Electric Racing, and My Struggle to Care
I’ve been hearing that cars just aren’t that popular with the youths (yutes) anymore, and I gotta say I can’t blame them. Right now is a strange moment in the history of car culture, with the coming of further electrification and self-driven vehicles. It’s hard to admit, but in a lot of ways cars are becoming… old people stuff. Like rock'n’roll, car enthusiasts evolved from a fringe society to mass popular appeal, and have now seemingly passed their apogee. Racing series are scrambling to get more participation and scrabbling for any kind of relevance they can find to try and attract the manufacturers and the money back, but is that what they really need?
I was flipping through a copy of Professional Motorsport World, and it was impossible to ignore that roughly half of the magazine was devoted to the development of e-series - a beginner open wheel series, a GT e-series using modified production cars, ETCR touring cars from the developers of WTCR, Extreme E cross cars, Opel E-rally cars, etc. If the move to electric cars brings back the popularity of racing, it will be in no small part because of manufacturer attention and the money they bring, but I think that will ride second to what made motorsport popular in the first place. Novelty.
Say what you will about the aesthetics of e-racing. I’ve watched a slew of Formula E races since its inception, and there is a lot to like there. The racing is pretty good. The names on the cars and the drivers are largely immediately recognizable. I could leave the gimmicky fan-boost and whatnot, but it is a good demonstration of what they’re capable of doing and considering that its currently a distant fiddle to Formula 1, I don’t begrudge them doing what they have to to draw eyes. Like I said, its novelty. On top of that, it seems to be working, which is great. I also can’t deny that they are the way of the future, but I seriously… it’s hard for me to watch.
Aside from the compromises that they have to make (street circuits only, shorter race lengths), I just… I just don’t like the way that they sound, and I’ve discovered that that is a huge part of the experience for me as a spectator. Look at the reaction that F1 got at the start of the hybrid era when the turbo muted, lower rpm engines came to be. For the majority of spectators, racing is held as a visceral experience. Not everyone cares what the series standings are or is thinking about the driving mechanics or engineering going by.
I know that I’m getting dangerously close to “old man yelling at cloud” territory here, but bear with me. What are the visceral components of racing? The cars themselves, for starters - their shapes, the colors. The look of the track. If you’re lucky enough to be at the track, there’s the smells and the feeling of the cars pounding by. And then there’s the sound.
One of my favorite experiences is camping at the track, and waking up at dawn to the sound of the first practice of the day, distant v8 loosing their throaty bellow as the begin to roar around the misty pavement. As you get nearer to the track, that sound is what you feel in your chest. The engines are a huge component of it, but also the tires.
Formula E does present to you a clearer perception of the tire behavior, being able to hear them so much clearer over the whine of the motors. But that whine. That dang whine. I just haven’t adapted to it yet, and even after as much as I’ve watched, it still bothers me whenever I’m watching any sort of e-racing or electric vehicle going at full chooch. Internal combustion engines are animalistic. Electric motors are… flying tinnitus.
I know that someday soon I’ll have to resign myself to watching the whine of the major series, and I wonder if there is anything that they can realistically do to address the sound and make it more appealing. I also know that, decades from now, I’ll be out there with the other old men watching the dinosaurs that run around on their own, less attended weekends, fueled by flames .