Formula E chief executive Alejandro Agag has brought plenty of novelty to the world’s first all-electric motor racing series and now he is wondering about unleashing fake dogs as a hazard for driverless cars.
If that idea sounds virtually barking, the 46-year-old Spaniard appears to be serious.
Speaking ahead of races in New York this weekend, Agag ran the rule over some of his championship’s technological innovations — from “fanboost” to digital dimensions and driverless racing cars — and ventured one step beyond.
Photo: AFP
Part of the program envisages futuristic-looking “Roborace” cars doing demonstration laps around the Brooklyn street circuit.
Formula E organizers hope ultimately to have up to 10 of the cars racing together, run by teams who write their own software, around city tracks as a support event to their series.
However, they are not there yet and the format of any such race has yet to be decided.
One problem is that all are likely to be programmed to take the perfect line around the track and might not be able to overtake.
However, Agag’s view is that the driverless technology is less about motorsport than safety and that maybe highlighting the latter is the best way forward.
“Maybe the way to do it is to have [the cars lap] one by one and see which one is safer,” he told reporters. “So you throw in a fake dog for example, a fake obstacle, and see how the car reacts to that.”
“The fake dog has to be fake,” he added firmly.
Such thinking is typical of Formula E, a series that appeals as much if not more to geeks and gamers than old-style petrolheads.
While Formula One talks about entering a digital era, with an expansion of social media and putting content onto previously neglected platforms under new owners Liberty Media, Formula E has enjoyed a head start.
“The digital world is so wide that you can do a million things and you don’t collide with someone else doing another million things,” Agag said. “We keep having new ideas that nobody has done and maybe they [Formula One management] are having some ideas that nobody has done. They have started a little bit late, but we can see the new team is really pushing on that and doing some interesting things, but we started much earlier.”
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