Why the new-look F1 isn't real racing #304

Welcome back to the intercooler podcast, everybody, the podcast powered by car finance specialist

JBR Capital. This is episode 304. There's lots that we want to talk about this week,

Andrew, particularly F1. We're recording this the day after the Australian Grand Prix, so

there's loads to discuss there. And I'm so excited to get into that discussion because

I already know how you feel about it. But before we do that, just a couple of things

that I want to mention briefly. The intercooler now has a Reddit page. It's the intercooler,

and it's brand new. And so we still don't really know how it's going to go or what people are

going to use it for. But the idea is that it's a place where people can gather to discuss

everything that we do, whether that's our magazine or this podcast or maybe the videos

or events or whatever. So if you are a Redditor, you'll find the intercooler on there, post away,

and we'll be in there as well, responding to you and contributing. But the plan is that it's just

a place for our audience to gather. Like-minded individuals to indulge in mutual passion.

Yeah. So let's see. That's good to me. Let's see how it goes. I also briefly wanted to mention

a new platform that I came across recently. It's called New Roads, and it's a AI-powered

road trip planner, a route planner. This isn't a paid segment, by the way. We're not in partnership

with New Roads. I met the founder, Steve, at an event. He taught me through it. I've had a good

look at the platform, and I just thought it was cool. So it uses AI to plan your route for you.

You give it a few prompts using natural language, and it suggests the roads and the routes and hotels.

And this is nationwide, Europe-wise, worldwide. It's across Europe. Well, it's the UK and a

big chunk of Europe. I just thought it was a cool thing. So if you're looking at planning a road

trip soon, maybe just have a look. NewRoads.co. They also go into spectacular detail. I don't

know how they do this, and it's the secret source, so they're not going to tell me. But

you tell it what car you've got, it figures out what that car's ground clearance is, and then it

knows if the roads it's suggesting for you are going to cause an issue in terms of ground clearance.

Wow. So it's pretty trick. NewRoads.co. There'll be a link in the description,

if it sounds interesting to you. Go and have a look. Australian Grand Prix, the new

ruleset, the 2026 regulation cycle. Yes. I mean, this is the podcast after the podcast,

because we did a special preview podcast that went out at the end of last week.

And we have now both sat through the... Did you get up?

Don't talk to me about it. I did get up, but my now subscription didn't function quite the way

I expected it to. Oh, no. I eventually ended up watching it eight in the morning rather than

four in the morning. So I wasn't terribly happy about that, but I didn't watch it live, but I

yeah, and then totaled off downstairs and had it on at 4am. And actually, I'm glad that I did.

Well, I'm glad that I did too, because we need to be able to talk about it on this podcast.

Not sure I'm glad I did for any other reason. Okay, so I'm sure you will know. George Russell

won in the Mercedes. He also put it on poll on Saturday. His teammate right beside him on the

grid and in the final standings. So Mercedes won. Mercedes has the best car. It's interesting,

isn't it? Because that has been rumoured for years. So the jungle drums know.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that people... Okay, I know that Mercedes didn't make the list of the last set

with sort of the ground effects regulations, but I think people probably thought that an anomaly.

And if you look at the total domination that they had before and the fact that so many of the

same people are involved. But yes, I think people just get an idea, don't they? And also, I think

what always happens when you get these big changes is that actually, and I said this on the podcast

before, in terms of who is at the sharp end, that really doesn't change very much at all.

There isn't suddenly from nowhere a fifth team. No, it's still the top four, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, it is still the top four. So the point about Mercedes being everyone knowing that they

were going to be the team to beat, it's a powertrain formula once more. The previous set was very

much an aero formula. And the Mercedes HPP high performance powertrains, that's the class of the

field, isn't it? As an operation? Yeah, it is, absolutely. I mean, it'd be interesting to see.

If Ferrari hadn't cocked up the strategy, it would have been very interesting to see just

how much of a race they could have made of it. Because I think we're going to see a lot of

this. Ferrari with their little turbo, you know, Shell and Lewis both made cracking starts.

Yeah. I mean, Shell fourth to first. And so if you find yourself in a position where if you're

Ferrari, as long as you can qualify on the top four, that is an effective poll,

because you're always going to lead into the first corner. I mean, that is an enormous advantage.

