How motorsport’s new eco series fared in its debut season

Did Extreme E work? It’s the same question we posed after the debut season of Formula E – Alejandro Agag’s other famous motorsport creation. The short answer, then as now, is largely positive.

Unlike its effective sister series, Extreme E hasn’t inspired and overcome an almost immediate financial breaking point (yet) and there’s been no investor coup. They share the merit of a brilliant driver rollcall, and both created sound racing in spectacular locations. However, no one is singing the praises of the machinery this time around and manufacturers aren’t expected to queue up to take part.

The world has moved on in the seven years since Formula E was launched. Electric racing has become far less countercultural. While Extreme E and its chunky Odyssey 21 tap successfully into the automotive zeitgeist and the contradiction that is eco-friendly SUVs, that alone is not enough of a reason to exist. Here, also in its corner, this championship strives for gender equality with its female-male driver pairings. It also has a genuine a desire to draw more attention to the climate crisis than anything this side of a documentary narrated by David Attenborough.

These founding principles were decent, but Extreme E launched into the ultimate headwind thanks to the pandemic. Prospective squads looked for the break clauses in their contracts and hasty replacements had to be sourced to retain a nine-team grid. Tests to troubleshoot the car were canned and the calendar took a beating before the incentives of a launch in oil-rich Saudi Arabia locked it in to an early April slot.

As that date rolled around, Extreme E’s parallels to Formula E were reaffirmed. It became clear there was going to be a fair amount of learning on the job. Ringing people for a steer on what an actual event might look like returned the answer ‘Your guess is as good as mine’. Few, team bosses and drivers included, had a solid clue.

That was exacerbated by the desert dust in AlUla, which forced changes to the format before a wheel had whirred in anger. Single-entry qualifying sprints were brought in to replace multi-car packs racing their way through the blind clouds. The finale was scaled back to three cars and high temperatures meant batteries were kept on a tight leash. Aside from the four-second hyperdrive activation, the nine Odyssey 21s got nowhere near their promised 400kW. They were running at barely half that power for the duration of the season.

Format tweaks were commonplace, beginning at the opening round in the Saudi desert

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Where the lines are slightly blurred, though, is in the brief battery provider Williams Advanced Engineering was first given. Autosport understands the specification was made clear, a car was built, but then the championship’s push to be ‘extreme’ moved the goalposts beyond what the machinery and its water-cooling was capable of.

While the power was indeed reigned in, this preventative measure at least stopped the battery from giving up the ghost after a troubled Saudi free practice initiation. The same can’t be written for the rest of the car. Limited development from off-road novice Spark Racing Technology, which used budget components that cried mercy all too easily, proved to be a persistent, avoidable, and major frustration.

"The drivers have huge expectations; they have driven the best cars in the world. Things need to be put in perspective. The drivers break the same parts and none of them tried to slow down" Pierre Prunin

Snapped toe links and power steering failures were the repeat offenders. Meanwhile, the unwieldy rear suspension was called out by Dakar Rally and trophy truck specialists as well as 2009 Formula 1 champion Jenson Button, who would soon vacate the JBXE cockpit after his unease during that Saudi opener. The issue was a tendency for the back axle to flick into the air with barely a moment’s notice to force a driver to save a bad landing and prevent a rollover. This was ostensibly due to limited suspension travel and value dampers.

The crop of World Rally, Rallycross and cross-country champions grew increasingly miffed at the mass unreliability through Greenland and Sardinia as they felt their vast experience and input was being brushed aside. Abt Cupra’s Mattias Ekstrom said: “Car development is a crucial part of your daily business. What we do now after having given feedback, how slow we are seeing development, that’s the reason the racing is how it is. That’s a shame. It’s not finding the money or the time, it’s just attitude. [Spark are] missing the right attitude. To make a change, someone must really want to do it.”

PLUS: How technical troubles detracted from Extreme E's Sardinia encounter

The defence from the car constructor was robust. COVID cancelling tests to slash the pre-season troubleshooting from an ideal 400 miles down to 200 was one justification. The constraints of shipping cars aboard the RMS St Helena that then denied time for a full strip of the Odyssey 21 back at the French factory was another.

When development engineer Pierre Prunin did front a reply from Spark, he said: “We did this car with a limited budget; it’s not like we’re Audi or Peugeot. The drivers have huge expectations; they have driven the best cars in the world. Things need to be put in perspective. The drivers break the same parts and none of them tried to slow down. Truth is, a slow driver would have been on the podium.”

