Colin McMaster / LAT Photos
ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the distant areas on Earth, Alejandro Agag is holding court docket.
“Welcome to the sting of the world,” he laughs, gesturing towards the huge desert round him. A gust of wind kicks a cloud of sand and dirt throughout the desk. “It is wonderful, this place.”
The 53-year-old Spanish entrepreneur is taking within the sights and sounds of the season 3 finale of Excessive E, the off-road electrical racing sequence he launched in 2021. A part of the sequence’ ethos is that it races completely in areas of the globe which are closely impacted by local weather change (such because the Atacama Desert—the driest, non-polar area on Earth), sometimes with no spectators current.
And whereas the competitors in the course of the finale is dramatic—with 5 of the sequence’ 10 groups in rivalry to win the championship—racing has taken a agency backseat this weekend. Dialog as a substitute has centered on Agag’s current proclamation that Excessive E will rebrand as Excessive H in 2025, changing into the primary racing sequence powered totally by hydrogen.
“We wish to be the primary to be doing it,” says Agag, holding his hand as much as protect his face from the still-swirling sand. “The problem is there, and we love challenges—the problem of working with a complete new know-how, related know-how that may have actual, big makes use of within the economic system usually.”
Excessive E
Agag is not any stranger to pioneering new racing know-how: He’s additionally the founder and chairman of System E, which was the primary all-electric racing sequence when it debuted in 2014. To bolster his credibility in establishing Excessive H by 2025, Agag lately introduced that the fledgling sequence can be becoming a member of a working group with System 1 and the Worldwide Vehicle Federation (FIA) to additional discover the event of hydrogen gas. Excessive H can also be slated to achieve FIA World Championship standing by 2026.
“My concept, my pitch, for System 1 was to say, hear, you do not know which know-how would be the successful one,” Agag explains. “For the second, you might be betting on artificial fuels… however hydrogen goes to be, perhaps, one know-how that could possibly be a part of the equation. In order that’s all that it’s, for System 1 to regulate what is going on to occur right here. And what is going on to occur is we’ll have the primary—and, I feel for fairly some time, the one—pure hydrogen world championship racing.”
In some ways, the working group makes numerous sense: 5 of Excessive E’s current 10 groups have direct or tangential ties to System 1, with the likes of McLaren, Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, and Jenson Button amongst its crew house owners. And using hydrogen has turn into an attractive prospect for all of motorsports, partly as a result of it may be utilized in combustion engines (“They [Formula 1] like noise… and combustion makes noise!” Agag laughs).
After all, utilizing hydrogen completely to gas a racing sequence is not any small feat, and different hydrogen-based tasks have been suffering from setbacks and delays in current months. Most notably, the Le Mans hydrogen class has already been delayed to 2027, citing security issues.
However Excessive E believes its model of racing—quick sprints that final roughly 10 minutes—is completely suited to showcasing and testing the facility of hydrogen gas cells, and the sequence’ management is assured that after preliminary testing final month, they are going to be operating their first totally hydrogen race by February 2025.
Gregory Leporati
Getting all of the operations up and operating in solely 13 months actually will not be straightforward, although. “Switching that one letter to H means now we have to change 1,000,000 different issues,” Agag says.