An electric 4x4 race whose paradoxical goal is to raise awareness of environmental issues, the Extreme E begins Saturday and Sunday in the Saudi Arabian desert, with star drivers like Jenson Button, Sébastien Loeb and Carlos Sainz.
“Giving motorsports a platform for climate action”: Alejandro Agag believes passionately in his new project.
The Spanish entrepreneur, who has managed to run electric single-seaters in the heart of Paris or Rome with Formula E, returns with a new UFO in a rather conservative environment.
By going to the "most remote places on the planet already affected by climate change", the Extreme E wants to "show what is happening there and take specific actions to try to help resolve the situation" ecological, Agag told AFP.
For this, the Extreme E relies on its ambassadors.
Briton Lewis Hamilton, seven-time Formula 1 winner and voice of ecology in his sport, created his X44 team and hired the nine-time French world rally champion Sébastien Loeb.
German Nico Rosberg, F1 world champion in 2016, also has his team, while Briton Jenson Button, crowned in 2009 in the premier category of motorsport, will compete in his own team.
Just like the two-time world rally champion and three-time Spanish Dakar winner Carlos Sainz, who will team up with the multiple Spanish trials world champion Laia Sanz, also used to the Dakar on motorcycles.
Mixed crews
Laia Sanz and Carlos Sainz with the Sainz XE Team
Nine teams of two drivers, a woman and a man, will compete five times this year in wheel-to-wheel sprint races, through the desert in Saudi Arabia, near Lac Rose in Senegal, Greenland, and the Brazilian Amazon. and in the middle of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.
For Cristina Gutiérrez, the second woman to have won a stage in the Dakar and who will ride for Hamilton with Loeb, the Extreme E is "an excellent way to show, through sport, the problems linked to climate change".
On the sporting side, "it's going to be very short races which will lead to interesting battles", imagines the Spaniard.
Each round will take place over two days: qualifying on Saturday, semi-final and final on Sunday, with each time two laps of the track of some nine kilometers, one with a woman at the wheel, the other with a man.
Paradoxes
Between the first stop this weekend in Al-Ula and the last (December 11-12 in Argentina), it is a boat, the St. Helena, which will carry the electric SUVs, rather than a plane as it is. used to motor sports.
"The boat allows us to reduce our emissions by 2/3", Agag assures us.
Carbon offset programs (planting mangroves in Senegal and trees in the Amazon, for example) must also be carried out on the sidelines of races and relayed on social networks.
The Extreme E also intends to promote gender equality with its mixed crews.
But, a UFO decidedly loaded with paradoxes, its beginnings take place in an ultra-conservative kingdom which remains singled out for its breaches of human rights and where women were allowed to drive in 2018 only.
Like the Dakar, which has been taking place since 2020 in these desert landscapes, between sand dunes, volcanic basalt mountains and date oases, the Extreme E is part of Saudi Arabia's plan to open up.
Since the coming to power of Crown Prince Mohammed ben Salman, the kingdom has sought to diversify its essentially oil-based economy.
And like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain before it, major sporting events offer a showcase for tourism development.
In this context and with a completely different dimension than the Extreme E, a first Formula 1 Grand Prix will be organized there in December.
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