CUPRA is the first automotive brand to participate in Extreme E
CUPRA is taking its motorsport heritage into the contemporary times joining the Extreme E racing series as the main partner of the ABT Sportsline team.
Extreme E, the electric SUV off-road competition, is set to travel across some of the world’s most extreme environments in 2021 with a five-stage format. The global voyage will utilise its international entertainment platform to promote electrification, sustainability, and equality.
CUPRA’s move into the Extreme E arena isn’t a surprise, as the brand has always pushed the boundaries of what is possible. The CUPRA e-Racer – the world’s first all-electric racing touring car – integrated four single-speed electric motors that delivered a combined 680PS (500kW) and 960Nm with a 65kWh liquid cooled battery pack, helping redefine what motorsport could be.
That project helped the brand develop its knowledge as it takes a journey towards electrification becoming an ever more important part of its passenger vehicle line-up. And it now has the CUPRA Leon plug-in hybrid, which will be followed at the beginning at 2021 by the CUPRA Formentor plug-in hybrid, which will be available in 2 different variants, and will be joined by the CUPRA el-Born in the second half of next year. All vehicles will bring sustainable mobility with the character and dynamism that enthusiasts desire.
Extreme E: An electric odyssey
CUPRA will pair up with ABT Sportsline as the racing team’s main partner, and will contribute to lining up a team of engineers and drivers for this electric odyssey. The Extreme E has a gender equal sporting format whereby teams must field one male and one female driver. The first of whom is CUPRA e-ambassador, Mattias Ekström.
“Extreme E is a mix of Raid and Rally Cross, racing through very different environments with tracks marked using GPS,” said Ekström. “But it holds a lot of promise for developing electric vehicles; collecting data to feedback into cars in areas such as software and regeneration.”
CUPRA’s involvement in Extreme E isn’t solely because of a desire to exceed in motorsport, but to also feed accrued knowledge back into its passenger vehicle in great many areas including driveability, power delivery, chassis setup and steering.
