Formula E boss Alejandro Agag is back with another all-electric racing series, this time running off-road events all over the world. It’s called Extreme E, and the plan is to run five races in five different types of off-road environment from 2021. This is the tube-frame, high-riding offroad buggy that the series will use. Oh lawd, the Odyssey 21 is comin’.
The Extreme E car ran up the hill during the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Saturday afternoon. You can see that run below.
This is a big lad. According to Extreme E, the truck sits about 7.5 feet wide, 6.2 feet tall, and 14.4 feet front-to-back. The whole thing, ready to rock and roll, weighs some 3600 pounds. Each of the tires is 37 inches tall with tons of sidewall and lots of knobby Continental rubber to keep the thing trucking forward even in the nasty sand, ice, or dirt that the truck will come into contact with across the season.
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Extreme E has already signed a deal with Fox Sports to air the races, which will be tape delayed and aired in a “docu-sport” style. The plan is to run these races in locales that display the full effect of global climate change, bringing some intercontinental politics and global pollution optics into the mix. The hope for the whole program is “Blue Planet meets Dakar” which actually sounds kind of interesting to me.
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The Odyssey 21 racer is near-silent, as expected for an EV, and doesn’t move particularly quickly up the driveway, but I imagine it’s geared quite low for the gravel and ice that the series expects to compete on.
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This is just a show car, built by Spark Racing Technologies [the same company which builds the Formula E chassis], to demonstrate what a finished product might look like. This chassis will serve as the basis for teams to build from, and a spec battery will be used, produced by Williams Advanced Engineering. Each team will develop its own powertrain and aesthetically-minded sections of bodywork, such as the bumpers, engine cover, and lights.
“Our challenge was to build a car that could face all the variations in surface and terrain that will be thrown its way, which will include gravel, rock, mud, ice, snow, water and sand, too,” explained Spark’s technical director Theopile Gouzin.
“Straight out-of-the-box in Season One, the Odyssey 21 and its performance is going to be very impressive, exceeding the power and torque of World Rally Championship and rally raid cars. The numbers are mind-blowing, really.”
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