Extreme E on BBC24 Dec 2021 14:01
Extreme E: Has the all-electric racing series effected change in first season?
By Matt Warwick
BBC Sport
Last updated on6 hours ago6 hours ago.
From the sectionMotorsport
Extreme E Nico Rosberg
Former F1 champion Nico Rosberg now runs an Extreme E team and other green business initiatives
With a strong message promoting climate awareness and gender equality, and a team backed by Lewis Hamilton, Extreme E arrived to quite the fanfare in 2021.
The series raced battery-powered 'electric SUV' 4x4 cars around improvised off-road circuits in locations affected by climate change, incorporating 'legacy projects' to leave a positive mark along the way.
Alongside that, social change was also acknowledged, with each of the nine teams fielding one male and one female driver, addressing the lack of female presence in motorsport.
Five races might not seem like much of a season in elite sport's event-saturated modern era, but in a year ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic and races set on temporary tracks in the world's remotest areas, it's a wonder anything happened at all.
"We're super happy to just have made it with a full season. It's been so tough," says chief executive officer Alejandro Agag, part of a team who found the money and the will to launch a carbon-neutral antidote to fuel-powered racing like Formula 1, and which transports its cars and equipment around the world on one ship - the reconditioned St Helena.
"One example was when all the gear and the cars and everything had been shipped up to Greenland [the flagship race and first motorsport event at the polar ice cap] but we didn't have permission to race because of Covid. We only got it the day before - we spent millions and millions setting everything up. We were close to having to stop."
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Extreme E - Alejandro Agag, Molly Taylor and Johan Kristoffersson
Agag, middle, celebrates at the final race in Dorset with RXR drivers Molly Taylor and Johan Kristoffersson
What is Extreme E actually trying to do?
So was it even worth it? And what good will raising awareness actually do?
"Awareness is only step one," says Agag. "Awareness is high in some areas of the world, but definitely in some areas not.
"Action is what counts - we are very much about action. You cannot do action without awareness. Awareness is what makes it possible."
Awareness for the audience - who are all watching on television as there are no spectators at each race - is seeing what is happening to the places they are racing in.
Action, for Extreme E, was legacy - an often expensive response to a weekend of racing: in Dakar, the port capital of Senegal in west Africa, drivers, organisers and associated environmentalists helped plant a million mangrove trees, as well as cleaned huge amounts of plastic off the beaches where they competed.
"It's