Why McLaren has taken its unprecedented off-road left turn

Modern-day McLaren is a popular Formula 1 team that’s again heading in the right direction. It is also a youthful supercar business that has Ferrari and Porsche sweating. There have been tangents, of course; an on-off relationship with IndyCar and its sportscar successes – namely at Le Mans in 1995 and a domination of Can-Am that started 55 years ago.

Since its 1963 inception, though, McLaren has never been associated with bulky, high-riding SUVs. That is until this weekend, when Woking will make its Extreme E debut in Neom, Saudi Arabia.

In January last year, McLaren announced it had an option to join Formula E in 2022-23 for the Gen3 rules. Although that now hangs in the balance, you could understand the potentially expensive decision the moment it came to light. More so when it was rumoured to be taking the path of least resistance by seeking to carry over its powertrain partnership with Mercedes from F1. But racing a 1650kg, dune-traversing off-roader from a company whose top brass have repeatedly rubbished the idea of ever making an SUV road car… it’s quite unexpected.

But contemporary McLaren is also a segmented company that houses distinct divisions in Racing, Automotive and Applied. It is very much the former and it’s chief executive officer Zak Brown acting independently that has created the move into Extreme E. There’ll be zero bearing on what’s in the showrooms.

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And, while McLaren leased its Technology Centre and sought huge investment to survive the perils of 2020, its latest venture is remarkably humble in terms of financial outlay. There’s a €1.2million lease per spec car and a tiny headcount – fewer than 10 staff can work directly on the SUV at each event. Better yet, expect some of those personnel to have moved straight over from the grand prix outfit to avoid unwanted and unnecessary P45s being dished out to comply with F1’s cost cap.

Brown previously told Autosport: “We have a filter, if you like, when we look at new racing series. It has to be commercially viable. Extreme E ticked every single one of those boxes.”

Being affordable and having no relation to, and thereby not contradicting, the road car arm of the business mitigates some major cons with joining Extreme E. But that’s not enough to explain why McLaren signed up.

XE's cost-effective approach ticks several boxes for McLaren boss Brown (left, with XE boss Alejandro Agag)

Photo by: McLaren

Note, therefore, the livery that was unveiled as part of the four-way launch (including the MCL36 F1 challenger plus IndyCar and Shadow Esports programmes) last Friday evening. There’s something different about the blue hue worn by the SUV when it’s placed alongside its single-seater siblings.

The shade is dubbed ‘Oceanic’. It ties in to the 26-slide presentation McLaren issued on 14 April 2021, before its Extreme E venture was announced, entitled ‘Sustainability at McLaren Racing’. The section ‘Our Strategy Framework’ is subdivided into portions pertaining to ‘CO2’ and ‘Diversity, equality and inclusion’. Here, Extreme E offers McLaren an obvious route to realising its targets.

“Extreme E is pretty much driven around sustainability, and that’s a huge part of one of McLaren’s core marks,” says Aston Martin Autosport BRDC Young Driver of the Year Award judge Leena Gade, the revered Le Mans-winning race engineer who has joined the programme on secondment from Multimatic. “With the type of racing, with the technology that goes into the car itself, the battery – all of that is very applicable to where McLaren stand at the moment with their sustainability goals.”

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The F1 team has been gaining honours for its environmental conscience for over a decade now, but an Extreme E attack looks to extrapolate that success. As per the presentation, “compliance is simply a minimum. Our ambition is to help drive and champion the sport and industry agenda forward to positively contribute to a truly sustainable future.”

McLaren Applied has been the unheralded hero of Formula E for four somewhat thankless years. It’s never wresting for the limelight. But to spread a message, an Extreme E team has far greater potential even if the trade-off is little room for technology transfer

Naturally, the greenest form of motorsport is no motorsport, let alone McLaren actively expanding into Extreme E and IndyCar.  But the objective of the electric series and its newest team is to “explain what’s going on” with the climate crisis, per Extreme E co-founder Alejandro Agag.

If the championship existed purely to combat environmental damage, it could never satisfactorily justify docking in oil-rich Saudi Arabia. But if racing in that one nation helps pay for the remaining four rounds, which could span three further continents should Senegal get the nod over Scotland in July, it should draw more eyes to the problem.

That helps fulfil McLaren’s corporate social responsibility commitment in the sustainability presentation. It wants to “inspire, influence and impact our people, our fans and the communities, where we work and race”. An Extreme E entry, which will compel McLaren and its drivers to be active in the local environment-benefiting legacy programmes, is exactly in line with this.

