zzdcar
Home
/
Reviews
/
Racing
/
The Odyssey 21 is the Electric Off Road Race Truck Formula E Wants You to Get Excited About
The Odyssey 21 is the Electric Off Road Race Truck Formula E Wants You to Get Excited About-July 2024
2024-02-19 EST 22:11:08

Image for article titled The Odyssey 21 is the Electric Off Road Race Truck Formula E Wants You to Get Excited About

Formula E boss Alejandro Agag is back with another all-electric racing series, this time running off-road events all over the world. It’s called Extreme E, and the plan is to run five races in five different types of off-road environment from 2021. This is the tube-frame, high-riding offroad buggy that the series will use. Oh lawd, the Odyssey 21 is comin’.

The Extreme E car ran up the hill during the Goodwood Festival of Speed on Saturday afternoon. You can see that run below.

This is a big lad. According to Extreme E, the truck sits about 7.5 feet wide, 6.2 feet tall, and 14.4 feet front-to-back. The whole thing, ready to rock and roll, weighs some 3600 pounds. Each of the tires is 37 inches tall with tons of sidewall and lots of knobby Continental rubber to keep the thing trucking forward even in the nasty sand, ice, or dirt that the truck will come into contact with across the season.

Extreme E has already signed a deal with Fox Sports to air the races, which will be tape delayed and aired in a “docu-sport” style. The plan is to run these races in locales that display the full effect of global climate change, bringing some intercontinental politics and global pollution optics into the mix. The hope for the whole program is “Blue Planet meets Dakar” which actually sounds kind of interesting to me.

Electric SUV racing as a sport is a hard thing to sell, for obvious reasons. But a new series…

The Odyssey 21 racer is near-silent, as expected for an EV, and doesn’t move particularly quickly up the driveway, but I imagine it’s geared quite low for the gravel and ice that the series expects to compete on.

This is just a show car, built by Spark Racing Technologies [the same company which builds the Formula E chassis], to demonstrate what a finished product might look like. This chassis will serve as the basis for teams to build from, and a spec battery will be used, produced by Williams Advanced Engineering. Each team will develop its own powertrain and aesthetically-minded sections of bodywork, such as the bumpers, engine cover, and lights.

Image for article titled The Odyssey 21 is the Electric Off Road Race Truck Formula E Wants You to Get Excited About

“Our challenge was to build a car that could face all the variations in surface and terrain that will be thrown its way, which will include gravel, rock, mud, ice, snow, water and sand, too,” explained Spark’s technical director Theopile Gouzin.

“Straight out-of-the-box in Season One, the Odyssey 21 and its performance is going to be very impressive, exceeding the power and torque of World Rally Championship and rally raid cars. The numbers are mind-blowing, really.”

Image for article titled The Odyssey 21 is the Electric Off Road Race Truck Formula E Wants You to Get Excited About

Comments
Welcome to zzdcar comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
Racing
The Flooding At Spa-Francorchamps Was So Bad The Track Is Being Repaired
The Flooding At Spa-Francorchamps Was So Bad The Track Is Being Repaired
Spa-Francorchamps is a notoriously intimidating circuit, even when it’s bone dry. Last weekend, it was most definitely not dry. . Stavelot, the town in which Spa resides, got absolutely walloped with rain on Friday. So much so that a nearby river overflowed its banks, sending in water over the circuit’s...
Jul 27, 2025
Let's Hear It For The Dacia Logan That Finished The Nürburgring 24 Hours In...Not Last Place
Let's Hear It For The Dacia Logan That Finished The Nürburgring 24 Hours In...Not Last Place
You have to admire the total chaos of the Nürburgring 24 Hours. Cars of all stripes run the famed Nordschleife — from GT3 machines, like the Porsche 911 prepared by Manthey Racing that won this year’s event, all the way down to TCR touring cars and lightly-modified production vehicles....
Jul 27, 2025
GM Breaks Ground At Its Charlotte Racing Technical Center
GM Breaks Ground At Its Charlotte Racing Technical Center
General Motors is bringing a new facility to Concord, North Carolina as a way to further develop the Chevrolet NASCAR program, and ground was broken this past week in anticipation of the opening of the 130,000 square foot facility in 2022. Named the Charlotte Technical Center, this space is...
Jul 27, 2025
Michael Shank On Winning His First Indy 500 With Hélio Castroneves
Michael Shank On Winning His First Indy 500 With Hélio Castroneves
One week ago today, Meyer Shank Racing achieved an almost unthinkable goal for an IndyCar team in its second full season. The team’s No. 06 chassis powered by Hélio Castroneves took the checkered flag at the famed Indianapolis 500, making history to become the fourth driver in the race’s...
Jul 27, 2025
Here's How Kévin Estre Won The Nürburgring 24 In The First 20 Minutes
Here's How Kévin Estre Won The Nürburgring 24 In The First 20 Minutes
Porsche’s ace sports car crew is packed to the gills with incredible talent, but one guy really making a name for himself as a Nürburgring specialist is Frenchman Kévin Estre. You may recall Estre’s famed pass in the grass from the 24 Hour in 2019 () and while that ballsy...
Jul 27, 2025
There's Still No Official Answer Why A MotoGP Rider's Suit Broke Apart In The Middle Of A Race
There's Still No Official Answer Why A MotoGP Rider's Suit Broke Apart In The Middle Of A Race
You can almost always count on MotoGP for 45 minutes of exciting racing, and last Sunday’s round at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya certainly didn’t disappoint. It was an event full of tense action at the front, with Miguel Oliveira snatching the early lead of the race from Jack Miller,...
Jul 27, 2025
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.zzdcar.com All Rights Reserved