Formula E, the world’s only all-electric racing series, aims to achieve something that has never been attempted before: a game to solve a fundamental political problem.
Fans react to the Formula E World Championship at Portland International Raceway on June 24, 2023, in Portland, Oregon. Photos via Mason Trinca for POLITICO
PORTLAND, Ore. — On a blue day last summer at Portland International Raceway, a banner in the fan village proclaimed, “Progress is unstoppable. “Children pedaled motorcycles perched on desks that charged their phones. electronic music. At the hydration station, smiling attendees provided water in compostable cups and, wait a minute, compostable cups?Where were the red plastic cups that turned Budweiser and country music upside down?And why didn’t my nostrils tremble with the sweet toxic scent of benzene-burning engines?
At that moment, a noise was heard from the direction of the track, a hissing sound similar to that of a boiling kettle. A candy-colored race car passed by, and the whistle turned into a deep whistle. The spectators turned their heads with their mouths open. “, they are picking up speed!”A red-bearded boy exclaimed.
This is Formula E, the world’s first electric car race. Founded in a Paris café in 2011 by two European entrepreneurs with deep ties to Formula 1, Formula E was conceived as a way to standardize electric cars by inventing a festival that would last an incubator generation and a PR tour.
Today, like its better-known and hugely popular big brother, Formula E travels around the world to exotic locations such as Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Monaco and once a year to the United States. For five years, the occasion had been held at a transient urban track in Brooklyn’s Red Hook community, which wasn’t exactly a hotbed of auto racing fanaticism. Last summer, he moved to Portland, a legendarily liberal city where human-caused weather replacement is a fundamental trust and Prius trees dominate the road. .
The crowds that thronged around this carefully curated fan village probably wouldn’t have realized that they were anything more than just spectators. They were also test subjects in an experiment, partly in sport and partly in politics. The crowd’s reaction to the action in the next 8 hours, of course, would contribute to the popularity of a new sport. But they would also shape confidence in electric cars in general and even the 2024 presidential election. That’s because Formula E sells the electric car, which has become a key point. of discord between the two leading presidential candidates.
Since May 2021, when President Joe Biden boarded an electric F-150 on an asphalt control track in Michigan and pressed the steel, again telling reporters, “That is fast,” EV speed has been a potential presidential ally. It’s a sexy gift that can accomplish the task of furthering Biden’s massive, unsexy climate agenda.
In the most productive of all imaginable worlds, Formula E’s high-tech cars would be a liberal answer to NASCAR: a primal sporting phenomenon that aligns perfectly with an entire political worldview.
This perception still has a long way to go. Even the White House didn’t notice. Asked to comment on Formula E, and whether anyone in the West Wing was watching, management declined to answer: “It’s a bit out of our purview,” a press officer told the Transport Ministry told me.
The administration’s lack of interest in what amounts to lax exposure is puzzling. No generation included more than the electric vehicle in Biden’s mammoth inflation-reducing bill. As envisioned by the administration, the electric vehicle would be key to winning the global rivalry with China and keeping the climate at a habitable temperature.
But that’s just the beginning. The production of these cars would be a source of employment, technological advances and economic recovery. Such a transformation would require much more than any other type of car. Several adjacent industries would have to be created from scratch. The Biden administration has created a trade policy to inspire the structure of electric vehicle factories, factories to make batteries for electric vehicles, and factories to make battery parts, not to mention the structure and installation of millions of charging stations that could eventually dethrone the iconic road fuel pump. the IRA in 2022, according to research conducted through E2, a nonprofit knowledge store, the large infusion of federal dollars has catalyzed an unexpected $74 billion in personal capital.
To make its case, the government wants the electorate to believe in these still-unbuilt factories (most of them located in the red-leaning southern constituencies) and tens of thousands of jobs yet to be created. The only thing that tangibly exists today is the vehicle itself. Voters may not like or perceive the EPA’s or Department of Energy’s loan program regulations, and mediocre sales figures recommend that’s not the case. But maybe they can identify with some outdated competition on Sunday, sell on Monday,” reads the automaker’s maxim. That’s basically the concept behind Formula E.
The most difficult position to make this point is in the United States, and specifically since last summer, when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump began calling electric cars underpowered and pathetic job destroyers that would end up helping China. fortune,” Trump said at a rally in Iowa in December. Could electric race cars impress American racing enthusiasts (already in the grip of NASCAR’s roaring, resource-hungry frenzy) so much that they’re taking off their wraparound sunglasses and taking another look at the electric vehicle?
