Batteries not included

Racecar Engineering believes a figure around the $19/20 per kg mark [for air freight] is reasonably accurate as it stands

When Jean Eric Vergne hit the wall at turn three in qualifying for the Diriyah EPrix at Riyadh in November 2019, it took almost a year to move his damaged battery from Saudi Arabia to California to be repaired.

The reason was because no airline was prepared to put a damaged battery in one of its aeroplanes. As a result, engineers from McLaren Applied had to make a special trip to where the battery was stored in Saudi Arabia and work on it in the summer of 2020 for it then to be deemed safe enough to be allowed to fly to Atieva’s base near San Francisco.

Flying and shipping hybrid and electric racecars, and the infrastructure that comes with them, adds headaches to the already complex world of motorsport logistics.

For Formula E, in its first rules set between 2014 and 2018, this included at least 40 cars with electric powertrains and lithium-ion batteries. It meant the series’ logistics team had to very quickly learn a myriad certification and health and safety protocols.

While that continues to this day, it is much reduced in terms of absolute hardware. When the Gen 2 era of Formula E kicked in for the 2018 / ’19 season, the field was immediately halved as two cars per driver became just a single Dallara-designed, Spark Racing Technologies-managed chassis, together with a single Atieva-designed