This is all very Star Trek, isn’t it? Formula E established a path for electric motorsport on city streets, before sister series Extreme E took the scenic route off road a few years later. And now comes Extreme H, trying to do the same for hydrogen.
For alternative-power-motorsport svengali Alejandro Agag, it continues the mantra “to boldly go where no one has gone before”. The Spaniard, perhaps not fully up to speed on late 1960s American sci-fi TV series, prefers to view himself not as Captain Kirk, but as a reverse-engineered Marty McFly.
“I don’t know if you have seen movies about people that travel in time, like Back to the Future,” he offers. “When you travel back in time, you have to be very careful not to touch or change anything because, even if you touch something very small, it can have huge consequences for the future. Imagine that today is one such moment, but looking forward. With this championship that we are launching, we could be having a butterfly effect for the future of huge proportions.”
There’s no doubt that ‘hydrogen’ is the current racing buzzword – as anyone who follows the World Endurance Championship will attest. And Extreme H is boldly (that word again) striking out as the first to venture down this avenue, beginning with the 2025 season opener in April. It’s doing so with plenty of involvement from other worldwide series.
“We decided to pull together something that we called the Hydrogen Hub,” reveals Extreme H technical director Mark Grain. “It’s a forum where we’ve invited other forms of motorsport – representatives from different championships, OEMs and so on, and of course the FIA, and representatives from our competing teams. The idea is that we’re right in the vanguard of hydrogen racing and we’d like to share our experiences, and hopefully in the future shortcut any of the processes and give them a helping hand down the road.”
Presumably that would include people from the Le Mans 24 Hours and WEC-organising Automobile Club de l’Ouest. “Yes,” responds Grain. “They’re invited along, as are representatives of IMSA, NASCAR, Formula 1. We’ve had OEMs in the shape of Toyota, Hyundai, BMW. That’s the level of interest that we’re talking about. Extensive interest across all these different championships and OEMs.”
Grain is a converted single-seater purist, despite the background of a father who built rally cars. He started off at Bowman Racing in the halcyon late 1980s/early 1990s era of Formula 3 before moving to Formula 1, mostly at McLaren – which is where he came across this quirky new thing called Extreme E.
“When I was still at McLaren, Zak [Brown, McLaren CEO] asked me to pull the team together, set it up and go racing,” he explains. “I didn’t know what to expect. When I was there in the paddock, there were a lot more familiar faces than I anticipated – from Prodrive and other teams. I was impressed with the feel of the paddock, the camaraderie between the teams, and the relationship with the championship and so on, that really appealed to me.”
To the extent that, in 2022, he crossed over to the championship itself. One of his first tasks? To oversee the birth of Extreme H and the Pioneer 25 machine, which is built by Formula E and Extreme E constructor Spark Racing Technology and replaces the XE Odyssey 21.
"It’s kind of everything’s changed, but it hasn’t at the same time, if that makes sense!"
Mark Grain
Extreme H had been announced in February 2022, although it wouldn’t become clear for some time whether this would be in addition to XE or whether it would replace it. Images of the car were released later that year, at which point it was still very much a concept rather than living in the real world. Naturally, the experiences from Extreme E, which launched with its first round in April 2021, mean that the new Pioneer 25 is very much from the same family tree as the Odyssey 21.
“You’ve got carryover principles,” stresses Grain. “We’ve got a tubular spaceframe chassis, but that’s all a new design, so it’s not the same shape, although the bodywork styling is reminiscent of an XE car. It’s a single seat, centrally mounted [as opposed to XE].
“We accommodated the conversations we had with the FIA, and we’re defining all these new rulesets for a hydrogen racing car. The design of the chassis; what it has to withstand. The suspension elements, by and large they’re all new. They’re the same construction, but the design detail has changed.
