Right here’s how an off-road racing sequence will make its personal hydrogen gas

ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile’s Atacama Desert, probably the most distant places 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 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 sequence he launched in 2021. A part of the sequence’ ethos is that it races completely in areas of the globe which can be closely impacted by local weather change (such because the Atacama Desert—the driest, non-polar area on Earth), usually with no spectators current.

And whereas the competitors throughout 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. Dialog as an alternative has centered on Agag’s current proclamation that Excessive E will rebrand as Excessive H in 2025, changing into the primary racing sequence powered absolutely 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, large makes use of within the financial system usually.”

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

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

In some ways, the working group makes a variety of sense: 5 of Excessive E’s present 10 groups have direct or tangential ties to Formulation 1, with the likes of McLaren, Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, and Jenson Button amongst its staff homeowners. And the usage of hydrogen has change 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).

After all, utilizing hydrogen completely to gas a racing sequence is not any small feat, and different hydrogen-based initiatives have been suffering from setbacks and delays in current months. Most notably, the Le Mans hydrogen class has already been delayed to 2027, citing security considerations.

However Excessive E believes its type of racing—brief sprints that final roughly 10 minutes—is completely suited to showcasing and testing the facility of hydrogen gas cells, and the sequence’ management is assured that after preliminary testing final month, they are going to be working their first absolutely hydrogen race by February 2025.

Getting all of the operations up and working in solely 13 months definitely will not be straightforward, although. “Switching that one letter to H means we’ve to change 1,000,000 different issues,” Agag says.