corners, and pushing it, even though it’s so huge. I’d say it’s about twice as big [as her regular TCR Scandinavia touring car]. It’s wider, longer, and higher. That’s why I was so surprised I still felt one with the car, and after just half a day.”

Ahlin-Kottulinsky won the opening race of the TCR Scandinavia Championship in 2019, showing the kind of speed that has seen her be a long-term part of the Red Bull Driver Academy, through whom she was given mental and physical fitness programmes during the break from racing due to the coronavirus. She is on the Driver Programme list, and will be hoping to be the pick of one of the teams. Her words on the handling of the car will also be encouragement to those who are stepping into this new form of motorsport with no experience of such a car.

There are drivers who enter a new sport with no sense of fear or nervousness. Simona de Silvestro, who has raced in IndyCar, Formula E, Australian Supercars, and many other series, is of that mind. “I thought it would be really fun to do; I’ve always been on asphalt and never had the chance to do anything different, and with all the different places they were going to, it seemed like a really cool concept, so I thought, ‘why not try and be part of it?’”

The Swiss driver, who drove in Formula E with Andretti Autosport, has plenty of experience to draw on of hustling an electric car around a street circuit, though of course a 10km off-road course is another kind of challenge. She will also be able to draw on having raced in the gruelling Bathurst 1000, the most famous race in Australia five times, in a heavy Supercar that may well present decent training for Extreme E. De Silvestro also has four Indy 500 starts under her belt.

Simona de Silvestro as part of Venturi Formula E in 2018 (photo copyright FIA Formula E)

“My IndyCar past, my Supercars past, it’s all part of my history, and while my path isn’t maybe what I thought it would be originally, it’s led me here. I like it when I get the chance to focus on something 100% - an IndyCar to a Supercar is really, really different! A lot of people, I think, don’t want to risk it, but when I look back, it’s really cool to say I’ve driven in these different series. I’m 31 years old, I’ve lived pretty much all over the world, I’ve driven in all kinds of race cars, and met some great people, so I think I can say I’ve grown a lot, and so far it’s been a pretty cool journey.”

Driving dynamics

Ken Block, the veteran American stunt specialist who has carved out a career as a kind of Evel Knievel of rallying, gathering hundreds of millions of views for his Gymkhana series of rally shows, is arguably the world’s best-known loose-terrain driver. Block was a great catch for Extreme E when they wanted a driver to demonstrate the Odyssey 21.

Though he was entered into the Dakar Rally, taking place this year in Saudi Arabia, the American was only to take part in the final stage, and would have to cope without a co-driver, effectively meaning his run could not be compared with the rest of the field. Nonetheless, Block was able to get plenty of speed out of the car, recording the third fastest time on the road.

Block’s run may have got the mainstream media’s attention, but Ahlin-Kottulinsky had been putting in the work well before that. Therefore, she is ideally placed to tell us about the unique dynamics of the Odyssey 21.

“I would say I can compare it with my rallycross experience - this is more of an off-road buggy in comparison. It’s got quite different suspension, because you’re going off-road, rather than on a circuit. It has a huge travel - 450mm - and what is special is the instant acceleration, meaning when you need it you get power straight away, and I think that makes it easier to handle when you’re drifting.”

For some track specialist drivers - Formula E drivers Sam Bird and Lucas di Grassi spring to mind from the list who have put themselves forward for selection - this will, the electric powertrain excepted, be about as far from their racing experience up to now as it is possible to go.

For others, like six-time World Rally Champion and bona fide living legend Sebastien Ogier, or reigning World Rallycross Champion Timmy Hansen and his brother Kevin, the transition may be smoother (no irony intended), but they will still have to adapt their driving styles to something that puts their inputs instantly onto the road, and which behaves fundamentally differently to the smaller hatchback-derived cars they are used to driving.

Munnings is someone else who shows few nerves about the idea of jumping into Extreme E, saying, “obviously I love rallying, but this is similar - I mean, the car’s massive, and it’s going to be different driving an SUV, but there’ll be similar off-road techniques, and the basics are going to be the same.”

New experiences

As was the case for the drivers heading to China for the first-ever Formula E race in September 2014, Extreme E will be something none of the drivers - even a grizzled rally veteran like Ogier - have experienced. Munnings won’t be perturbed by that. “I didn’t really start out doing UK rallying or club rallying.” Instead, there was the opportunity to jump straight to the European Rally Championship, which is the equivalent of skipping karting to go straight to Formula Three.

“When we started out there was an opportunity to do ERC, and I was looking at that and thinking it would be the fastest juniors in the world, and there’s a lot of crossover between the J-WRC and ERC, so there’s not much difference [in terms of level].”

“So I was going from no rally experience to putting myself against the best juniors in the world. At the time, we said if I was able to pitch myself against them, and then compare and study them and watch on-boards back-to-back of their different techniques, I’d progress a lot quicker than if I wasn’t up against that level.”

“I’m glad we did that, if I’m honest with you, because it did mean I was able to put myself in positions I wouldn’t have been able to if I’d done it a different way.” Going up against the all-star list of drivers who want to do Extreme E will just be another step forward for Munnings, and it’s one that, if given the opportunity, she will take on with her usual analytical sense of care.

De Silvestro may have had to take a roundabout path in her career, but she is the kind of person who greets each unexpected challenge as an opportunity. She left her Supercars drive to take up a position with Porsche Formula E as Test and Development Driver, going to each of the races as the team’s official reserve driver and racking up the kilometres in the simulator. She often shares simulator sessions with race drivers Andre Lotterer and Neel Jani, with data exchanged between the driving squad and engineers.

Although racing drivers are, like most athletes, largely creatures of habit, de Silvestro is not someone bound by routine, and arguably possesses more adaptability for a series like Extreme E than many would.

