Colin McMaster / LAT Photographs
ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the crucial 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 mud 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 solely in areas of the globe which can be 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 throughout 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, turning into the primary racing sequence powered totally by hydrogen.
“We need 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 expertise, related expertise that may have actual, big makes use of within the economic system typically.”
Excessive E
Agag is not any stranger to pioneering new racing expertise: 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 just lately introduced that the fledgling sequence can be becoming a member of a working group with System 1 and the Worldwide Car Federation (FIA) to additional discover the event of hydrogen gasoline. Excessive H can also be slated to realize FIA World Championship standing by 2026.
“My concept, my pitch, for System 1 was to say, pay attention, you do not know which expertise would be the successful one,” Agag explains. “For the second, you’re betting on artificial fuels… however hydrogen goes to be, perhaps, one expertise that could possibly be a part of the equation. In order that’s all that it’s, for System 1 to keep watch over what is going on to occur right here. And what is going on to occur is we’ll have the primary—and, I believe 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 present 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 develop 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 solely to gasoline a racing sequence is not any small feat, and different hydrogen-based tasks have been affected by 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 fashion of racing—quick sprints that final roughly 10 minutes—is completely suited to showcasing and testing the facility of hydrogen gasoline cells, and the sequence’ management is assured that after preliminary testing final month, they are going to be working their first totally hydrogen race by February 2025.
Gregory Leporati
Getting all of the operations up and working in solely 13 months definitely will not be simple, although. “Switching that one letter to H means now we have to modify one million different issues,” Agag says.
