Formula E ready to make more noise - because CEO learned from Richard Branson
Formula E is ready to make more noise - even if it doesn't have the roar of a combustion engine.
That's because their new CEO Jeff Dodds worked alongside one of the masters of publicity in Richard Branson during a spell at Virgin Media that lasted over a decade.
Dodds, 51, worked as chief marketing officer and therefore knows all the tricks on how to successfully upset the apple cart. FE return to track for their tenth season live on TNT Sports on Saturday night in front of over 40,000 fans in Mexico City - and do so with a bigger worldwide fanbase than ever before.
But Dodds, who took over from former Manchester United exec Jamie Reigle as chief executive towards the end of last season, knows that he will have to pull on some of the levers he did with Branson to help the all-electric series realise its full potential in a motorsport landscape dominated by F1.
Dodds said: "There are companies that have deep pockets that spend fortunes on every media channel out there. Because they can do that, they worry less about the quality of the message and disruptive nature and the idea.
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"Then there are businesses that are start-ups and like Virgin, who don't want to spend masses on media, so their premium is on how good the idea is, how disruptive the idea is, how creative is the idea and let's focus on that - and that is where I come from.
Formula E returns in front of a bumper crowd in Mexico City this weekend"We are not going to take on Formula One in scale, we're not going to spend what they spend, so it's about how we use their scale to help us. How do we create very disruptive, creative ideas of our own to get more talkability and make more noise?
"If I learned anything from Richard, that was the one thing that really stuck with me.
"Virgin's ethos was to go into an industry where there was an established way of doing things and properly shake it up in the interest of the customer - in our case the fan.
"Richard would speak a lot about being good for people, being good for the planet, good for employees. He wanted to run companies that were a force for good and a lot of that stuck with me."
Richard Branson is no stranger to a big stunt at Virgin - and Dodds knows that all too well (Getty Images)Formula E estimated that their worldwide fanbase was as big as 340million at the end of last season - but that is still just a fraction of the size of F1.
Although that is where wild differences end. Formula E boasts on-track entertainment unlike its rivals, with last year's Portland E-Prix, which had over 400 overtakes in under an hour, a prime example.
And the performance of the Generation3 car which Formula E currently uses rivals any other top motorsport, as proven when it broke the indoor land speed record before last year's London E-Prix.
Dodds said: "We have two powertrains in the car, one is opened for propulsion, the other is not. If we open both for propulsion, we know the car will do 0-60mph in about two seconds.
Formula E broke the world record for indoor land speed at last year's London E-Prix (FIA Formula E)"If you compare that to an F1 car, it's 2.6 or 2.7 seconds. Compare it to an IndyCar too and it's blisteringly fast; faster than any other world championship car.
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"We don't really talk about that and we haven't really been able to showcase the potential of the car through content and stories. The good news is that the technology is in its infancy. Internal combustion engines are 100 years old, so getting any incremental development out of that technology costs a lot of money to get very little return.
"For us, because the technology is so new, we are still seeing these exponential jumps and leaps in technological benefits.
"The year Formula E was established, there were 300,000 electric vehicles sold in the world that year. Fast forward to now and there are around eleven million sold each year."
The Mexico City E-Prix is always one of the favourites on the calendarDodds has a clear plan of what he wants to achieve in Formula E: build on media partnerships for growth, create calendar stability and deliver a faster, more innovative race car in years to come.
He said: "We have to keep innovating and show people what EVs are capable of and to remove some of that anxiety that people have about electric vehicles, like are they fast enough, is the range good enough, are they complicated to charge.
"We can showcase all of those things on a racing track."
Watch Formula E's Mexico City E-Prix live on TNT Sports and Discovery+ on Saturday January 13 at 8pm.
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