It's an absolute, you know, poll position, effectively. If that turns out to be what the

their small turbo advantage confers on them. Then I think you have to think that so long as

Ferrari don't continue to cock up the strategy, they're going to be a very serious contender

through the season. Well, that was the encouraging thing was Mercedes took the poll one and first

and second. But it did come down to that VSC strategy call, didn't it? And so without that,

the Ferraris would have been presumably right there with them unless Mercedes had kept

a load of performance in reserve. But we don't know. We don't know. But at least on the evidence

of this Grand Prix, Ferrari are in the fight. Absolutely. Which means to you, Lewis is in

the fight. Yeah. Which I'm clearly very happy about. Of course. As am I. So you, we need to talk

about the racing because what we saw in those first 10 laps or something wasn't racing. We saw

multiple overtakes, changes for the lead between Russell and Leclerc. The likes of

which we just haven't seen in Formula One for a long time. I think that maybe it was

seven overtakes or something. Yeah, I'm over it now. What did you what did you feel at the time

watching it? I thought it's strange because I think this is the first time that I can remember

being my view of things being significantly at variance to those of, you know, people, you know,

the main sort of Formula One commentators and pundits who, you know, I know, like and whose

views I respect completely. I thought what we were watching was ridiculous. I thought it was,

I thought it was silly. I thought that, you know, yes, there was that battle out the front with

with George and with Charles and they swap positions a lot, but they weren't swapping

positions because one driver had done some, you know, do or die extraordinary exit from a corner

or was unbelievably late on the brakes and was, you know, showing their talent and racing in the

way that or forcing another driver into making a mistake, do all those things that make overtaking

exciting. They were overtaking because at that particular point on the track, they had

hundreds horsepower more than the bit they're trying to overtake. So I mean, the phrase I keep

on hearing is it's a high speed chess game. I don't want it to be a high speed. I don't want to be

a low speed. I don't want it to be a chess game at all. If I want to go and watch a game of chess,

I'll go and watch a game of chess. I'm not interested in drivers being forced to be in a

position where where they come depends on not their bravery, their talent, their skill, but

their ability to choose when to meet out a certain amount of electrical power over course of a lap.

It's not racing. Okay, here's a question for you. Could you please name one current Formula One

driver who has said anything nice about those cars? Lewis said that he found them fun to drive,

but I think that's because he's in a chassis that suits his driving style once more.

Yeah, but Lewis also said it's not Formula One. About the powertrains, yeah.

It's not Formula One. No one said anything flattering about the powertrains.

No. And did you notice also how little on board there was? How little they show was on? Because

if you see the on board, you can see what a particularly in qualifying nonsense it is just

how much lift and coasting they got, the full throttle downshift. I mean, where does they come

from? Yeah. So on the on the overtake, but you really enjoyed it. I thought it was fun to watch

those first few laps, the changes for the lead, because we haven't seen that in F1 for donkey's

years. And we all got used to this idea of the lead car getting in front and then just racing

away and you couldn't follow it. You couldn't get near it. So at least it wasn't that.

The I think we need to differentiate between these the types of overtakes that we're going to see

in Formula One now. There's overtaking because you've charged up your battery and you've pressed

a button and you've got a load more power and torque than the next guy. And then there's real

overtaking, which is what you described late breaking into a corner or a great exit coming out

or some clever cunning move. Okay, I think we need to use separate terms for these things.

So that hybrid assisted overtake, that's not an overtake, that's a pass. Okay. But a do or die

brave skillful manoeuvre, that is an overtake. My worry here is that these new regulations

have made the overtake redundant. Because why would you risk it? Why would you risk a do or die

late breaking manoeuvre? When you know, you can just charge a battery and get by.

The answer question is that you won't. So there will be no in your terms,

using your definition, there will be no overtaking. Because

to pass is both easier and safer. So they won't do it because as you say, why would they?

I genuinely do worry about that. And rightly so. And I think, I mean, this may just be me being,

you know, curmudgeonly, which is entirely possible. But I think people will tire of it.

Because I think what they will, what will they will realize is they're not watching talent or

skill. And that's why why is racing interesting? Why do we like wheel to wheel battles? Because

when you see it happen, you are looking at two drivers, showcasing their talents, their skill,

their courage. It's a human story. It's a human story. That's exactly it,

Dan. And what we saw in Melbourne was not a human story at all. It was a electromechanical story.

