Bethonie WaringRosberg Xtreme Racing founder Nico Rosberg has praised Extreme E for the changes it made for the second round of the season in Senegal, but admitted there were more changes to come from the series.
The championship introduced a new opporunity to earn points in Senegal with its Super Sector competition. The fastest driver through the sector over the entire weekend earned an extra five points for their team.
There was also a minor format change compared to the opening race of the championship, with four cars instead of three competing in the Final.
Rosberg, whose team won the Final, praised the changes, but expects there to be more to come over the course of the series’ first season.
“We can all agree it was a big step forward from Alula [round 1] in terms of development for the excitement, but it’s still early stages,” he said.
“There’s still further steps that will be done. One needs to analyse again.
“I think we keep on seeing more and more glimpses of such awesome motorracing. And this will evolve into a huge spectacle, the more we go, I’m very sure of that.
“We’re in the very early stages of Extreme E, where we are creating changes to the sporting format as we go. We’ve created the super sector, the four car finals. That’s fine. It’s a start up. It has to be accepted by everybody. Nobody’s ever done this before, so you have to be open minded, and accept that you’re going to learn, and you’re going to work towards making it more and more exciting.”
Extreme E had come under criticism after the opening round in Saudi Arabia due to the lack of racing. Drivers struggled to stick close to one another due to dust and there was little wheel-to-wheel action after the field had left the grid.
Changing to a four-car format for the final race of the weekend aimed to encourage racing, but drivers Molly Taylor and Johanne Kristofferson believed it made little difference.
“In Saudi, it wouldn’t change anything if we were two or nice cars. It would be very difficult in any way,” Kristoffersson said. “But here you could have four or five cars, because you can bring close racing all the way around the lap.
“In my semi-final, I think we were seperated by 50 meters or whatever. So really great racing.”
“From what we’ve seen in the semi-finals, with less dust we were able to see some overtaking and generally close racing throghout the whole lap,” Taylor added.
“It really kept everything to play for all the way through the races, which I think was great.”
As it was terraine, as much as the format changes, that made the difference in Senegal, the switch from sand to ice for the third round of the season will pose a new challenge.
“Different terraine, different everything, with a car that nobody really knows anything about because we’ve only done a handful of laps overall,” Rosberg said. “But that’s really the special thing about this.
“It really is hard. I come from really, really advanced stuff in motorsport, and this is hard.”
Andrea Perilli