“One of the few elements that does carry straight over is the motors and inverters, and the gearbox and transmission. That’s a good saving, and they didn’t need to be revised. Then you’ve got the hydrogen fuel cell, which is an all-new element, and the battery pack from Fortescue [previously known as WAE] – the technology’s the same but the packaging is different, so we’ve gone from a cube-shaped battery to a flatter and more rectangular battery that sits low down in the car. It’s kind of everything’s changed, but it hasn’t at the same time, if that makes sense!”
But why the move to hydrogen? Agag, whose Extreme E series kicked off in 2021 in oil-exporting powerhouse Saudi Arabia, offers an eyebrow-raising statement when he claims “the world is different to five years ago. When we launched Extreme E, climate was at the top of worries. Today I feel that climate has gone to second or third place when there are wars, problems with the economy and so on.” He qualifies this by adding that “AI will multiply the demand for energy. Hydrogen can be the enabler of renewable energy all around the world.”
Regarding the practicalities of motorsport and its future, Grain says of the move to hydrogen fuel cell technology: “We felt that it was going to be a significant player in the automotive industry and mobility in the future. We could already see it in buses and trucks and so on. We know, and we’ve had contact with, aircraft companies that are actively investigating hydrogen options.
“We had demonstrated to the world that an EV could go to all these tough environments, race really hard wheel to wheel, roll over, all of that stuff that we did in Extreme E, and that EVs weren’t just for the trip to the supermarket or whatever, that they could withstand these incredibly demanding situations. So we wanted to do the same with hydrogen.”
The shakedown and validation test for the Pioneer 25 took place last December at the La Ferte Gaucher asphalt test track, to the east of Paris and around 80 kilometres from Spark’s factory. It’s the same circuit where the Formula E Spark took its baby steps more than a decade ago, and honours for the first Extreme H run were handed to Dakar Rally veteran and two-time Le Mans 24 Hours starter Christian Lavieille.
“That went well,” recalls Grain. “Then Christmas break and we were up and running in the third week of January at a track to the north-west of Paris. And now we were onto using all the locations and tracks that are used by the World Rally Championship teams and Dakar teams.
“What we’ve done since is we’ve been out every month. From January through to June we’ve done eight tests at locations always in France – one north of Lyon, also down in the south-west at Chateau de Lastours, plus two more. We have covered just under 1800km [1100 miles] of testing. That equates to three seasons of XE racing, so we’re obviously very pleased with that total and how the progress in testing’s been going.”
While Lavieille remains part of the test driver team, others to take the wheel have been versatile French maestro Romain Dumas and Norwegian Hedda Hosas, who was a regular in Extreme E in 2022 and 2023 but finds herself out of a permanent seat this season. The participation of Hosas is crucial in a series that mandates mixed-gender driving crews.
“We’ve been dividing all those responsibilities up depending on driver availability and the programme,” explains Grain. “You don’t need me to tell you how important it would be to make sure we’ve got a female test driver, and we’re not tuning a car just for males. Steering load, braking forces, all that sort of stuff are completely transferable between a male and a female driver.
“But it’s not only that. Hedda comes with a lot of XE experience, certainly more than Christian and Romain, so she’s been able to give us good back-to-back feedback between the E car and the H car.”
While in the case of Hosas in particular, it would be hoped that her early grounding in the Extreme H car would be a conduit back into a regular seat, it’s as fair as the series could make it in the sense that no existing teams and drivers get an advantage.
“The whole programme is operated by Spark,” points out Grain. “We have conducted the tests privately with good sound logic. We have got an all-new type of car, and we’ve had no need to go public until now. We’ve just been running our own programme quietly.”
"Motorsport has to be involved in hydrogen, and for sure we will follow. From a driver’s point of view the car is going to be better"
Carlos Sainz
Apart from the single seat, another notable feature of the Pioneer 25 is its centre of gravity lowered from the Odyssey 21 – less chance of rolling over – while modular carbon-fibre bodywork replaces the green flax used on the XE machine. In the latter case, too much damage from the rugged racing that features in the series meant that its recycling couldn’t keep pace with demand. And then there’s the critical question of the safety of hydrogen. It’s one that instantly springs to mind in the layman, but Grain is quick to counter the fears.