Tickets for the Formula E event sell out regularly, to whom?
“I don’t think anybody knows,” said Darrell LeBlanc, president of Friends of PIR, an organization that organizes the races with local volunteers. Portland International Raceway had hosted a NASCAR race (part of their second-tier Xfinity series) for 3 weeks. before, and the stands were packed, with an overflowing crowd on the lawn.
Ron Huegli, the track’s general manager and racer who attended his first race at the PIR in 1968, wondered what enthusiasm classic engine enthusiasts could generate for a battery-powered car. “It’s a struggle, I’m not going to deny it,” he told me. “Motor racing is based on sensory sensations, noises, smells, and that’s not the case with Formula E.
Alberto Longo, co-founder and director of the Formula E Championship, is a Spaniard with a beard and a deeply wrinkled face. At a press conference on the eve of the Portland race, her hairy torso was visible under a blouse more unbuttoned than any American. How important, I asked, for Formula E to win over American fans?
China is now leading the way in electric mobility, but you can see the U. S. getting there, and once it does, it will probably overtake every other country in the world. “
Longo is that rare user who can boast of having introduced a world series of motorsports. That puts him in the same league overall as Bill France, the guy who founded NASCAR, though their cases couldn’t be more different. In the 1930s, when France introduced what would become NASCAR, auto racing didn’t exist in the Great Depression-era South. Neither were grassroots sports, with the exception of baseball. France has replaced that. France, a race car driver and gas station owner with a knack for showmanship, drew crowds of innocents to the compacted sand of Daytona Beach, Florida, where they stood dangerously close to the track and watched in awe as the Fords passed faster than anyone else. I’ve noticed it before. A car is leaving. It wasn’t just the speed, but also the monstrous sound that sparked the racing craze. One of the largest crowds ever seen amassed at a 1938 standout race in Atlanta.
“The roar of thirty V-8 engines as they accelerated was a sound unlike anything the people of Atlanta had ever heard,” Neal Thompson wrote in his NASCAR article, “Driving with the Devil. “”As if hell itself had opened up and released the cries of their angry souls. “
Longo faces a tougher crowd. Americans are no longer rural, rural people, run over by a noisy sedan. They are the most complicated and wealthiest sports consumers on the planet, with dozens of professional sports entertainment just a click away from a TV remote. Their task becomes even more daunting. In addition to the grunts of hell, Formula E promises the buzz of heaven: a bonus for the planet but a radical upgrade for motorsport fans.
“The problem, the historical challenge of what is considered a European motorsport to enter this market has been almost impossible,” Longo admitted. While its competitor NASCAR exerts its cultural dominance — drawing millions of viewers each weekend on Fox and NBC — Formula E is relegated to CBS Sports, where it appears to bowl and fish for billfish. NASCAR is where American automakers spend millions and risk their reputations on duped Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaros. No U. S. automaker has committed as a constructor for Formula E, despite Longo’s appeals. Still, Longo is betting that many Formula E enthusiasts will eventually be Americans, but not Americans who watch NASCAR.
“Our purpose has not been to please everybody,” Longo said. “There are now six hundred million motorsport enthusiasts in the world, while there are 8 billion in the world. So I think our opportunity is much bigger than just motorsport enthusiasts. “
Courting the American sports customer is just one of Formula E’s business challenges. An even greater country is the ability to meet its own climate commitments.
When Formula E was founded, it was committed to achieving 0 carbon emissions. This might seem undeniable in a series of races where the cars don’t consume fuel. But the compromise went much further by adding one and both aspects of the production beyond the track. , even its enthusiasts. This is not an undeniable task in global motorsport, one of the most consumed competitions on the planet. As Formula E moves from continent to continent, many cars and other aircraft are converted into 4,747 aircraft. Thousands of enthusiasts flock to the rink to eat, drink and fill the rubbish bins to overflowing. They watch cars burn rubber, and when it gets fun, they crash into each other and break into tiny pieces of carbon fiber.
The person in charge of erasing this environmental impact in Formula E is Julia Pallé, Vice President of Sustainability. In an interview ahead of the Portland race, the dashing Frenchwoman spoke of the popular Formula E catchphrase: “We basically combine racing and explaining why so that they can coexist powerfully without compromise. “
Pallé starts with the rubbish bins. ” 100% will be collected and recycled through a company located just 10 minutes from the racecourse,” he said. For emissions into the local power grid, Formula E is powered by electric turbines that run on biodiesel. To save materials, car bodies are made from recycled linen and carbon fiber. If a collision leaves splinters on the track, they are collected and sent to London (via a courier service that uses biofuels and buys carbon offsets from cars) to be recycled again.
