Extreme E unveils championship rules – mixes Star Wars with Dakar

29th May 2020

Henry Biggs

The offroad electric racing series, Extreme E, was already looking totally different to any other race series – in a very enticing way – and now its organisers have revealed exactly how the weekends will be run, describing them as ‘Star Wars pod racing meets the Dakar Rally’.

Actually, to us it sounds a bit more like it was inspired by some marathon Mario Kart sessions during lockdown (again, not a bad thing).

As we’ve already noted, each team will run a male-female driver pairing and the races will consist of two 16-kilometre laps. Each driver must drive one lap and teams do not have to publish the order in advance, ensuring some male-female racing. Qualifying on day one sends the top four teams into the first semi-final and the bottom four into a ‘sudden death’ second semi-final, dubbed the 'Crazy Race’. While the top three finishers from semi-final one go through to the final, only the overall winner of the 'Crazy Race’ will do so.

The courses are designed with a mix of extreme gradients, banks, drops, dunes and jumps. The latter feature also gives rise (sorry) to another racing plot twist – Hyperdrive. This is an additional boost of speed awarded to the car performing the biggest jump. And with 550PS (542bhp), the 1,650kg Odyssey 21 racing machines should be plenty capable of some serious air. Just no Jar-Jar Binks please.