“I don’t know,” responds a modest Johan Kristoffersson when posed the question by Autosport prior to clinching his second Extreme E finale in Chile. “I just try to do the best that I can within the races that I do. But it is, of course, nice to be able to have won the first championship of Extreme E together with Rosberg and also the first two years of Rallycross with electric [powertrains].
“But in the end, the competition is so high and also the margins are so small, so to be able to win, you need a bit the margins on your side. I don’t think that is particularly anything to do with EV or something like that. I’ll just try to do my best and the results can speak for themselves.”
And his results do speak for themselves. In electric competition, Kristoffersson has scored four championship trophies from a possible five and enjoyed a 100% win-rate in the 2023 WRX season before the pause necessitated by investigations into a paddock fire at Lydden Hill. When the season resumed with double-headers in South Africa and Hong Kong, this dropped to 71%, with Timo Scheider and Kevin Hansen each achieving one victory to break the dominance of Kristoffersson's family-run team.
In Extreme E, Kristoffersson may not be as controlling on an event-to-event basis, but his consistency across his three campaigns to date with Rosberg X Racing highlight his class. Even in 2022, the single season in which he has not topped the standings, the 35-year-old and team-mate Mikaela Åhlin-Kottulinsky were the only pairing to win more than one X-Prix.
Indeed, had it not been for a disqualification in the Crazy Race at the season finale in 2022 – this for having too many mechanics inside the switch area bay during a driver change – the Swede could have found himself at the summit of all three Extreme E seasons to date. Of course, that first Extreme success came alongside Molly Taylor, who was subsequently replaced by Åhlin-Kottulinsky.
Quizzed as to his yearning for further titles and whether he has a number that he sees as 'enough', Kristoffersson says: “No, not really. I just try to focus on the next season and within motorsport, everything changes so quickly. As long as I have the opportunity to be within a team that is competitive and I am still competitive as a driver, I would like to continue.
“But it’s impossible to say for how long that will be or to set any long-term target. I just try to really focus on the next thing and be within the championship where it is attractive to be at the moment. I don’t really have any number.
“I’ll just try to work on myself as a driver and try to be the best as I can for as many years as possible and then we’ll see how far that will bring me. That’s the focus at the moment. And then one day when I retire, I can look back at the numbers and see it was nice.”
Despite his recent honours coming under electrical power, Kristoffersson stated that he is not beholden to EVs, with competitive racing his key criteria when exploring opportunities.
“I think we’ll see what the future brings,” he said. “Within Extreme E, there is Extreme H coming as well so that might be a little bit different. Things are changing very quickly within motorsport.
"I don’t feel like I must drive an EV. My role is always to be in a championship with high competition and trying to compete against the best" Johan Kristoffersson
“Within Rallycross, I still do the Rally X Nordic which I did this year and that is still IC. So we will see what happens. I don’t feel like I must drive an EV. My role is always to be in a championship with high competition and trying to compete against the best. If that is with internal combustion or hydrogen or electric, as long as I can be there and try to achieve the results that I want, that is the place I would like to be in.”
Pressed on his potential involvement in Extreme H – which recently announced a joint hydrogen technical working group with Formula 1 – he added: “At the moment, there are not really any plans. But if I get the opportunity and also, as they are working closely with the FIA, it might become a world championship. Of course, that’s something that is very attractive to me as a driver, so let’s see what the future brings. But at the moment, it’s a bit too far ahead.”
As for a Rosberg X Racing expansion into the category, he says: “I’m not sure if it’s too far in the future to speak about but, for me, just being the driver of the team, it’s not really something that we’re discussing at the moment.”
Kristoffersson isn't wrong when he says that this has been a “very different” kind of WRX season. Events were cancelled in the United Kingdom, Germany and Belgium following the fire that destroyed the Lancias of Guerlain Chicherit and Sebastien Loeb. After a period of doubt as to whether the championship would continue at all, the varied RX1e cars were replaced by the Zeroid X1s that comprise WRX's second-tier RX2e class as the South Africa and Hong Kong rounds became single-make, spec car events.
“Yeah, it’s been very different,” Kristoffersson reflects. “We started the season with the cars we built ourselves and I had an extremely strong start to the season. I won the first three events and all of the qualifying heats of the three events as well.
“Then, unfortunately, we had the fire at Lydden Hill. But I’ve tried to focus on what I can change and not focus on things more on the political side and all the stuff around it because I can’t really influence it. There is no need for me to waste energy on that.
“Then to finish off the season and drive the last two events, it was cool to come back to South Africa which I have very good memories from. And also, the new event in Hong Kong was something brand new for Rallycross, we’d never done anything like it before.
“It was cool to be a part of that and competing the last couple of events in equal cars was also quite exciting in a way, even if the cars maybe weren’t too exciting to drive. As long as you have the same material as the others and trying to keep the same results is obviously a nice feeling.”
Having dominated the early rounds and enjoyed a relatively comfortable championship lead, Kristoffersson revealed how he managed to deal with the uncertainty and subsequent switch to spec machinery - which he sampled with great success by winning the R2Xe division at Mettet.
“I was in a quite good position anyway,” he says. “The sixth title was something that I would really like to achieve, so there was some uncertainty where if the championship would not continue, if it would be calculated or counted as a title with only three races.
“But in the end, I just tried to focus on if there would be a race and when they said we would race these RX3 cars, we had some experience within the team from Mikaela and Nils [Andersson] who was the RX3 champion, Mikaela was third in the championship, and we had been a little bit involved in that from the sideline, looking on at what they were doing during the season.
“So, we had some experience of the cars and going into the last couple of events with the lead that I had with a car that was equal to the others was not anything that I was very worried about. The cars were the same but also, the cars we had driven previously had the same battery and the same drive[train]. So there are differences in those cars as well but these were exactly identical.
"We had some experience of the cars and going into the last couple of events with the lead that I had with a car that was equal to the others was not anything that I was very worried about" Johan Kristoffersson
“But in the end, I think the biggest difference why it was a little bit tighter at the end of the season is also because the cars are significantly slower, so as a driver, it is more difficult to make a difference when the cars are so slow compared to the cars we’d drive otherwise.
“A faster car is just trickier to drive and easier to make differences as a driver. And also, our team within both Extreme E and Rallycross, our strength is that we are strong as working as a team and working on details to make the car suitable for that track and conditions which makes us feel really strong.
“With a one-make car that we used for the last couple of events in rallycross, we were much more limited in what we could influence as a team on the car to make a little bit of a difference. It was tricky but, in the end, I had my points lead and I just tried to secure that for the last couple of events and finished off the season with a P1 was, of course, nice.”
IG Prime, the prime brokerage division of IG, is a partner of Rosberg X Racing. To find out more, visit http://ig.com/uk/prime/rxr-sponsorship-with-ig-prime