To reduce emissions from fan travel, races are only held at locations that are available via public transportation. (Portland is the rare U. S. line. with light rail service). For their own travel-related broadcasts, teams race across the continent and the city. Ten of last season’s 16 races were doubleheads, in cities such as Jakarta, Indonesia and Rome.
“75% of the carbon footprint is due to logistics,” Pallé said. “And logistics is the time. “
Emissions that cannot be eliminated are offset by Formula E investments in biofuels projects in Chile and South Carolina, landfill fuel in Malaysia, and wind farms in Morocco and Mexico. The company’s 70-page sustainability report boasts that it has led the way in It is a founding member of the Global Sustainability Benchmark in Sports, as well as the framework organized by the United Nations. It is the first motorsport to obtain ISO 20121 certification, which establishes sustainability criteria in event management.
“It also provides you with the credibility and legitimacy to be part of an organization of like-minded people who set and exceed expectations,” Pallé said.
Energy is a term that means a lot to the American racing fan, unless it’s the caffeine rush of a Red Bull. But power (and more particularly energy savings) explains almost everything in the organization of a Formula E race.
The race lasts about forty-five minutes. After that, the battery died. That’s ridiculously short by the standards of NASCAR, whose cars lap the track for hours. But then, NASCAR has the luxury of making pit stops. Up to six times per race, a driver enters the paddock and a burly team member, the “gas man,” pours 11 gallons of fuel into the tank. Formula E doesn’t have that luxury. There is no such thing as an “electronic man” who can offer a miraculous sip. A full battery charge can take only hours and enthusiasts probably wouldn’t be expecting that. (Until 2018, Formula E drivers solved this challenge by switching from a mid-race car to a fully qualified second replacement car, the world’s most expensive battery change. )
Then it’s all at once. For three-quarters of an hour, a driver pushes the car to the limit, which actually means pushing the battery to the limit. Imagine driving a Camaro or Dodge on an 88-mile drive at high speed through treacherous traffic. Then turn this up Requirement: When you cross the finish line, the engine will have no power left. No one feels more anxiety when it comes to autonomy than a Formula E engine.
Even so, the battery powers the car for 60 percent of the race.
You read that right. With battery charging, cars would expire long before reaching the finish line. The additional 40% comes from so-called regenerative braking. Conventional electric cars also have “regeneration”; Release the accelerator and the car decelerates as if the brakes are applied.
Regen is a stunner. While classic cars lose braking power in the form of heat, the electric vehicle uses this heat to fill the battery. Formula E is a wizard of regeneration, extracting more juice from its brakes than any other. ” “It’s an incredibly complex car,” said James Barclay, Jaguar TCS Racing team principal.
Regenerating the battery is not as undeniable as hitting the brakes. Using the buttons on the guide wheel, the driver can adjust the feedback at the front and rear. Sometimes the brakes are not used at all. Teams set in motion an intense strategy of inertia, or in racing parlance, “lifting,” without accelerating or braking, allowing the battery to pick up a few drops of energy as the speedometer is lowered. The pilot monitors the battery levels, turns on the regeneration paddles and talks on the radio. in a special code that the other groups can’t decipher – to transmit the battery ratings to the team’s engineers, so that they can advise you – still in the code – how to manage your power on the lap.
“A lot of drivers will tell you it’s a game of chess at top speed,” said Sam Smith, a correspondent for British motorsport The Race who has covered Formula E since its inception.
This is a drastic replacement of the skills that most runners learn from childhood. Traditionalists win by going up against the wall,” said Oliver Askew. American, he is one of the few drivers to have raced in Formula E and IndyCar. the American edition of single-seater racing. ” It’s very hard to understand,” Askew said. “It’s like being informed to walk again. I didn’t have the ability to think about the things that were unique to this career. All of this has become secondary in terms of how I drive the car and how I manage my energy.
The Portland track presented a particularly tricky challenge for the drivers. The other races in the Formula E series feature common hairpin bends. Each circular is an opportunity to deploy regeneration and get an electronic snack. Portland had few such snacks. A classic American track that emphasizes pure speed in challenging corners, the PIR features two long straightaways that eat away at battery life. And the track is very wide, inviting drivers to get out and overtake. But getting ahead consumes energy. Therefore, the runner will have to resist the temptation to step on it and be cerebral. He looks at his rival’s bumper and waits, saving his energy for the final laps, when it matters most.
