Extreme E racing series a bad case of unrealized potential

“I wanted to like this.” – Aaron Williams

That’s my younger son’s capsule comment on Extreme E, the new electric off-road racing series featuring extreme natural venues intended to highlight environmental concerns. The “Desert X Prix” was held in Saudi Arabia this weekend.

To be sure, there are a lot of nifty things about it. Big names familiar from other series, like Ganassi and Andretti, have teams. So do Formula 1 stars Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. Each of the nine teams has two drivers—one man and one woman—and the car, called the Odyssey 21, is an all-wheel-drive electric…truck? buggy? SUV? with 550bhp. They look like steroid-ripped Nissan Jukes.

The Extreme E race car. (Click for larger.)

Sounds promising, right? That’s what we thought. The course in the Saudi Arabian desert was an 8.8km circuit, with nine gates through which the car must pass to be scored. Those are the only course limits. Cool. Sounds like pod racing in Star Wars, doesn’t it?

The cars are definitely capable of neat maneuvers, and we saw a few that made us ooh and aah. There are two large drawbacks, however.

First, the qualifying is nearly comically convoluted. They do begin by going out and getting times, but then there are semifinals and a “crazy race” and maybe one more. It’s all elimination, but some positions get funneled into one next round and some the other, and I don’t know what all. They went through it all on the broadcast and I swear it took five actual minutes. I quit paying attention and went back to my phone far before she was done explaining it.

Second—and this is probably a deal-breaker—there are never more than three cars on track at once, and there were never more than two laps (one by each driver). This was true even in the “final” round (the ostensible flagship event of the weekend). If they have nine cars and they’re never going to have them all on the race course at the same time (and for longer than 15 minutes!), I’m not at all certain we can stay with this. Visibility would be a challenge in some environments (like deserts), but to me that just encourages drivers to open up more lines. (No course limits except the gates, remember?)

Given the charter of the race series, it’s expected that the politics would be up-front and center. If it were the prelude to an exciting racing product, that would be fine.

But this is not an exciting racing product as it sits. This is a bad case of unrealized potential.

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2 thoughts on “Extreme E racing series a bad case of unrealized potential”

  1. I have tried but I just am not excited by extreme e. They could probably do a lot more for the environment by just…not doing it.

    Reply
    • We were really excited to check it out, and then thoroughly disappointed by how convoluted it all was, and especially by the fact that all of the buggies never race together.

      Reply

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