Here’s how an off-road racing series will make its own hydrogen fuel

ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the distant places on Earth, Alejandro Agag is holding courtroom.

“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 collection he launched in 2021. A part of the collection’ ethos is that it races solely in areas of the globe which are 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 collection’ 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 latest proclamation that Excessive E will rebrand as Excessive H in 2025, turning into the primary racing collection 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 know-how, related know-how that may have actual, enormous makes use of within the economic system on the whole.”

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

“My thought, my pitch, for System 1 was to say, pay attention, you do not know which know-how would be the profitable one,” Agag explains. “For the second, you might be betting on synthetic fuels… however hydrogen goes to be, perhaps, one know-how that might be a part of the equation. In order that’s all that it’s, for System 1 to control 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 plenty of 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 homeowners. And using hydrogen has turn out to be 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).

In fact, utilizing hydrogen solely to gas a racing collection isn’t any small feat, and different hydrogen-based tasks have been stricken by setbacks and delays in latest months. Most notably, the Le Mans hydrogen class has already been delayed to 2027, citing security considerations.

However Excessive E believes its model of racing—quick sprints that final roughly 10 minutes—is completely suited to showcasing and testing the ability of hydrogen gas cells, and the collection’ management is assured that after preliminary testing final month, they are going to be operating their first totally hydrogen race by February 2025.

Getting all of the operations up and operating in solely 13 months definitely will not be straightforward, although. “Switching that one letter to H means now we have to modify one million different issues,” Agag says.