11/24/2023 0 Comments Extreme e series![]() The three F1-champion-backed teams (Jenson Button's JBXE, Nico Rosberg's eponymous effort and Lewis Hamilton's X44) understandably receive a lot of the attention, but ultra-experienced outfits like Chip Ganassi Racing of NASCAR and Ind圜ar fame and DTM and Formula E champions ABT clearly aren't there to make up the numbers.Įven as a spec series, with little latitude for technological development, automakers Hummer and Cupra have been attracted in, at a time when the vast shift toward electrification is making auto brands nervous and flaky about motorsport commitment.īeing there from the start, Griffiths told ESPN, was important. With the names attached to the series, that's clearly not just a draw for Andretti. "This championship serves as a platform for promoting inclusivity and breaking barriers, which truly resonates with our values as an organization." "We strongly believe that motorsports should reflect the diverse world we live in, and Extreme E's focus on gender equality and providing equal opportunities for female and male drivers was an incredibly important factor for us," he said to ESPN. Roger Griffiths, team principal of Andretti's electric racing teams, said that the titanic motorsport brand was attracted to the series because of its values. It's a significant part of the appeal to teams. The World Rallycross Championship fielded a chunk of the XE field to make its grid 40% women at its last round. If you see the female drivers as the peers of their male counterparts and the fierce competition between them, then the idea that there simply are no skilled-enough women starts falling apart. The gender anarchists among us might be left asking where non-binary people fit into that, but in the conservative world of motorsport, that's a significant shift. and Nasser Al-Attiyah, it's not as though there are a huge number of male drivers who can claim to have reached their level either. But when some of the men are World Rally champions and Dakar winners like Sebastien Loeb, Carlos Sainz Sr. Because of the numbers game of motorsport, the women are generally younger, less experienced and have competed in less-high-level categories - with the notable exception of Dakar winner Jutta Kleinschmidt. They were forced to in Diriyah in 2018, and that directive may have given XE the confidence to launch with an explicit gender split.Įach team fields a male and female driver. There hasn't been a woman in a race seat since Season 2 in 2015-16, though, and teams have only patchily given them testing opportunities. ![]() Two women did start the first season, a collision between Michela Cerruti and Katherine Legge having the bizarre accolade of being the only two women to have had the opportunity to crash into each other in professional FIA single seaters. The original intention with FE was that the driver field would be 50-50 gender split, which didn't happen. It's not that Extreme E is a do-over of Formula E, even though a lot of the same people are involved, but it did come with some of the things FE didn't necessarily manage. That's small potatoes if you're comparing it to F1 or NASCAR, but the World Rallycross Championship, in its second year back in 2015, was pleased with 11.4 million viewers in Europe, its largest market. Some 135 million viewers tuned in last season, a 30% increase on the first. Despite a difficult, locked-down birth that saw its launch phoned in via holograms, the erratic schedule and leading the way on environmental and diversity issues that plenty of social media commenters will tell you motorsport fans don't care about, XE's audience is growing. The electric off-roading series doesn't do a lot of the traditional motorsport fundamentals well: its calendar changes frequently, its rounds happen equally infrequently, it changes its format sometimes mid-weekend and teams hardly get to see their race cars, let alone take them back to their factories to study like bugs under high-tech glass.Īnd yet, it's thriving. This weekend, after two months of sitting idle, Extreme E is roaring back to life in Sardinia. No one wants to watch "Formula One but-," after all. If the idea is to do something new, then leaning too heavily on what defines other series is a comfy way to try to do it but not one that's all that likely to go well. It's a truism that holds whether you're building a house or developing a racing series, but there's a step before that, too: you need to decide what those fundamentals are. You have to get the fundamentals right before you start worrying about the details. ![]() You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browserĮxtreme E boasts a meaningful mission and compelling racing ![]()
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