And it was, you know, right now, my machine is better than your machine. So I'm going to

overtake. Well, there's no surprise in that. There's no heroics in that. There's nothing,

there's no, to me, there's no drama in it. I suppose there is a drama if, you know,

the bloke being overtaken. But also, the other thing is, is that if you are the bloke being

overtaken, how hard are you really going to defend? If you know that the bloke's got, I don't know

what at that moment when, and we saw it happen, didn't we? So where does the passing speeds?

And there's no chance. Ridiculous. You've got no chance.

So how much more power does the car passing have than the one being passed at that time?

It'll be, it looked like hundreds of horsepower. Well, that's not a competition. That's not,

that's not a, you know, an even playing field. It's just like, well, I'm going to do that because

I can. It's not racing. We've got the Chinese Grand Prix coming and it's a sprint weekend.

Very, very different circuit layout. The harvesting, energy harvesting around the Chinese track is

much simpler than Australia. Australia is one of the worst for energy harvesting.

So I think we'll see how another Grand Prix plays out. I don't think there are too many firm

conclusions we can reach just yet. I agree. Also, for all sorts of reasons. A, it's the first.

B, Melbourne has always been a bit of an outlier track. You can't just look at a race like that

and go, oh, well, you know, Mercedes have got the upper hand, they'll be champions this year.

I suspect they will. But you can't say that. So yes, I think you need to get a few races under

your belt before you see. But I do think they've got a problem. And so the question is, what are

they going to do about it? Within the existing regulations, I think the, here's not the only

thing they can really do is slow the cars down. Yeah, or reduce the advantage of that overtake.

But how do you do that? Well, it's an electric deployment. So surely you can cap it somehow?

I guess. I don't know. I guess. I don't know. But I mean, okay, so that's just more complexity,

more management, more... At times it looked like a puppet show. It did. And it's, to me,

it's not racing. You know, you go to Mallory Park over weekend and watch, you know, some

cheap budget saloons going on. That's racing. Yeah. A bunch of amateurs having a bit of a

laugh at the weekend. That's racing. The creme de la creme of drivers, teams, millions and millions

of pounds being spent. And you get a spectacle like that, where at no point did I actually think

I was watching any form of proper motor race. Did you have more of an issue with the race or

qualifying? I thought qualifying was pretty farcical. Yes, I guess so. But they were farcical for the

same reasons. I mean, I said, we said on our preview podcast, the idea that on a qualifying lap,

you can't actually drive the car as fast as you could, as you could drive the car,

and that you're having to lift and coast. It makes a complete nonsense of the entire format.

The format is wrong. The format was created to get other manufacturers into the sport and to

maintain manufacturers who already, they can make sure that they stayed there.

It's wrong and it needs to change. But I don't think it can. No, not for several years.

One interesting aspect of the weekend was the crashes that we saw. When did we last see Max

Rostappen put it in the wall? When we last see Oscar Bennett on the out lap. Exactly. And Kimmy

Antonelli had a big one in practice as well. I don't know the cause, but the previous two,

they were down to these new powertrains doing unusual things, unpredicted things.

In Max's case, it locked up the rear axle, didn't it, going into turn one?

For Oscar, it gave him this huge torque spike as he was on a curve.

Oscar's interesting because he said he had 100 kilowatts more power than he was expecting.

What he didn't say was the car delivered 100 more horsepower than it should have been.

And also, he then, I thought, very bravely went on to say, it's on me.

He did. So he took responsibility. So I was a little unsure whether he meant

it gave me 100 horsepower, which it shouldn't have given me, or I made a mistake because

I should have known that's what it was going to do. But when it did it, I didn't expect it,

which is why I crashed. But actually, in either case, if you got to a point where

a driver of his caliber can be so caught out on an out lab,

that suggests to me that something's not as it should be.

And I think for those two to have accidents because of the powertrains,

it can happen to anyone, can't it? Absolutely. I think we might keep seeing it all season long.

And if it's wet, people might just be sticking into the gravel or into a wall.

