#Extreme race cars series

It can be the smallest thing, like separating your rubbish from your recycling, or not even buying plastic water bottles so you don’t need to recycle them in the first place. In terms of people at home, we’re showing what they can do to help the environment and help our kids in the future. We’re hopefully developing the technology for racing on-track and off-track in the future. We’re showing that you can have great racing without a combustion engine. What can the rest of motor sport learn from Extreme E? The only way we’re going to find a good direction is competition from different power sources. We have EV here, biofuels in Formula One. Who knows where we’re going to end up in 10, 15 years? Everyone’s trying different things. They’re really pushing biofuels in F1, which is great. It’s going to be a long time if it does change. It’s a tricky one with Formula One, you know, it’s been combustion engine-based forever.

#Extreme race cars series

Will the kind of technology we have seen in Extreme E and Formula E, a track-based racing series for electric vehicles, ever make its way into Formula One? The only way to watch is on your TV, which again is a good thing because they’re trying to keep the footprint as small as possible. Jenson Button on the Russell Glacier, Greenland 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. You could see the massive rivers that occurred from that melting. Soot sits on the ice when the sun shines and melts them. We saw the ice in Greenland was brown, dirty-ish looking, which was from the wildfires in North America. Extreme E is travelling to destinations that have been massively affected by climate change and to bring awareness to those areas. But we also travel to places around the world I never would have travelled to before. The cars themselves are very exciting with 500-odd horsepower, off-road vehicles, with big suspension travel. “Extreme E is travelling to destinations that have been massively affected by climate change to bring awareness to those areas” In the future, I’m sure we’re moving to solid-state batteries new technologies, but this is a great starting point. It’s about making lightweight but also having enough battery power for the distance we need. We can’t be running around in cars that are four times heavier than their internal combustion engine counterparts. I still want this to feel like a fun car to drive. So for us to push the boundaries here, it was really exciting. A lot of manufacturers are now working with EVs.

We are definitely going to have sustainable power in the future when it comes to road cars. 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.ĭavid Stock: What is Extreme E and what makes it different from other motor sport? On a smaller scale, everyone who attends – the media included – is asked to bring their own bowls, cutlery and cups to eliminate waste. 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. 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. It is also a real-world experiment in making racing more sustainable. 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.