“We’ve been working closely with the FIA on this to define the all-new crash-test regulations,” he says. “We had the battery pressure test last month that we passed, and we’ve got our final crash tests at UTAC in August using chassis 2. They’ve required a lot of collaboration back and forth with the FIA.
“If you saw an XE and an XH chassis side by side, you’d notice a much more robust roof detail, which is right above the hydrogen tanks. So instead of just tubes, there’s metal fillets and infills. The same applies underneath the car and the composite impact structures left and right. Also, there’s a frame that will sit above the hydrogen tanks, and we’ve been working with the FIA on velocities and so on, system pressures.
“It’s been a collaborative process, and that’s one of the exciting things about this – it’s an all-new championship, there aren’t any other hydrogen cars out there racing at the moment, so this has been a journey of discovering and thought process for the FIA, as it has been for us. That applies not only to the car, but to how we operate the championship – everything that you associate with a modern racing championship, car recovery and so on. All those processes have been thoroughly reviewed and revised.”
The production run for the Pioneer 25 begins next month, with the aim of teams taking delivery of their new weaponry in late October or early November. You can expect plenty of the current participants to be on the grid when the action begins in 2025; among those who attended the launch last month on the St Helena ship, which acts as the series’ transport, were Legacy Motor Club chief and NASCAR legend Jimmie Johnson, Acciona Sainz boss and all-round motorsport hero Carlos Sainz Sr, and SUN Minimeal driver/principal and two-time DTM king Timo Scheider.
“Motorsport has to be involved in hydrogen, and for sure we will follow,” asserts Sainz. “From a driver’s point of view, the car is going to be better. We faced problems at the beginning of XE; I think it was a continuous learning process together with Spark. It’s a super challenge for everybody.”
Sainz’s staff and his rivals will, says Grain, be able to get a handle on the challenges of hydrogen in the near future: “We are going to run sessions at Spark for the engineers and technicians so that, before they get their race cars, they’ll get a good education on the car, and that’s backed up by operation manuals.
“We’ve got a relationship with GeoPura, who are owned by Siemens – they’ve got extensive hydrogen experience, and so we’ve got a team based in Detroit who are doing more work on supersonic CFD that ties into the FIA work, and it demonstrates how if anything untoward happens, like you rupture a high pressure line on a hydrogen car, that it actually just dissipates. Hydrogen is so light; it doesn’t hang around to catch fire. It just goes.”
Grain refers to the Hindenburg airship disaster of 1937, which perhaps has done more than anything to raise scepticism of hydrogen: “Actually the fire was caused by the material of the balloon, not the hydrogen. We want to dispel all of those myths that surround hydrogen. It’s an incredibly safe form of energy. We want to show the world that you can race these cars in these locations, and just have great motorsport using this technology that hopefully then starts to get mainstream interest.”
Agag pays tribute to his late friend Gil de Ferran, with whom he launched Extreme E. “His spirit, his leadership, his ideas, his vision are very much with us,” he declares. And that is backed up by Scheider, whose other Extreme E hat is as the track designer.
“When I think back five years ago, there was one point Alejandro said, ‘It should be extreme, that’s the target’,” reflects the German. “And now five years later with this history I’ve had as a track designer and driver, and now as a team principal and driver, I’m super-proud to be part of this journey. There’s a bright future coming up for all of us. It’s clear that this championship is reducing the carbon footprint big time, and that’s why we all have such a big interest in the future of XH.”
Does this work on the Pioneer 25 make those involved feel like, erm, pioneers?
“It does,” reckons Grain. “We’re right at the front of it. It’s not without its challenges but it is rewarding, I have to say. I spent some time in IndyCar – it was great racing, but you’ve got that 12-year-old car over there. Doing something new is always more exciting, I would say.”
