EXTREME MEASURES

PIONEERING OFF-ROAD RACING SERIES EXTREME E IS THRUSTING EVs INTO GLOBAL MOTORSPORT IN SPECTACULAR STYLE. WE JOIN THE ELECTRIC CIRCUS IN SARDINIA TO DISH THE DIRT

- DANIEL GARDNER

CONVINCING SOMEONE that electric vehicles are exciting is not hard. Chuck them the keys to a Rimac, point them at the nearest circuit and you can be certain they’ll be flying the zero-emissions flag for the rest of their days. But the conversion becomes a little more challenging if you don’t have access to one of the world’s fastest EVs and a private race track – and it’s made harder still by motorsport.

Most car manufacturers are transitioning into majority (if not exclusively) purveyors of EVs, claiming that the brightest future is electric. And yet, when the weekend rolls around, race tracks are a cacophony of combustion. At worst it’s hypocritical; at best it’s simply inconsistent.

Either way, petrol power in motorsport is damaging the message that battery is best.

This awkward paradox was sitting uncomfortably with Spanish entrepreneur and Formula E founder Alejandro Agag who picked up the phone to former racer Gil de Ferran and hatched an extraordinary solution – Extreme E; a revolutionary racing series that has categorically shattered the traditional motorsport model as we know it.

Like its circuit-bound sibling series Formula E, Extreme E is an all-electric competition, but that’s just the start of its mould-breaking approach. In a bid to shrink its carbon footprint as much as possible, the fleet of race cars are not flown between each location around the world, but loaded onto the St Helena – a retired mail ship that once served the island of the same name. The 105-metre vessel also serves as accommodation for the crews in remote locations and even has its own laboratory to conduct scientific research in the various race sites around the world.