Rosberg, Ganassi, and the Unique Challenge of Extreme E
Rosberg Xtreme Racing’s Extreme E car in testing (photo: Extreme E Media)
Extreme E, the newest form of motorsport, might be taking headlines for its all-electric SUVs, and for the calendar of venues threatened by climate change at which it is racing, but beyond these matters, there is something intriguing about its slate of teams. Some are going into Extreme E having never before raced as a squad, while others are hoping their decades of experience of other forms of top-level motorsport will help them to be successful in the inaugural season.
Nico Rosberg prior to demonstrating the Gen2 car for Formula E, in which he is a shareholder, at the Berlin E-Prix of 2018 (picture: copyright FIA Formula E)
Motion E spoke to leading figures at two teams at opposite ends of the experience spectrum. Nico Rosberg is taking his new team, Rosberg Xtreme Racing, into the new season as his first racing venture as a team owner. It’s a bold undertaking, not least when Lewis Hamilton, his one-time arch-rival in Formula One, is now also a team owner, with Team X44. While the two teams have genuine hopes to dovetail their Extreme E campaigns with environmental work, they are joined by Jenson Button, whose JBXE team is even more of a new-build project, and shows just as much bravery.
Further reading: Extreme E on Untested Terrain - long read
At the other end of the scale is Chip Ganassi Racing. In its fourth decade as a racing team, the American organisation will be bringing the full weight of its frontrunning experience in Nascar, IndyCar, IMSA, and other series, to a championship where every team is new, and every landscape is unraced.
How are the teams preparing differently, and who is stepping into Extreme E with a template for success? Rosberg and Dave Berkenfield of Ganassi Racing gave their views on the unique challenges of going off-road around the world.
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Driver to team principal
“As a driver you’re still very involved in the managerial aspect as a crucial element of the team, but as a CEO you’re putting together the operational side, choosing the drivers, choosing the whole operational team, putting together the PR side, and it’s a great challenge,” explained Rosberg in a group call shortly after the Extreme E team launch. “It’s still flat-out - my goodness it’s time-consuming - and it’s competitive! There’s two verticals, as I said - dominating the sport, and having an impact - and they’re both just as important.”
Rosberg Xtreme Racing’s new car (photo: Extreme E Media)
Rosberg, who acted as his own agent throughout the latter part of his Formula One career, and single-handedly insisted to Mercedes GP that he wanted to bring his Williams engineer, Tony Ross, with him when he moved teams, has spent his retirement from driving making a series of environmentally focused investments, everything from lab-grown burgers to his GreenTech Festival, which takes place in ordinary circumstances alongside the Berlin Formula E race.
As such, it could be assumed that it would be a smooth ramp from driver to team owner, and he has been able to rely on the support of a group of people with enormous experience gained as part of Team Rosberg, his father Keke’s successful racing operation. Nonetheless, there have been surprises for the younger Rosberg.
Help where it’s needed
Keke Rosberg, as well as being the 1982 Formula One World Champion, also managed Mika Häkkinen while running Team Rosberg. “My dad is always there when I need advice - I give him a call and he helps, because he’s got so much experience - particularly when it comes to contracts!”
“The amount of contracts we’ve done is just ridiculous - every sponsor needs a separate contract, the Extreme E championship, we had to negotiate that contract - my goodness! It’s a long term thing. Also the drivers - every driver needs a different contract, every engineer needs a different contract, every mechanic needs a different contract - some are fully employed, some are freelance! My goodness, it’s been a lot of paperwork, it’s like it’s loading up to the ceiling with paperwork.”
“That’s where dad helps. When it comes to negotiations, he’s got so much experience, having been a driver manager in F1, having had his own team for 25 years, he’s seen everything already, so there he can be ready with those details, and there I can always ask him for advice. Don’t forget, in my own career in F1, I was my own manager, so I have a lot of experience there, but now I’m on Toto [Wolff]’s side all of a sudden!”