I mean, is it really, are we really just going back, are we actually, what we're talking about

is that thing that you and I have noted on electric cars so many times is that the way that

EV powertrains deliver their torque is, you know, is very immediate, isn't it?

Yeah, it's everything.

You go from nothing to everything in a heartbeat. And I guess,

you know, Formula One, it appears to be catching out, you know, two of the top five drivers on the

It's fascinating to see. What did you make of Ferrari?

I felt very sorry for the drivers. I couldn't believe they didn't come in.

At least one of them. So for people who don't know, there was a virtual safety car

quite early on in the race. Most teams, including Mercedes, decided to pit both cars

because it's a very cheap pit stop. And they gambled on being able to make

one set of hard tyres last for 40-something laps. And it is a gamble. We now know it paid off.

But Ferrari chose not to take that gamble with either of its cars. I saw Karin Chandok posted

on Instagram a video and he said, what was the worst that was going to happen? The worst that

was going to happen was that you finished third and fourth, which is what they did.

Exactly. So why not gamble with one? I just don't understand.

Yeah. And I can remember, I think it was Croftier Martin talking in commentary

saying that, you know, what Ferrari are anticipating is that there will be another

virtual safety car, which they will then allow and do it. But why still? Why not do it the first

time? Why gamble on the opportunity, on the chance that it's going to happen again,

rather than just do it when everybody else is? I didn't understand it. I mean,

I think Fred Vassa has tried to defend it, but I didn't think that there was any ambiguity

from the drivers at all. It was just wrong. Charles did say, when he was being interviewed,

that even if they had come in and changed, he said he didn't think that they had the pace to win,

which I thought again was a very honest and an open thing to say. But they had been in the fight.

They'd have been up there. And I think that the, well, not that this is Ferrari's fault,

but the crowd and the viewers were denied a much more exciting spectacle than it could have been.

And I don't know. I mean, all this stuff I've said, all this criticism that I have

loaded on this thing, I would, I would couch it. I would phrase it in such a way as to say

it was just the first race at an outlier circuit. And I don't think, however much I may be concerned

with what this season and future seasons are going to end up looking like. I don't think that

anybody really knows. And it may be that Melbourne turns out to have just been because it was the

first because of the kind of circuit that it is. It is the most extreme example that actually with

the first ever race under these new regulations, Formula One put not its best, but its worst foot

forward. And that from now on, clearly we will get used to it to an extent. And there will be

circuits where it is less noticed. But I just can't get excited about it. And I keep on coming back

to, you know, that thing that Karun was saying about Formula E being for electric, the World

Endurance Championship being for hybrids and Formula One should be, you know, petrol V8 engines

powered by sustainable fuels. That to me is the answer. It is so simple. It is so obvious. It is so

to me, just right. Yeah. And I think these incredibly complex, compromised machines that

we now have, which were only created to get more manufacturers. And I don't know whether that for

Formula One is a good or a bad thing. I don't care about the manufacturers. I don't care. Ferrari

is not going to leave. The sport has such profile nowadays that others are going to stay for that

value regardless of the. Do you think? I don't blame Audi at all. I mean, I think probably that

Audi was up on most of Formula One's mind when they were trying to get these things in and working

out who they might be able to entice. I mean, I can see that to Audi, there is a kind of marketing

advantage of having these hybrid cars. But do you think that if they'd gone with high revving,

naturally aspirated V8s that Audi would go, oh, well, these powertrain will cost us a lot less to

produce. And people will be much more interested in them because they make amazing noise and that

sort of thing. But somehow, we're going to sell fewer cars because they haven't got hybrid powertrains.

And we can't make that connection between what we race and what we sell to the public.

I mean, clearly there is something in that, but I don't understand it.

I think that connection to the public that they insist on making, I think it's nonsense. I really

do think it's nonsense. Just allow the sport, the formula to be as exciting as possible.

And the benefit, the upside there, far outweighs a marketing message, far outweighs.

And if many more people are watching it, many more people are excited by it,

that has to be a good thing. I think so. We need to move on from Formula One in a moment,

but there are a couple of other storylines I wanted to briefly touch on.

Oh, did you see Colla Pinto's avoid? Oh my God.

Even the Formula One guys, when they're in the sort of the warm down room,

George licks off his seat. And there's a slight, oh my God.

