- Laia Sanz and Mattias Ekström, winners of a race in Saudi Arabia, are set to contest this weekend in the third and the fourth rounds of the calendar.
ACCIONA | SAINZ XE Team faces this weekend the third and the fourth rounds of the Extreme E Championship, which will take place in a new location for the series: Scotland. The track will be built in an abandoned open-air coal mine and it is set to become one of the most spectacular landmarks of the entire calendar.
The team, Laia Sanz and Mattias Ekström arrive in Scotland as co-leaders of the championship after the season-opener event in Saudi Arabia, where they clinched the maiden win of the team and a second-place finish that translate into 46 points in the standings. It is the best start to the season so far in the history of the team.
Two months after the races in Neom, Extreme E is back underway with Scotland’s Hydro X-Prix, where the focus is on the transition to sustainable energies. The location of the event is the old coal mine of Glenmuckloch, which is set to become a reversible hydropower plant.
Scotland is a world leader in terms of sustainable energy. The 97% of the energy it produces is sustainable and the country wants that half of its energy consumption to come from green sources by 2030. This also affects mobility, with the country wanting to phase out the sales of new cars with combustion engines by 2032.
The Hydro X-Prix will pose a vast range of challenges to the drivers of the Extreme E Championship. In this same location, a 1,600 MWh storage capacity plant will be built, together with a 33.6 MC wind farm.
LEGACY PROGRAMME
The drivers of the Extreme E Championship will contribute to the planting of 1,200 native trees and the construction of a fence as part of a conservation project from the Nitch Catchment Fishery Trust, whose goal is to minimise the erosion of the soil and to cast more shadows in the riverbanks to contribute to stabilizing the temperature of the water. The Atlantic salmon will benefit from this, given that it breeds in the rivers.
Quotes:
Laia Sanz, driver:
"I am very happy and eager to be racing in the Hydro X-Prix. Scotland is a country I really like. I have already had the opportunity to compete here in trial and I like it. We raced in Dorset a couple of years ago and this week we are expecting some rain and mud. We will have to fight really hard, just like we did in Saudi Arabia. We will work hard and aim to be as competitive. This is our goal and we are going for it”.
Mattias Ekström, driver:
"Coming to Scotland is very special for me because I had not been in this country before. I have already seen that everything is very green and that it is a country where you can expect both sun and rain, with mud involved. That is how the weather is in this place. It should rain this weekend, but I would not mind a dry event. It is nice to come into the race as Championship leaders. My goal is to be fighting up there all season long, although it is still early days because there are four weekends and eight races still to go. We must stay disciplined and do whatever it takes to sustain the speed we showed in Saudi Arabia."
Joan Orús, Team Principal:
"The Desert X-Prix was a moral boost for the entire team because we had been chasing that maiden win for a long time and in Neom we finally clinched it. These two months of waiting between races have been long, but we have gone through everything that happened on that first weekend to make sure that we keep on evolving as a team. Scotland will be one of the hardest races in the entire calendar due to the characteristics of the track, which will surely look spectacular on television. Being quick will be almost as important as not making any mistake because there is no place for error in this place."
Carlos Sainz:
"After the good results we had in the Desert X-Prix, we are really looking forward to the second event of the Championship. The Hydro X-Prix will take place in a location that had not been before in the Extreme E calendar, so we are curious to find out what kind of racetrack and terrain we find ourselves in. Being in Scotland, we know we can expect a lot of mud, but we must check it. We are happy and eager after our victory in Neom and we want to defend our co-leading position in the Championship. Laia and Mattia are really looking forward to hopping on the Odyssey 21."