“Let the building do the work”
Chip Ganassi Racing’s Extreme E entry (photo: Extreme E Media)
Dave Berkenfield is coming at Extreme E from a different background to Rosberg, and he is doing so as the Team Principal of a name synonymous with success in North America since it was formed in 1990, Chip Ganassi Racing. Prior to taking charge of the Extreme E operation for Ganassi, Berkenfield, who as a younger man spent 24 years in the US Special Operations community, had been a trusted company man supporting Ganassi’s IndyCar and Ford GT Le Mans entries.
Even so, Berkenfield was keen to play down how crucial his and Ganassi’s experience across motorsport would help in Extreme E, where Kyle LeDuc and Sara Price will team up. “This is a very unique series - everything about it is unique. The messaging, the market space, the operation side with the racing, the spec institution with the car, the tents we’re going to be operating out of, the Saint Helena as our floating paddock - everything about it is different. “
“While we have our thirty-year foundation to anchor our motorsport experience on, I find myself as Team Manager asking other team managers, or Chip, what do we think here, and the answer is we don’t know, and we’re going to have to be flexible, and focus on being prepared about the little things, and doing all the easy stuff right. We’ve been to private tests, but this event coming up in Saudi Arabia is our first global event and I think we’re going to learn a lot.”
One of the problems for Ganassi to solve was the lack of time with their car, which now carries Hummer backing as part of their long-term tie-in with General Motors, which aims to launch a range of luxury electric SUVs under the famous brand name. “We only had the car in our shop for a few weeks - that’s because it was manufactured in Europe by Spark, and then we chose to have it shipped to the US, and got it into our IndyCar shop, to work on it, get familiar with it, get all our sub-departments familiar with it. Then we took it to Nevada, to a low-power, regulated private test, and so we’ve had limited time with it.”
No FedEx in Greenland
“The other thing with this series is the logistics, because of the places where we’re going - there is no transporter truck, there’s no hardware store down the road, there’s no access to FedEx and McMaster if we forget something, so we’re creating spreadsheets and big lists, and we’re having to check them two, three, four, five times, and we’re having teams meetings with our team, drivers, crew chiefs, engineers, wider organisation, and we’re figuring out how we’re going to do marketing, and we’re taking really good care of our partners - it’s a really big undertaking for everyone.”
Chip Ganassi inspects his team’s car (photo: Extreme E Media)
Berkenfield, who has been in the business too long to start getting overconfident, and came across as the kind of leave-nothing-to-chance kind of person who values process and punctuality, explained how Ganassi had been preparing for a very different kind of undertaking to rolling up at Sebring or Daytona with several full big-rigs.
“We do have, as our team, a process which works very efficiently. We sort of joke that when a car comes in we let the building do the work, we bring it in one side of the building, and let it come out the other side of the building, and every department, whether it’s our sub-assembly department, our marketing or sales department, or fabrication, paint, carbon, those are absolutely critical to the organisation. We feel very fortunate we were able to put the Extreme E programme into the machine, to make the Extreme E programme into a winning organisation, hopefully.”
“We feel well prepared, and part of the reason we focused on pit equipment [first], and things we could affect at the time was because we knew we had limited time with the car, and so when we had it in front of us, we wanted to focus on the car, and not focus on making sure our pits were organised or that we had the right tools. All the dry runs in our garage were [after] taking just our seven [crew members] to Nevada. We made a choice to not take a hauler to Nevada and just work out of the tents,” something which will be required of all teams in Extreme E at race meetings. “All these things were pieces to that puzzle.”
This is not to say Ganassi are certain they have cracked Extreme E. To make sure they were at the highest possible level of preparedness, they moved engineers from other Ganassi teams to offer their expertise on the Extreme E side. “We knew we were at a little bit of a deficit in the sense of understanding off-road car setup, and we also knew we wanted to bring the experience of our engineering and performance side, and our mechanics who really understand the culture of Chip Ganassi Racing, and so we made some decisions to move some people from the sportscar operation on the lead engineering and mechanic side.”
How the pieces of the puzzle fit together, and whether Rosberg, Hamilton, and Button’s fledgling operations can be on the pace with a team of Ganassi’s long history, will be some of the fascinating aspects of this upcoming Extreme E season.