Yeah. Have you seen the slow-mo from the Gantry? It's unbelievable.

That is cat-like reactions. Huge credit to Colla Pinto for that.

Lewis Hamilton appears to be much happier in these cars. He was quick in the race yesterday.

Not as quick as his team, mate.

He was quicker.

Well, sorry, remind me of the finishing order.

That is not how it works.

On that hard...

So if I go quicker than you, you would tend normally to finish ahead.

That's not, absolutely not how it works. On that, the hard tyre stint,

Lewis was two-tenths quicker per lap.

Right. But he still came fourth.

Yeah, because he qualified in seventh.

All right. Okay.

Okay, just wait for China and we'll see.

Yes.

But I'm trying not to get too excited, but Lewis Hamilton is a man rejuvenated, I think.

And I want to talk about Arvid Lindblad.

Oh, goodness me.

The 18-year-old British rookie in the RB scoring points on debut.

Third youngest person to score points on debut.

Yeah. He looks quick.

After Max and Kenny, isn't it?

I'm not sure. I think it is, actually.

Yeah. I'm not sure either.

So he looks promising.

Audi did score points.

Also, sorry, you're back on Lindblad.

Not only did he score points and get into Q3,

he also held off a bloke called Max Mostappen for quite a long time during the race.

Yeah. Huge credit to him.

That'll be fun to watch.

Audi did score points on debut with...

Very impressive.

...Porsaletto.

Well done.

Very impressive.

Huge congratulations.

So, I mean, the point here is we can't read too much into one outlier Grand Prix, can we?

No.

We need several races behind us.

Ask me what I thought of the Grand Prix, and I'll tell you which I have.

But do I, therefore, write off the entire season?

No.

Am I, therefore, concerned about the prospects for the rest of the season?

Yes. Absolutely.

Well, we'll see.

Let's move it on.

This is something you wanted to talk about.

Pot holes.

Goodness.

How are the roads around you?

Do you know what?

Thing, compared to some of the places I go...

So, one of the trips I do is my wife has really quite elderly parents.

And they live about an hour away from us in Herefordshire.

We are on the sort of Monmouthshire-Gloucestershire border.

And one of us will go over there every weekend and make sure that all is well.

And the roads around them are, I mean, I mean, just...

Awful.

The road around us aren't that bad, but they're still sufficiently bad for our family golf to

have had two punctures in 24 hours, both caused by pot holes that just came up,

which could not have been seen.

And one of which was in a place on a road where it clearly hadn't been the week before.

Because, yeah, and one happened to my wife, but it was very close to home.

And she got our local tyre people who are completely brilliant.

Paul Gerald tyres in Monmouth, if anybody ever finds themselves needing a tyre in that part

of the world.

They came out and they put a new tyre on it.

And then I got back from the Aston Martin Valhalla launch on Saturday.

And we went out for dinner on the car with this spanking new continental sport contact

tyre on it, and I was driving there and bang, there was another one.

So it's now on a space saver.

Is that a couple hundred quid down the drain?

Yeah, easy.

Easy.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I'm, you know, because it holds, you know, everything that is precious to me,

i.e. my wife and my children, I do not, you know, you don't skimp on the rubber, do you?

You just don't.

So I've got the best possible rubber.

Yeah, so it's expensive every time it happens.

The second one has yet to be repaired.

I've got a horrible feeling that when they balance the wheel, they'll discover the wheel

is not circular anymore.

But yeah, it is.

I've often, you know, I've often thought that if you actually want them in the next election,

all you have to do is just fill in the potholes and do it properly.

And the local teams, when you see them, which is quite rarely, they come around and again,

I'm not blaming them because they can only do what they can do with the money that they have

and with what they've been told to do.

They just come to a pothole and they fill it in and they move on.

They've done that on a couple at the bottom of our hill.

Two huge potholes, been there a long time.

They come along for an hour or two, stick a load of gooey gravel in it, it dries.

And I don't know, you just look at it and you think that's going to start crumbling soon.

Give it a fortnight.

Yeah.

It'll be back and they'll have to come out again.

So what is it that happens?

It's normally it's winter, isn't it?

So it's a frost.

It's a really cold winter.

It hasn't been a cold winter.