Lack of rear suspension meant cars were savagely kicked up over bumps

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

A post-event test at the penultimate round in Sardinia did offer respite. Larger spherical joints, upgraded toe links and beefier steering racks were signed off ahead of the climax in Dorset. These modifications, combined with the softer landings provided by the Bovington tank proving ground’s clay floor, meant the fleet survived their muddy ordeal.

Agag’s final assessment was this: “I know how difficult it is. Of course, it’s sometimes very easy to criticise and probably we didn’t expect the amount of impact these cars were going to go through. But every time [Spark] have put their head down and continued trying to fix problems. We’ve seen the unreliability, which was our main challenge, has disappeared. We’ve used the season to test and now our reliability is OK.”

The other major shortcoming for Extreme E as it made its debut was the unrelenting tweaks to the event format. The switch to one-car qualifying runs worked by giving the weekend a sense of progression (if a car looked good on its own on Saturday, a bumper grid on Sunday came hotly anticipated). But in addition to the overhaul from Saudi, a points-paying super sector was introduced, finals went up to four and later five cars.

Then in Dorset, the driver starting order was clumsily mandated for each heat. This move, wanted by the teams, deprived the series of its open competition in which males and females could race against one another as equals. For the UK, it was boys versus boys, girls against girls.

As for 2022, four-car grids for the semi-finals will come into play to ensure that if one team crashes or has a problem then there’s still a fight for the top two places to progress into the finale. But a blueprint needs to be established. One, to prevent viewer fatigue and frustration. Two, to ensure a meritocratic title fight. This year, it was only marginal that Rosberg X Racing – the team to win three of the five events – still walked away with the crown over the Prodrive-run X44 squad that only tasted victory once.

Temperamental cars and a fluctuating format considered, and even the pandemic accounted for, Extreme E otherwise enjoyed a roaring success of an inaugural season. A launch in Saudi, while not particularly well justified by the championship’s top brass, provided one of the most breathtaking backgrounds ever seen in motorsport. While the dust detracted from the racing, a move to Neom for 2022 will bypass that complaint.

The Senegalese could not have been more hospitable, and the beachfront course gave way to the first ‘Hamilton versus Rosberg’ wheel-to-wheel contact of the campaign. Greenland blended an ethereal glacial setting with a course that was a smash hit with drivers. That said, Agag rates his mid-season host venue as the most difficult of the lot: “We only got the permits to travel to Greenland and enter the day before the race. We were begging to be allowed in.”

PLUS: Why Extreme E's Senegal round hints at the series' true potential

Greenland track was a hit with drivers, although XE faced a fight to be allowed in

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Sardinia provided the unreliability flashpoint needed to inspire action from Spark and it showed the value of retaining a European adventure that media and partners could easily attend. Dorset did the job of filling in for an Argentinian round binned off by travel restrictions. That British title decider remains tough to assess.

RXR and X44 tied on 155 points as the media lapped up the epilogue to the Rosberg-Hamilton rivalry. But the year-long narrative was a tale of how Molly Taylor and Johan Kristoffersson (who relied on countback to win a crown) dominated event after event, only for that to be lost by the fiddling to the points system.

PLUS: How Rosberg triumphed over Hamilton in 2021's final showdown

Taylor, the 2016 Australian rally champion, who Rosberg approached via the ‘Drop Me a Note’ page on her website, and her Swedish team-mate (signed via a direct message on Instagram) used the might of their rehomed Team Rosberg DTM engineers to largely navigate the reliability woes that constricted their rivals. They were devastatingly fast and ruthlessly measured, and were the deserving champions – although the inconvenient truth is that in this most convivial of paddocks, inter-team rivalries were barely perceptible.

Building Extreme E to suit the privateers would be the smart money move following the recent troubles experienced by Formula E. But the off-roaders are already proving pricey

Kristoffersson and Taylor grabbed the first slice of history by winning the maiden event; a second triumph in Senegal looked ominous. Fortunately, Andretti United’s popular duo of Catie Munnings and Timmy Hansen broke the run of form in Greenland as reliability woes hit RXR. Then it stuck one hand on the recycled plastic trophy with its inherited Sardinian success after Chip Ganassi’s car broke and denied an almost certain win. Fourth place in the UK was the minimum required to take the spoils.

“It was already before the win in Saudi that the goal was to win the championship,” Kristoffersson says. “It was pretty clear from Nico that we joined to be able to win. This season, we’ve had so many technical issues and it’s not been up to the team every time either. But we performed well and preserved the car when we had to.”