“It’s going to be incredibly tricky,” Maserati team principal James Rossiter told reporters at a briefing. “What we’re going to see is going to be a little bit unique. I’m really excited to see how it goes, new, incredibly fast.
Formula E’s long history in the U. S. depends on teenagers like Emilio Ortega, who didn’t even have a driver’s license yet.
Ortega, a 15-year-old boy with a shaky mustache, sat in the stands with his parents, wearing a black T-shirt over his head to brave the heat, as he watched the cars go through their qualifying laps. “I don’t really care what sound they make,” he told me. “I only care about the quality of the races and how fast they go by. “
Ortega had a wonderful view of the curves leading to a short straightaway. The cars slowed down the corners and Ortega watched impatiently as the cars entered the straight. This is where an electric race car, with its astonishing torque, deserves to have a box. day. But the pilots seemed to hold back. Ortega didn’t hear the impressive sound that spectators first spotted when they arrived at the track the day before. Intrigued, Ortega looked down at his phone to compare lap times to the Indy and NASCAR races he watched. These Formula E drivers were a moment slower. That drivers Indy. Si electric cars are so fast, why were those electric supercars so slow?
Ortega’s idea may simply be due to the tires. A Formula E car has only a few games per weekend, for a total of eight. Depending on the race, a NASCAR vehicle receives up to 15 sets of tires, for a total of 60. The sound of tires shaking told Ortega that the tires on the electric cars were worn out and didn’t grip the track well. “When you use newer tires, you can overtake faster every time,” he said. “When you reuse them, they get slower and slower. “
Ortega is right. The tyres are the point where Formula E’s two main rules – fast racing and zero carbon emissions – come into direct conflict. Consider NASCAR without restrictions. A team travels with two giant piles of tires: slick tires for dry asphalt and tread tires for rain. Formula E has only one type of tyre. Manufactured by the South Korean company Hankook, it has a dual purpose and is designed to operate in dry and rainy conditions. It doesn’t excel in any of the areas. Hybrid tyres are a plus for Formula E’s carbon footprint, but for drivers they are a serious compromise.
“I can’t overtake to the limit,” said Askew, the American driver. “I have to accelerate at low speed. There is only one secure grip.
Ortega didn’t know that Formula E had so few tires because it was bigger for the weather. All I knew was that it was disappointing. I asked Ortega the key question: Which do you prefer, NASCAR or Formula E?He paused to think. In the silence, the tires screeched and the electro echoed somewhere. Ortega, already a veteran of PIR racing, knows the differences between the two racing series.
Over the course of a three-day weekend, a NASCAR viewer can witness 12 hours of on-track action, not just the NASCAR series and finals, but many other occasions where locals drive their Mazda Miatas or kids race in “dwarf” cars. with lawnmower type motors. NASCAR enthusiasts, usually middle-aged men dressed in baseball caps, shorts, and baggy T-shirts who assert their allegiance to a logo (Carhartt), a band (Led Zeppelin), or a political vision (1776 Bitches), wander beyond. they. A line of semi-trucks so long that it stretches as far as the eye can see. It’s those cars that brought the cars and toys to more than 60 professional and semi-professional drivers. Their engines idle in the heat, run the air conditioning, and brazenly emit into the atmosphere.
Formula E has none of that.
Ortega remained silent as he weighed the pros and cons. Finally, he spoke in the tone of one who has already made up his mind. “I like it a lot,” he said of Formula E. I like it more than IndyCar and the others. “
What made him a fan wasn’t the action on the track. That’s how Formula E threw a fancy party. The road to the bleachers was a non-stop carnival: ping-pong tables, cornhole stations, a cheerleading squad, a costumed Sasquatch escorted through two beautiful women with axes. He said fondly, “There’s a guy in a Darth Vader mask with a bagpipe on a unicycle. “
“For NASCAR there was no shadow. Far from it,” he continued. “There were only pots and a food truck. Here are places to sit. It looks like a festival. It makes me so much happier. .
“I mean, that’s what Portland is,” Ortega concluded. “Weird things are happening. “
It was getting closer to the last circular of the race and the grandstands were packed. People wore more wide-brimmed hats and fewer baseball caps than the crowd wore at the NASCAR race a few weeks earlier. The demographics were much more diverse. There were couples with babies; moms with daughters; A thick white guy walking to his seat holding the hand of a black woman. A broad-shouldered figure, long black hair, and baldness sat alone, dressed in a blue floral dress.
