LONDON: Extreme E’s fourth race of its inaugural season, the Enel X Island X Prix, is set to take place at Capo Teulada in Sulcis-Iglesiente, Sardinia this weekend, from Oct. 23-24.
The first-ever electric SUV series launched in April with the Desert x Prix at AlUla, Saudi Arabia, with the Ocean X Prix following in Dakar, Senegal at the end of May, and the Arctic X Prix in Greenland in August.
Currently, Rosberg X Racing lead the Extreme E Season 1 standings.
The last race saw RXR’s winning streak broken by Andretti United Extreme E, who were joined on the podium by JBXE and ACCIONA | Sainz XE Team. RXR, leading the table on 93 points, could mathematically take the title in Sardinia, but X44 (84 points) and Andretti United Extreme E (76 points) will be looking to keep the championship alive into the last event of the season in the UK.
“Our Sardinian race is shaping up to be a true spectacle and I can’t wait to see the teams battling it out on the course for victory at our penultimate event of Season 1,” Alejandro Agag, founder and CEO of Extreme E, said. “Sardinia has a rich motorsport heritage and won’t be unfamiliar territory for some of our drivers, but the course will be one full of challenges.
“The island has been suffering at the hands of the climate crisis, and I’m really pleased our Legacy Programmes here will be two-fold, focusing on both the land and the ocean through reforestation in areas affected by wildfires, which are still so front of mind, and blue carbon through seagrass restoration and conservation,” he added.
Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Western Mediterranean and is well known for hosting motorsport events, most famously the Rally Italia Sardegna, which has been on the World Rally Championship calendar since 2004 and has been won by X44’s Sebastien Loeb four times.
The Enel X Island X Prix will follow the same format as the Arctic X Prix with qualifying taking place on Saturday, Oct. 23. There will be one session in the morning and one in the afternoon with each team completing two laps of the course, one per driver with a driver switch. The times recorded across the morning session will equate to classification points, meaning first place receives nine points, second place eight, third place seven and so on. The same then happens in the afternoon with classification points awarded on the same scale.
The combined total of these classification points provides the intermediate standings, and the remaining races will take place as follows:
— The teams will be listed first to ninth place based on the total combined points of each team’s two Qualifying runs.
— Teams placed in first, fifth and sixth progress to Semi-Final 1, where the top two finishers claim spots in the Enel X Island X Prix Final.
— Second, third and fourth from Qualifying go through to Semi-Final 2, where again the top two progress to the Enel X Island X Prix Final.
— The bottom three teams (seventh, eighth and ninth) head to the Crazy Race, with the winner reaching the Enel X Island X Prix Final.
— The Enel X Island X Prix Final features five cars.
The nine teams and 18 drivers are as follows:
ABT CUPRA XE — #125 — Mattias Ekstrom / Jutta Kleinschmidt
ACCIONA | Sainz XE Team — #55 — Carlos Sainz Sr. / Laia Sanz
Andretti United Extreme E — #23 — Timmy Hansen / Catie Munnings
SEGI TV Chip Ganassi Racing — #99 — Kyle LeDuc / Sara Price
XITE ENERGY RACING powered by myenergi — #42 — Oliver Bennett / Christine GZ
JBXE — #22 — Kevin Hansen / Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky
Rosberg X Racing — #6 — Johan Kristoffersson / Molly Taylor
Veloce Racing — #5 — Stephane Sarrazin / Emma Gilmour
X44 — #44 — Sebastien Loeb / Cristina Gutierrez