Extreme E, an off-road racing series that started in 2021, aims to prove that internal combustion engines are no longer required in motor sport. It is also a real-world experiment in making racing more sustainable.
To minimise each event’s carbon footprint, the teams’ all-electric Spark Odyssey 21 sports utility vehicles are charged with solar power stored in hydrogen fuel cells. In-person spectators are banned in order to reduce the sport’s carbon footprint, and cars and equipment move between races on a specially modified ship to minimise flights and other forms of travel. On a smaller scale, everyone who attends – the media included – is asked to bring their own bowls, cutlery and cups to eliminate waste.
New Scientist travelled to Bovington Camp – a British Army base in Dorset, UK – for the final race of the season and spoke to Jenson Button, a Formula One world champion and owner of the JBXE Extreme E team, about what the racing series is trying to achieve.
Jenson Button: Extreme E is very different from most motor sports because it’s not a combustion engine, it’s electric power with batteries. The great thing about an electric motor is there’s only one moving part, so the reliability is very good. Electric vehicle (EV) power is immediate. You have immediate torque when you get on the throttle. This is not just driving on a motorway or track. We’re driving off-road. It’s very aggressive terrain and it’s really pushing the technology to its limits.
And also it’s obviously a lot greener than a combustion engine. With Extreme E, we also have a hydrogen generator which is charging the cars. [We’re trying to] push the boundaries and push the technology, and hopefully it’s something we’ll see more widely used in the future.
Why did you join Extreme E?
We are definitely going to have sustainable power in the future when it comes to road cars. A lot of manufacturers are now working with EVs. So for us to push the boundaries here, it was really exciting. I still want this to feel like a fun car to drive. We can’t be running around in cars that are four times heavier than their internal combustion engine counterparts. It’s about making [the car] lightweight but also having enough battery power for the distance we need. In the future, I’m sure we’re moving to solid-state batteries [and other] new technologies, but this is a great starting point.
What excited you most about Extreme E?
The cars themselves are very exciting with 500-odd horsepower, off-road vehicles, with big suspension travel. But we also travel to places around the world I never would have travelled to before. I went to Greenland and Senegal. [One of the aims of] Extreme E is travelling to destinations that have been massively affected by climate change and to bring awareness to those areas.
We also have the legacy programme [a series of collaborations with environmental groups to support local sustainability projects]. We saw the ice in Greenland was brown, dirty-ish looking, which was from the wildfires in North America. Soot sits on the ice when the sun shines and melts them. You could see the massive rivers that occurred from that melting. It’s really sad to see. We were trying to gather as much information as possible for the scientists to study it, to try and help and try and understand what we can do to help.
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