Six-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton is going to enter the new electric Extreme E off-road race series with his own team, called X44.
Hamilton’s personal race team is named after his own racing number and will enter the inaugural season of the Extreme E Championship in early 2021.
However, the F1 champion will not get behind the wheel of an electric off-road racer or involved on a day-to-day basis in the team but will instead help in the creation of a competitive race team by putting his motorsport experience into practice.
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“Extreme E really appealed to me because of its environmental focus,” said Lewis Hamilton. “As Founder of X44, I am looking forward to building my team around important values such as sustainability and equality.”
X44 didn’t announce a driver lineup just yet but said that the team will promote diversity and provide an inclusive culture, having one professional female and one male driver.
Hamilton’s X44 team and its Extreme E rivals will race in off-road electric vehicles in five remote locations that are already damaged or severely under threat of climate change. These include arctic, desert, rainforest, glacier, and coastal.
Extreme E was created by Formula E founder Alejandro Agag, with the new racing series designed to put the spotlight on “the impact of climate change on some of the world’s most fragile ecosystems and promote the adoption of electric vehicles to help preserve the environment”.
The championship’s electric off-road racer Odyssey21 is built by Spark Racing Technology and is based on a steel alloy tubular frame, featuring a battery pack from Williams Advanced Engineering. The combined output from its electric motors is 542 HP, enabling a 0-62 mph (100 km/h) in 4.5 seconds “at gradients of up to 130 percent”.
Extreme E founder and CEO Alejandro Agag said: “We are thrilled to welcome Lewis Hamilton and his X44 team to Extreme E. Like us, Lewis is hugely passionate about motorsport, but also shares our belief that we can use sport to highlight subjects which are vital to the world, such as climate change and equality.”
Other teams that are already signed up in the Extreme E racing series include Chip Ganassi Racing and Andretti United from USA, Abt and HWA from Germany, Techeetah from Indonesia, QEV Technologies from Spain, and Veloce Racing from the UK.