“Every country is different - the mentality is different, the racing is different. If I compare the racing in Europe to in America or Australia, I can see differences. For example, in Australia you would say the atmosphere is a little more chilled and relaxed, and in America as well. It’s cool to be involved in that.”

For de Silvestro, adaptability is key (photo copyright FIA Formula E)

“It’s also adapting yourself. If you’ve a driver sometimes you think your way is the way, but if you end up doing a lot of different series you have to adapt, and not be afraid, and learn the different aspects of it. I think it took me a little bit of time to get that and understand it, but it helps me now if I get to a new team to understand how to work with them.”

New horizons

Adaptability will be key when it comes to the five-event calendar. The provisional timetable begins with a trip to Lac Rose, near Dakar, the capital of Senegal, from 22-24 January 2021. The irony of this is that the event named after Dakar - the Dakar Rally - is now no longer on the same continent as the city. The championship then goes to the modern home of the Dakar Rally, Saudi Arabia, for a race through Sharaan, in Al-Ula, from 4-6 March. There is then a two-month break before the third event, on the Kali Gandaki Valley in Nepal from 6-8 May. From 27-29 August, round four takes place in Greenland, and the season concludes with a trip to Santarem, on the banks of the Amazon River, in the State of Para in Brazil, from 29-30 October.

None of these venues have hosted motorsport before. Taking electric buggies to these regions presents a fantastic opportunity to introduce long-term sustainability projects and funding to regions and communities in need of both, while bringing scientists to the regions to perform first-hand studies of climate change. For racing fans, it will bring picturesque and hopefully thrilling media coverage of challenging courses being driven by some of the best drivers in the world.

“I think the big thing with Extreme E is you’re going to go to locations that I don’t think you’d have ever thought of driving a car there,” said de Silvestro. “Like, going to Senegal, or Greenland, I might have visited there to see what it was like, but to be able to go and do what I love doing there, which is racing, I think it’ll be pretty fun, and pretty much the first few rounds of the first year are quite exciting. Most of the race tracks around the world, you pretty much know where you are going to be, like with your hotel, and it’s going to be totally different here.”

Ahlin-Kottulinsky agreed, and is hoping to get the call-up to drive for one of the teams being announced as taking part, in the wake of the confirmed entry of Veloce, Chip Ganassi Racing, and Andretti Autosport. “I’m really hoping that’s the case; I was so happy to get the call from Continental to develop the car. I’m also really excited by Extreme E’s plans - we’re not just going to go and drive the cars, there’s also the Legacy Programme, scientists are going to go with us to each location, so I like the whole projects, and I would like to be one of the drivers next year, but that’s up to the teams.”

Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky (photo: Shivraj Gohil / Spacesuit Media)

Extreme E’s Science Team also has representatives with genuine pedigree. Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, who leads the team, is the author of papers which have warned of the dangers of inaction on climate change. Professor Wadhams is undeniably of the broad opinion backed by 97% of the scientific community - that climate change presents a threat to life on Earth - and it is reasonable to assume that to gain his backing, Extreme E must have had to promise a scientific programme with real teeth, not just a diplomatic exercise.

The question remaining

There is, nonetheless, an elephant in the room. With motorsport lending a great deal of prestige to countries hosting events, there are questions over what price the hosting of these events should carry. These questions were asked of Bahrain and Abu Dhabi when they first hosted Formula One races, and they were asked of Saudi Arabia when it was given a Formula E race, all three of these examples being due to concerns over the countries’ human rights record.

Taking an event in an environmentally conscious series such as Extreme E to Brazil, and to the Amazon River, at a time when President Bolsonaro is enabling the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest at an unprecedented rate, and when he is attempting to put the blame for it on non-governmental organisations protesting the action, is potentially problematic, not to mention the Brazilian government’s treatment of indigenous peoples. Of course Extreme E comes with a Legacy Programme, and seeks to bring awareness to the effects of climate change, but the implementation of the Legacy Programme will presumably have to be signed off by the governments of the host countries.

There is a question over to what extent sport can bring change within a country, and to what extent it provides a veneer of respectability to questionable regimes, otherwise known as ‘sportswashing’. These are legitimate questions to ask, as sport does not exist in an apolitical bubble, especially not in 2020, and it will be well worth looking at what happens in the fullness of time, and holding the executors of the Legacy Programme, along with the host governments, to account.

In its favour, Extreme E has an Amazon scientist on its team, Francisco Oliveira, and will be performing research while also providing assistance to local communities in Para State, along with the other areas it visits. Formula E has consistently taken the principle that it is better to be in a country as a force for change, than on the outside, and Extreme E seems to be operating with the same attitude.

Exchange of views

De Silvestro racing for Amlin Andretti in Formula E (photo copyright FIA Formula E)

Even though Extreme E’s teams and drivers will be competing against each other, there will be plenty of chance for drivers to meet and talk to each other on that boat. It’s inevitable that the more experienced drivers will have information to pass on to their newer, younger colleagues, even in a series where most are getting used to an entirely new way of racing, as de Silvestro conceded.

“All my career I’ve fought to be in a good race car, and here, you’re always going to be in a good pairing. It’s going to be new for me, too. In a career things sometimes aren’t always easy, and for sure the way I went at it, and if some girls have questions, hopefully we all get to inspire the younger generations to be race car drivers and to have success in the sport.”

Extreme E is on untested terrain, in every possible way. Turning racing from an individual sport into a true collaborative exercise, and introducing a sustainability agenda into the mix, are both important evolutions. How Extreme E fares on its objectives - to raise awareness and knowledge of climate change, while providing cracking entertainment - will decide if it is to be a trailblazer for other forms of motorsport.

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