ANTOFAGASTA, Chile — On a picnic bench in Chile’s Atacama Desert, some of the distant areas on Earth, Alejandro Agag is holding courtroom.

“Welcome to the sting of the world,” he laughs, gesturing towards the huge desert round him. A gust of wind kicks a cloud of sand and dirt throughout the desk. “It is wonderful, this place.”

The 53-year-old Spanish entrepreneur is taking within the sights and sounds of the season 3 finale of Excessive E, the off-road electrical racing collection he launched in 2021. A part of the collection’ ethos is that it races solely in areas of the globe which might be closely impacted by local weather change (such because the Atacama Desert—the driest, non-polar area on Earth), sometimes with no spectators current.

And whereas the competitors through the finale is dramatic—with 5 of the collection’ 10 groups in rivalry to win the championship—racing has taken a agency backseat this weekend. Dialog as an alternative has centered on Agag’s latest proclamation that Excessive E will rebrand as Excessive H in 2025, turning into the primary racing collection powered absolutely by hydrogen.

“We wish to be the primary to be doing it,” says Agag, holding his hand as much as defend his face from the still-swirling sand. “The problem is there, and we love challenges—the problem of working with an entire new know-how, related know-how that may have actual, big makes use of within the financial system usually.”

Agag is not any stranger to pioneering new racing know-how: He’s additionally the founder and chairman of System E, which was the primary all-electric racing collection when it debuted in 2014. To bolster his credibility in establishing Excessive H by 2025, Agag just lately introduced that the fledgling collection can be becoming a member of a working group with System 1 and the Worldwide Car Federation (FIA) to additional discover the event of hydrogen gas. Excessive H can also be slated to realize FIA World Championship standing by 2026.

“My thought, my pitch, for System 1 was to say, hear, you do not know which know-how would be the successful one,” Agag explains. “For the second, you’re betting on artificial fuels… however hydrogen goes to be, perhaps, one know-how that may very well be a part of the equation. In order that’s all that it’s, for System 1 to control what is going on to occur right here. And what is going on to occur is we’ll have the primary—and, I believe for fairly some time, the one—pure hydrogen world championship racing.”

In some ways, the working group makes plenty of sense: 5 of Excessive E’s present 10 groups have direct or tangential ties to System 1, with the likes of McLaren, Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, and Jenson Button amongst its workforce homeowners. And the usage of hydrogen has grow to be an attractive prospect for all of motorsports, partly as a result of it may be utilized in combustion engines (“They [Formula 1] like noise… and combustion makes noise!” Agag laughs).

After all, utilizing hydrogen solely to gas a racing collection is not any small feat, and different hydrogen-based tasks have been affected by setbacks and delays in latest months. Most notably, the Le Mans hydrogen class has already been delayed to 2027, citing security considerations.

However Excessive E believes its type of racing—brief sprints that final roughly 10 minutes—is completely suited to showcasing and testing the facility of hydrogen gas cells, and the collection’ management is assured that after preliminary testing final month, they are going to be operating their first absolutely hydrogen race by February 2025.

Getting all of the operations up and operating in solely 13 months definitely will not be simple, although. “Switching that one letter to H means we have now to change one million different issues,” Agag says.