Extreme E pulls back the curtain on hydrogen testing

Just one season of Extreme E remains in its current form. The 2024 campaign will be the swansong for the battery-electric Odyssey 21 before its successor, the as-yet-unnamed Extreme H hydrogen fuel cell car, will arrive.

The transition to hydrogen isn’t straightforward. There isn’t a hydrogen-powered motorsport series in existence yet, so while Extreme H has been developing a new car, the series has also been collaborating with the FIA to create new rules and safety standards for hydrogen racing.

“[It’s] very similar to all the work that’s been done in Formula 1 for many years, and of course, cascaded down to all the different championships,” Extreme E technical director Mark Grain says, speaking to media including RACER at the recent season finale in Chile. “We’re doing that work for the very first time, with it being the first hydrogen car. We’re looking at side impacts, low impacts, and impacts from the top. The chassis has been designed so the metallic element of the chassis is much more robust in that area.”

“They are still being defined in conjunction with the FIA, and they’re bolt-on parts. Again, something similar to what you’ve seen in different categories of racing. So they’ll go bolted on to the side, and they’re replaceable as well. There’s been good, solid consideration for those elements, and collaboration.”

Working out how to build and race hydrogen vehicles is one of several challenges Extreme H will face. Another is the safety stigma. It’s something the series’ managing director Ali Russell is well-versed in, having dealt with similar outside doubts during Formula E’s gestation period.

“There’s hydrogen cars in existence, but this is going to be a championship devoted to hydrogen. Hydrogen can be one of the solutions, not just for e-mobility, but actually for power, and green power,” he says. “So I think we’ve got a responsibility, we’ve got a North Star, and what we want to do is to accelerate that growth in that adoption.

“We’ve got some challenges, and the biggest one is the education system, because anytime you speak to someone about hydrogen, they talk about the explosive nature of hydrogen, and the Hindenburg and the connotations. What we’ve got to do is break that down, we’ve got to show the performance of the vehicles, but also the fact that they can be so resilient with some of the crashes that you have in this championship and multi-car championships.”

Working out how the hydrogen cars will be fueled is a key consideration as well. The paddock setup will obviously be the first of its kind, but could have legitimate real-world relevance, too.

“There’s going to be a bespoke setup in the paddock,” Grain says. “We anticipate two refueling stations, and a line of cars that will come, refuel, move, next.

“It gives us a platform to demonstrate that hydrogen refueling is very run of the mill, very straightforward. We would just have the two fueling stations out the back, which is just like a gas station these days.”

Hydrogen fuel cells could also open up the possibility of mid-race refueling, explains Russell.

“I think the challenge we’re going to have is, how do we evolve as a championship? Because obviously, what hydrogen allows us to do is to have refueling, in-race refueling,” he says. “So do you stop and do the [driver] switch and do refueling? Do you have another [stop]? How do we do that?”

While a lot of focus has, understandably, been placed on the car’s switch to hydrogen power, the evolution doesn’t end there. The new vehicle will be almost entirely new, benefiting from lessons learned in the first three (soon to be four) seasons of Extreme E racing, particularly with regard to suspension – something that underwent extensive development with the help of Fox, which came onboard during Season 2.

“The three years of [data] that we’ve got now in Extreme E, they’ve not been forgotten, They’ve been considered,” Grain says. “Spark have done an excellent job moving forward with the H car and the revised suspension geometry. They’ve worked with some technical partners in the U.S. who are experts in off-road racing as well, Baja, and so on, so [we] definitely expect improvements in the experience for the driver, geometry improvements, different damper ranges, spring ranges and so on.”

The battery technology, which will serve as a ‘buffer battery’ to temporarily store the energy produced by the fuel cell until it’s needed by the motors, will be carried over from the Extreme E cars, though. It won’t be a direct port, however, with WAE working to repackage it into something smaller and more efficient.

“They’ve done a fantastic job of repackaging technology that they’ve got,” Grain says. “So rather than being a cube, it’s more of a rectangle. All that technology is carried over, [but] there’s no compromises with having to accommodate the hydrogen fuel cell.”

With revised approaches to bodywork and suspension, sights like this could be a thing of the past in Extreme H. Colin McMaster/Motorsport Images

Bodywork will change, and dramatically – from the large and costly components of the current car, to smaller pieces that will cut down on the vast amount of cosmetic damage the Odyssey 21 is susceptible to.

“The principles behind the large components on the Extreme E car were serviceability, so if you took a large component off, you can immediately get in work on it,” Grain explains. “What we need from our H car moving forward is bodywork that’s more modular. Smaller components, smaller sections, that could be replaced quickly; some components that are forgiving, like deformable structures around the wheel arches, for example.