A final word on Extreme E’s short-to-medium-term prospects. Plans to open elements of the powertrain to development have been pushed back to the fourth season at the earliest. That will help keep a lid on costs and seems wise, with the current question mark over manufacturer interest. Cupra is committed, the Hummer-lookalike Chip Ganassi car is a styling exercise only and it is McLaren Racing – as opposed to the road car marque – joining next season.

PLUS: Why McLaren’s surprise electric path can benefit everyone involved

Taylor and Kristoffersson were deserving champions after winning three of the five rounds for Rosberg X Racing

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Building Extreme E to suit the privateers would be the smart money move following the recent troubles experienced by Formula E. But the off-roaders are already proving pricey, with Button’s JBXE scrabbling for funds to remain, while Hispano Suiza will need a generous partner as its current Xite Energy Racing bedfellow heads for the door.

With that, Extreme E feels like the star that will shine twice as bright but only live half as long. It’s already been disruptive in motorsport and spectacular. Yet there’s a whiff of A1 GP about the set-up in that it’s only a technical misstep or a reluctant investor away from its downfall. It doesn’t have the initial might of a series that can limp along on a needs must basis, like World RX, British and World Touring Cars and more have done in the recent past. Should that be the case, enjoy the ride while Extreme E is here.

The machinery is on the way to restoring credibility and a pinch of salt resolves the contrived race format. But it’s the locations, TV footage, and the drivers – with Sebastien Loeb all but a certainty to remain next season – that are so deeply impressive. And as concluded in that first Formula E season review in the 9 July 2015 issue of Autosport, so too must Extreme E work to remain affordable for its teams and grow its audience after a decent debut album.

Stability is important for XE as it prepares for its tricky second album in 2022

Photo by: Colin McMaster / Motorsport Images

How ‘green’ is the eco series?

Extreme E isn’t short of commercial partners and TV rights deals with major broadcasters. It’s no coincidence that in every press release announcing such a tie up, brands are keen to highlight how this new relationship shows their environmental conscience. But what are they tapping into? For a series that says it exists to serve a wider purpose, how successful has the climate crisis-targeting modus operandi been?

Pleasingly, the paddock is small. While camera angles avoid capturing car parks and catering tents, the set-up is less than an average UK national meeting. Of course, there are champagne-sipping hospitality goers, but if they open their cheque books in return then that’s no bad thing.

Despite COVID cancelling rounds in Brazil and Argentina, the local environment-benefiting Legacy Programmes have gone ahead in the Amazon regardless. It’s not just a case of looking good while the camera is on

What’s good is that the size of the prawn sandwich brigade didn’t dramatically shoot up tenfold for the European rounds. It seems Extreme E wants a small footprint, rather than having been logistically limited to one.

It’s also to Extreme E’s credit that it was present and active at COP26 in November and, despite COVID cancelling rounds in Brazil and Argentina, the local environment-benefiting Legacy Programmes have gone ahead in the Amazon regardless. It’s not just a case of looking good while the camera is on.

Those altered dates meant Saudi Arabia and the UK came to start and end the calendar. Neither are economies that need a helping hand to fund climate action. But Extreme E’s argument has been that it exists to “highlight the impacts” of the damage rather than to ignite change. A Saudi race date goes a long way to paying for a full season. But the reasoning that ‘we don’t mix sports and politics’ has never been a satisfying reply from ex-MEP Alejandro Agag as to why he races there.

Extreme E scientist Richard Washington is more certain. He says: “We can say to Saudi, ‘You can keep all that money we should have taxed and didn’t’, or we can work together and use that resource to move things forward. They have the resource, and that needs to be ploughed back.”

PLUS: The key figure who sells Extreme E's environment dream

Of course, the greenest motorsport is one that doesn’t exist at all, let alone use the RMS St Helena to ship cars between hemispheres to be met by a few hundred people who have flown there. But by racing in landscapes already damaged, we’re meant to feel better about the sandy ruts left behind by Extreme E and the trees and bushes that have been clipped. It seems viewers and the more vocal social media users are far from sold on Extreme E’s environmental credentials.

But if the past 18 months teaches us anything, it’s that we should listen to those who are experts in their field. Apply that to Extreme E and the Oxbridge professors on the scientific committee were quick to sign up when the concept was explained to them, more have come onboard during the year, and they all validate the good work that the series is doing. So perhaps their assessments are the best ones.

The St Helena logistics ship

Photo by: Colin McMaster / Motorsport Images