McLaren's Extreme E livery differs from its F1 and IndyCar equivalent in its 'oceanic' blue hue

Photo by: McLaren

McLaren laid down an early indicator of its modus operandi by unveiling a show livery for its Extreme E car, which it was far from compelled to do. First, the graphics took cues from the Arctic, desert and Amazon locations used during the inaugural season. Second, the covers came off outside the Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow during the United Nations Climate Change Conference known as COP26. Third, for good measure, the special guest was Prince Charles. And fourth, it was later displayed at a Hampshire school. Flashy colours, a big event, a royal VIP, an engaging message – it was all organised to make an impact. When McLaren eventually went private testing, it used a run-of-the-mill matte black paint job anyway…

The standardised hardware, including a sealed Williams Advanced Engineering battery, likely means McLaren’s next generation of hybrid supercar won’t be based on findings from Extreme E. But this programme will act as the inverse of its quiet gig to supply the battery for the Gen2 Formula E car.

McLaren Applied has been the unheralded hero for four somewhat thankless years. It’s never wresting for the limelight. But to spread a message, an Extreme E team has far greater potential even if the trade-off is little room for technology transfer.

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This championship can also enable McLaren to achieve its aim of increasing the pool of female talent in its workforce. It isn’t expecting an immediate boost to the ratio, which currently stands at 12%. But having Gade, her sister and performance engineer Teena and Kiwi driver Emma Gilmour will create three high-profile role models to then engage and inspire more women into motorsport. In turn, the F1 team and the rest of the programmes aren’t tacitly excluding half the population when it comes to employing the best engineers, women perhaps having felt motorsport has been a closed shop to them.

Gade continues: “It’s incredibly important having role models and people who are visible for young girls, and young people in general, to see that motorsport is a career that can be taken up by males or females.

“In addition, McLaren has got an Engage programme, which is a partnership between organisations including the Women’s Engineering Society, and that’s to help promote [science, technology, engineering and maths] within organisations, schools and for young people.”

There’ll never be a public admission from either bedfellow, but McLaren and Extreme E will help each other by using the other party as a means to an end. The series gets a pukka name that brings with it a hardcore fanbase to boost audiences and in turn entice more commercial partners. The race team can serve its diversity and sustainability push in the image of the refreshing, modern-day McLaren.

Gade has been brought in from Multimatic to engineer McLaren's XE racer

Photo by: McLaren

Environmental politics

"You have to break some eggs to make omelettes…"

That was the response from an Oxbridge professor on the Extreme E Scientific Committee when Autosport tried to reason whether it was counterproductive to have travelled to a damaged turtle nesting site aboard a 5.7-litre V8, 2.6-tonne GMC Yukon SUV. According to a newly released internal sustainability report, Extreme E broke 8870 eggs last year. Or at least, that’s the number of tonnes of CO2 the series produced between 1 January and 31 December. That includes everything from the energy used by the head office in Hammersmith to the food and drinks consumed on-site during the five rounds in 2021.

But out of context, that’s something of a meaningless number. It’s an eyewatering 5482 return flights between Heathrow and JFK. However, it’s a fifth of a non-COVID-affected Formula E season. That feels far more palatable, especially given the electric single-seater series earned a 79 out of 100 score in the latest Sustainable Championship index. Formula 1, by comparison, was runner-up with 60.

The build of the Odyssey 21 E-SUVs and the races contributed just 4% to Extreme E’s output. A whopping 82%, some 7303 tonnes, was produced by shipping the series’ cargo to each location via the RMS St Helena. Keep in mind, the vessel had been upgraded to run on low-sulphur diesel, ran with reduced-friction propellors, and had a slippery coat applied to its underside to cut through the water more cleanly. What’s more, the boat is reckoned to be already 75% less polluting than air freight.

This eco-friendly infrastructure will likely last longer than the neutral series’ potentially short shelf life

To help combat those numbers, Extreme E followed through on no fewer than nine of its local environment-benefiting Legacy Projects. Testament to the championship striving to look good beyond just what the TV cameras pick up, that includes programmes going ahead in countries such as Brazil and Argentina where the actual event was canned by coronavirus.

Extreme E also pledged to achieve carbon neutrality by buying certified emission reductions (carbon credits) to offset its output. That meant investing in a wind farm in Patagonia, Argentina. Its 43 turbines annually prevent 190,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere.

As two South American rounds are added to the calendar in 2022, Extreme E is aware of its rising emissions. But it will continue to invest in similar projects to balance the books. And this eco-friendly infrastructure will likely last longer than the neutral series’ potentially short shelf life. This, plus charging the cars via water- and solar-powered hydrogen fuel cells, producing the TV broadcast back in London, having no fans on site, and the hospitality for cheque-writing VIPs accounting only 0.2% of emissions, all work in Extreme E’s favour.

But there is a misstep. Too much has seemingly been made of Extreme E’s capacity to inspire an audience at this stage. Supposedly 18million fans watched the opening round alone. But for the calendar year, just 1200 people pledged to curb their climate-unfriendly habits by subscribing to the ‘Count Us In Challenge’.

Chip Ganassi Racing's Sara Price and Kyle Leduc walk the track in Saudi Arabia

Photo by: Motorsport Images