How the new electric series with planet-changing aims will work

If an electric motorsport series is to be established, the person to do it should be obvious: Alejandro Agag. After all, he and his team created the blueprint for Formula E - an electric championship that's not just existing, but thriving.

Now he's doing it all again with a few differences and plenty of similarities. In 12 months' time, the electric off-road SUV racing series Extreme E will be just a few weeks away from its projected first contest. Since becoming FE chairman in December 2018 - although he carried on working as the series' CEO until last September - Agag has been busy getting his latest project out of the harbour.

Maritime references make sense here because the story starts with - and will intrinsically involve - a ship. This time last year, the RMS St Helena was preparing to make a journey to the heart of central London for XE's floating launch. The £32million ex-Royal Mail vessel will act as the championship's primary paddock, from which everything else will flow.

In the year following that launch event, XE announced a five-round inaugural calendar for 2021. Beginning at Lac Rose in Senegal, the championship will hold events at five themed locations - ocean (Senegal), desert, glacier, Arctic and rainforest. These sites have been chosen precisely because they have been damaged by the climate crisis currently gripping the planet. This is XE's central aim - to use motorsport to address the looming environmental catastrophe.

"Success for this championship is to have a real impact and leave a real legacy behind in the locations where we race," says Agag, "for motorsport to be an agent of change in those locations."

XE has developed the ODYSSEY 21 SUV to act as the base prototype for the teams. So far, four teams have committed, but Agag is certain that he's "going to announce another four in the first three/four months of 2020" and that "10 teams for season one, maybe even 12, it depends" will take part in the inaugural campaign.

Manufacturers that decide to enter will be able to tweak the look of the ODYSSEY 21 by changing areas of the bodywork - including the engine cover, front and rear bumpers, side skirts and lights - to resemble their road-going SUV models. They will also be able to develop certain areas of the car's powertrain, although non-works squads can compete using the base package.

As it stands, no manufacturer has committed to entering the first season, and it seems more likely than not that the privateer entries will use identical ODYSSEY 21s in 2021. If that sounds familiar, that's because it's the same model that Formula E used for its first campaign in 2014-15, and that didn't exactly work out badly on the manufacturer-entry front.

"I think manufacturers will definitely come into Extreme E, but probably in the second or third season," says Agag. "Manufacturers like to see how it works, how it's developing. Having said that, we may have a surprise and have a manufacturer earlier."

The teams that have committed to the first season will be well known to FE fans. Venturi Automobiles, Abt Sportsline and HWA will all field XE squads, as will Veloce Racing - an intriguing initiative that is the sister programme to the Veloce Esports organisation, with backers including Formula 1 design legend Adrian Newey and double FE champion Jean-Eric Vergne.

The St Helena is currently being refitted in Liverpool and getting ready for the biggest adventure of its life

The ODYSSEY 21 is currently going through a rapid development programme, which began with a test at the Chateau de Lastours facility near Narbonne in southern France last October.

"[The test was] the first time the chassis took a bit of a pounding," says XE chief operating officer Carlos Nunes, who was previously FE's head of technical operations. "Obviously [that means testing] the chassis components and especially the chassis itself, which has a high production time length. It's one of the first things we're going to pound around with and actually kill over the next few months. And then that will get a really thorough checking and visual inspection, and everything will then all be checked and passed for production. And then all the drivetrains and things that are less time consuming."

Although the ODYSSEY 21 development car uses a McLaren Applied Technologies-built battery, the energy storage in the race cars will come from Williams Advanced Engineering. In WAE, XE is using a partner that has successfully produced a capable product to a tight deadline - it made the battery that powered the Gen1 FE car.

Things will be slightly different in the off-road variety, though, as the plan is for the ODYSSEY 21s to discharge 400kW of power for race spurts around 6-10kilometres (3.7-62 miles) in length. Think Dakar-style cars doing long rallycross laps.

The race cars are set to be delivered to the XE teams in August, with a group test being followed by a full race simulation.

"That's where we find out things," says Nunes. "Teams will find out things they've forgotten to buy. We'll find out if all the signals and things are all communicating between the cars and TV, all the filming equipment and things like that."

From there, the St Helena - currently being refitted in Liverpool and "getting ready for the biggest adventure of its life", says Agag - will be loaded and dispatched to Senegal in November. Then the racing should begin. After Senegal comes Sharaan in Saudi Arabia (desert, unsurprisingly), Kali Gandaki Valley, Nepal (glacier), Kangerlussuaq, Greenland (Arctic) and Santarem in Brazil (again unsurprisingly, rainforest).

Each event is set to be a round-robin tournament - the top four from two races of two groups will complete a knockout competition, from which an overall winner will be established. It is understood that the size of the racing groups could be varied at different locations, so in places where space is not an issue, such as the desert, the whole field could compete together to establish the order for the knockout stages. The final plan for the race formats will be established at a special mock event in February 2021, which will not feature the ODYSSEY 21 prototype.

The initial plan was for the racing to be the central part of a documentary to be broadcast at the end of each campaign, in which every race winner and the overall champion would be revealed. The documentary will still happen - primarily to highlight the environmental issues XE wants to help tackle - but there will be a live-broadcast element to each round.

"We're going to put all the focus, all the investment, into the broadcasting," says Agag. "We're going to have drones flying over the cars filming the show."

As FE did so successfully ahead of its launch in 2014, XE has established a 'driver programme' of racers and rally drivers interested in taking part in the competition. It boasts some pretty impressive names too, including Sebastien Ogier, Andre Lotterer and Lucas di Grassi.

For Agag, a "blend of formula drivers, rally drivers, rallycross drivers" would be ideal.

Midway through its first season, FE nearly collapsed due to a lack of funds. But Agag says there is no risk of this happening with XE, which he claims is "fully financed", adding that the Hammersmith-based series (actually, it's just across the corridor from FE's office) is having to "tell a lot of investors that would like to invest that there's no space".

Using motorsport to try to tackle the climate crisis is certainly bold, but there are inherent inconsistencies. The expansion of electric-vehicle usage is a step in the right direction, but SUVs have a certain image issue that the championship will have to overcome.

"We're following the exact same template as Formula E, to be honest" Carlos Nunes

Agag is confident the message will chime as he intends, however, mainly because XE is aiming to establish a positive legacy for the damaged environments in which it will race.

This includes working with local organisations and charities on education programmes, and donating equipment, while the events - operating from temporary mini-paddocks - are also set to use as little infrastructure as possible, employing digital course markers. Incidentally, the championship is not affiliated with the FIA at this stage, but that could change.

"Once you see the location, the risk [regarding environmental concerns] disappears," says Agag. "I always said, 'Wait until you see the locations and then judge.' Now with the locations when you see them, there's no way we're going to damage them.

"We've been all around the world. We didn't know when we launched this idea what we were going to find - if we were going to find locations to race, if they were going to be appropriate, if we were going to find destroyed locations that would not cause problems for some environmental organisations. They gave us the benefit of the doubt but they said, 'OK, we want to see what you want to do before we say if we endorse or if we don't.'

"And we think once they see these locations, people are immediately going to understand we're not only not doing any damage, but we are raising awareness of big problems that are happening all over the world."

XE is set to be another electric racing series with big intentions. The multiple comparisons with FE's preparation are deliberate - "We're following the exact same template, to be honest," explains Nunes - and that's probably a very wise move.

Agag says FE "was not in my mind at all" a decade ago, and as XE is "just from my head" it certainly has the potential to be another success story.