FIA: Work on Electric GT Continuing “In the Background”

Image: FIA

Work on the FIA’s Electric GT Championship has taken a back seat according to the FIA’s deputy to the circuit sport director Stuart Murray, who admitted that the future of the proposed series will be dependent on manufacturer buy-in and a wider rollout of production EV sports cars.

Initially announced in 2021, the championship, to be promoted by Discovery, was originally targeted to launch in 2023 with a minimum of six events across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, featuring cars running to the current GT3 performance window and featuring 700 kW ‘super-fast’ charging pit stops.

A 45-minute Main Race featuring the recharging pit stop was planned as part of a two-day format that also consisted of a sprint race.

While the series faced multiple delays, work is understood to have slowed in recent years, although Murray said the project is not entirely dead.

“It’s something that’s still continuing in the background,” he said. “It’s fair to say and I don’t sugar coat it in saying that it hasn’t been an easy process and hasn’t exactly gone the way we wanted it to.

“It’s aligning ourselves with the market. When we started working on that project, everyone thought we’d all be driving electric cars by now. The market hasn’t gone that way.

“We are at the behest of the manufacturers and even the manufacturers, they have their product cycles and they’re planning ahead for what they have.”

A number of manufacturers have either postponed or canceled the launch of all-electric sports cars in recent years, amid less-than-expected EV sales globally.

“Every time we talk to the manufacturers, they say, ‘Well the car was supposed to be coming in 2026 and now it’s been pushed back to ’28 and it’s pushed back to 2030. So everything has been delayed,” Murray said.

“We are still interested and obviously it’s good for us to utilize these new technologies, because it might not be in the short term but I think long term, we will all probably in electric cars or hydrogen cars, so we need to embrace these technologies.

“We see things like Formula E, where motorsport has actually helped the development of batteries, the development of fast charging. It’s a great opportunity for us.”

Murray indicated that other EV projects, believed to be around manufacturer-based single-make series, could materialize first before a dedicated championship featuring multiple brands in action.

Porsche is known to have pursued the possibility of launching a series around its Cayman-based GT4 e-performance racer once an all-electric Cayman road car is launched.

“We’re still interested and we have a couple of other potential projects coming along with electric cars, which might not necessarily be this Electric GT Championship which we have been trying to get up and running, but might be related to something different.” Murry said.

“There is certainly interest from the FIA’s side but it needs to be aligned with the market and we’re not there.

“When we started the project, we actually thought we’d be running the first season, probably in 2025, and that’s next month! We’re certainly not there.

“Anything that does happen at a high level, I think it’s still a couple of years away.”

With the FIA and ACO making strides towards the adoption of hydrogen technology for the top class of prototype racing, Murray indicated that that hydrogen in GT machinery will also be dependent on the production marketplace, which currently doesn’t have a widespread adoption.

“Hydrogen is an interesting one as well,” he said. “WEC being the direction hydrogen is going in, but it too has its own set of unique challenges.

“Actually just having the supply of hydrogen is not necessarily cheap or readily available. There’s obviously the safety concerns about running with hydrogen, which we’ve been working along with our different partners to check.

“We’re comfortable with the direction we’re now going in. At the end it’s tied to the market. It can only happen when the market is really ready for it.”

John Dagys

John Dagys is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Sportscar365. Dagys spent eight years as a motorsports correspondent for FOXSports.com and SPEED Channel and has contributed to numerous other motorsports publications worldwide. Contact John