The race itself is also different. Unlike NASCAR, where cars are widely dispersed along the track and their roar is a constant background noise no matter where you sit, Formula E cars raced in a tight line like a squad of X-wing attackers from “Star Wars. “It passed, it was so quiet that you could only hear the breeze. The NASCAR race made my plastic beer cup shake; Today, my compostable water carton didn’t budge. The strangers filled the silence with rudimentary recommendations they had gathered. (“And it’s a style of tire they use in all weathers,” said one guy with headphones. )They’re not going as fast as they did in qualifying. “I think I can drive faster than that. “
The engineers in the teams’ control room may have explained why. The Portland race had “the maximum excessive peloton effect we’ve noticed all year,” Jaguar team principal Barclay told me. Pelotons are not unusual in bike races where riders organize themselves in combination for a tight mass to avoid wind resistance and save energy. The driving forces of race cars also gather one after the other to save fuel, but here in Portland, with its long, battery-draining straightaways, the need to conserve electrons was excessive. The rear of the group, or caboose, had other advantages. The further back a driver is, the more they brake. The more an electric vehicle brakes, the more energy it regenerates. The strategy in Portland wasn’t to get ahead yet to wander through traffic like a commuter’s rush hour.
In the last laps, the speed increases. ” There comes a point at the end of the race where there’s no reason to save more,” Barclay said.
New Zealand’s Jaguar driver Nick Cassidy crossed the finish line a third of a second ahead of British driver Jake Dennis. The announcer shouted, “Cassidy gets his third win of the season with 0% power across the line!”
Spectators made their way to the exits as the sun sank below the horizon. Race volunteers gathered in a grassy grove with the soft passengers to decompress with chili and burgers. LeBlanc, the volunteer organizer, was excited. ” We were seeing those drivers doing things on the track that we’d never noticed before,” he said. “I’ve never noticed them go 4 or 5 wide without crashing. “
One of LeBlanc’s most no-nonsense lieutenants, 64-year-old Matthew Mansur, a gruff track and boxing veteran everyone calls Bud. When asked what his idea was for Formula E, Mansur shrugged. “The race isn’t long enough, but you know, those are electric cars,” he said. “Basically, it’s all just for show, for the EV industry or whatever. “
Ask LeBlanc, Mansur, or other Portland motor enthusiasts and they’ll tell you they know the loud, vigorous engines they grew up with are headed toward the sunset. But oblivion is still a long way off.
“Fifty years from now, internal combustion cars will be like horses,” said Jeff Zurschmeide, a motorsports reporter for the Portland Tribune. “Which means other people across the country will have one or two and they’ll have the right assets where they’ll have a store and they’ll be able to take care of it, and they’ll be able to buy their fuel from a barrel somewhere, take it out and distribute it.
In the twilight, Formula E race cars were dismantled. Crews packed the fat-free portions into boxes, then stuffed them into yellow shipping boxes for a carbon-reduction adventure until the next stop in Rome. Formula E will return to Portland on the last weekend of June, aiming to fill the PIR grandstands two days in a row. It’s a gamble to see if last year’s onlookers can become a new fan base. It’s also a microcosm of Formula E’s ultimate gamble: that a few or so sleek electric cars can lure millions of people into a new culture of quiet, effective racing.
The bet is not much different from the one made through Biden. The president’s lieutenants, like him, have tried to generate excitement for the administration’s electric vehicle program through the electric vehicle program. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg took an electric bus, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. traveled in a motorcade of electric cars down the South, and Vice President Kamala Harris awkwardly inserted a charging cable into a Chevrolet Bolt in suburban Maryland.
But regardless of the vehicle, there are few signs that those circuits are convincing those who have already convinced.
The two places where Formula E has drawn its crowds, New York and Portland, are reliable sources of Democratic votes and EV purchases, and in this case, among the less enthusiastic about NASCAR. Meanwhile, the inventory car and its roaring engine are very popular in states like West Virginia, Indiana, and the Carolinas. Across the country, sales of electric vehicles have declined as car buyers worry about their high costs and lack of charging stations. Sales were up 15% in January — pretty good, but nothing like a 52% growth rate in 2023, according to data from S
So this year – as Formula E asks the audience and the president asks the electorate to sign up for another season – they both face the same confusing responsibility. They’ve latched onto a generation that, at first glance, turns out to have the kind of universal appeal that the iPhone had in 2009. Electric cars are packed with exciting new features and economic promises. Best of all, they go from 0 to 60 mph in 3 seconds. But all that sexiness and speed probably won’t be enough to break through the tough barrier of the culture wars.
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