It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but the incredible success of the inaugural Extreme E race in Saudi Arabia has given us a glimpse of motorsport’s future.
Held over a challenging eight-kilometre course where three electrically-powered SUVs ran together in the final race, it was taken out by Nico Rosberg’s team.
Drivers Johan Kristoffersson, a multiple World Rallycross champion, and Australian Molly Taylor, proved to be a formidable combination, defeating drivers of the calibre of Sebastien Loeb, Carlos Sainz and Jenson Button.
The cars are big and heavy – 1700 kilograms, with each wheel and tyre weighing 50 kilograms. But they’re producing around 500 horsepower through their electric motors, which Molly Taylor says takes some getting used to.
Rather than delivering the power gradually like a normal combustion engine does, the electric motor feeds all 500 horsepower to the drive wheels at once, making the cars even more tricky to drive.
As Taylor added, there’s no engine or gearbox noise either, so it takes some getting used to.
The racing provided plenty of excitement, a few crashes, and lots and lots of social media and general media coverage.
In Australia, Molly Taylor’s victory has even attracted coverage and post-event video links and interviews that are a rarity in Australian motorsport circles.
Indeed, Taylor’s win has already given her career more of a boost than her win in the 2016 Australian Rally Championship.
“We’ve worked so hard on this for many years, and finally everything has come together this weekend. It really has been beyond my wildest expectations,” Alejandro Agag, Founder and CEO of Extreme E, said.
“If I had written a script for the perfect weekend, I could not have come up with anything better than what we have witnessed these past two days – I’ve never seen such extreme racing in my life.”
Whether the Extreme E series can maintain its momentum remains to be seen. Many of the motorsport purists are already questioning whether the three-at-a-time racing can work in sandy and dusty locations, and whether external media coverage will drop off once the novelty has worn off.
For motorsport in general, however, it’s a step in the right direction. Using electric motors is seen as being environmentally friendly, and the work the Extreme E teams and competitors are doing in an effort to slow climate change will also be widely lauded.
Having team owners such as Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton and Chip Ganassi involved won’t hurt either.
Extreme E looks like it’s here to stay, and for the coverage of motorsport on a global scale, that’s great news.
Podcast Saturday: Questions asked about the new Extreme E | Talk Motorsport
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