Here’s how an off-road racing sequence will make its personal hydrogen gasoline

ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile’s Atacama Desert, some 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’s wonderful, this place.”

The 53-year-old Spanish entrepreneur is taking within the sights and sounds of the season 3 finale of Extreme E, the off-road electrical racing sequence he launched in 2021. Part of the sequence’ ethos is that it races completely in areas of the globe which might 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 through the finale is dramatic—with 5 of the sequence’ 10 groups in competition to win the championship—racing has taken a agency backseat this weekend. Conversation as an alternative has centered on Agag’s current proclamation that Extreme E will rebrand as Extreme 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, enormous makes use of within the economic system generally.”

Agag isn’t any stranger to pioneering new racing expertise: He can also be the founder and chairman of Formula E, which was the primary all-electric racing sequence when it debuted in 2014. To bolster his credibility in establishing Extreme H by 2025, Agag not too long ago introduced that the fledgling sequence could be becoming a member of a working group with Formula 1 and the International Automobile Federation (FIA) to additional discover the event of hydrogen gasoline. Extreme H can also be slated to achieve FIA World Championship standing by 2026.

“My thought, my pitch, for Formula 1 was to say, hear, you do not know which expertise would be the successful one,” Agag explains. “For the second, you might be betting on synthetic fuels… however hydrogen goes to be, possibly, one expertise that may very well be a part of the equation. So that is all that it’s, for Formula 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 feel for fairly some time, the one—pure hydrogen world championship racing.”

In some ways, the working group makes loads of sense: Five of Extreme E’s current 10 groups have direct or tangential ties to Formula 1, with the likes of McLaren, Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, and Jenson Button amongst its staff 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).

Of course, utilizing hydrogen completely to gasoline a racing sequence isn’t any small feat, and different hydrogen-based initiatives have been stricken by setbacks and delays in current months. Most notably, the Le Mans hydrogen class has already been delayed to 2027, citing security considerations.

But Extreme E believes its type of racing—quick sprints that final roughly 10 minutes—is completely suited to showcasing and testing the ability 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.

Getting all of the operations up and working in solely 13 months actually will not be straightforward, although. “Switching that one letter to H means we’ve got to modify one million different issues,” Agag says.