No, it's been a very wet one though.

Yeah.

And I think the weather conditions have not been great for that sort of thing.

I don't understand the geology of the potholes, but it's not been a great winter.

But it is, I'm afraid.

I mean, I don't want to sort of just sound like some ranting old bloke going,

some grumpy old man because it's just not how I see myself and I don't want to be,

identify that sort of person.

But it is a lack of investment and the issue is now so widespread and so severe,

it's going to require a massive intervention to put it right.

And I just don't see where it's coming from because we continue to be told

that there's just no money, although clearly they do have,

our local council had more than enough money to put 20 mile an hour speed limit signs up

all over the place, even when they were quite clearly not remotely needed.

But they can't actually make the roads.

Maybe that's their way of controlling speed.

Maybe they want us all to go so slowly.

They're very happy for the roads to be, I don't know.

I do get cheesed off by it though because it's expensive.

And it can be dangerous.

We were lucky, so far it's just two tyres and possibly one wheel,

but there's clearly not been any suspension damage.

But also, modern cars with no space, luckily the Golf,

because the Golf is eight years old, had a space saver.

So we could, when it happened to us on Saturday night,

we could at least keep going.

But a friend of mine who you also know, in his modern, what's he got?

He's got a BMW i4, an electric BMW.

He spent the night in the car.

In the middle of nowhere at the side of the road,

on a cold night, and given that he wasn't expecting to,

he hadn't exactly bought his sleeping bag with him.

He just had the clothes that he was in.

And it's just horrible.

And that's for drivers.

Imagine hitting it on a bike, a motorbike or a bicycle.

You're coming off.

You're absolutely coming off.

It is dangerous.

Anyway, there you go.

Potholes.

Potholes, eh?

Actually, there was a terrible pothole on our most recent group test

photo shoot last week.

We were on roads between Swindon and Newbury.

And there's one long straight road that goes into a right hand corner.

And most of the surface is really good.

But at the point where you're turning into this corner,

there's one enormous deep pothole that is going to be doing a lot of damage.

Right now.

But it's quite a quick road.

So people, when they hit it, they could easily be doing 50 miles an hour.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that was as egregious an example of the state of our roads,

as I've seen in a long time.

But actually, I just wanted to talk about that group test.

Because we did my current Audi S5 Avant Long Terma.

We wanted to pitch it up against a couple of rivals.

Because it's a really good car, that Audi.

It is.

I'm really pleased with it.

Actually, it has just today gone back to Audi,

because it's flashing up a couple of warning messages about driver assist systems.

So they wanted to take it back and have a look at what's going on.

Don't you get those all the times?

No, no, no.

It's systems that aren't working.

I quite often find myself in cars where it'll go,

oh, the system isn't working at the moment.

Your blind spot system isn't working.

Or your front collision detection system.

And then it goes away again.

It's been going on the whole time.

And the other day, it said parked car.

Oh, really?

It wanted to be pulled over here.

That's not what you expect from your brand new Audi, is it?

No, not at all.

So it's gone back.

They're having a look at it.

We'll see what the outcome is.

But that aside, it's a fantastic car.

And we wanted to put it up against the BMW M340i XDrive Touring.

Because that's one of our favorite cars, actually, at the moment.

It's a, you had one as a long term.

I did, absolutely.

I thought it was a brilliant car.

They're really, really good cars.

And we also had an outlier there, a third car along, a Volvo V60 Polestar Engineered,

which is a very different car in many ways to the other two.

But it sort of sits in the same bracket.

It absolutely does.

And I was, it surprised me.

Yeah, it's quite interesting.

In a good way.

And the story will be out this week.

The video will follow in a couple of weeks.

So I'm not going to give away the verdict now.

But the, yeah, the Volvo, I mean, it's not shown up in that company at all.

In many ways, it's more convincing.

Well, the chassis was, I thought, fantastic on it.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's got far and away the most power.

It feels the quickest.

So a very credible car.

But it was fun getting those three together.

And the thing is, these are sort of real world, faster state cars.

You know, they're not the M3 and RS5.

They're not the 100,000 pounds, huge horsepower,

expensive to buy, expensive to run options.

They're much, much more usable, much more practical.

And so it's a very, very worthwhile group test, that one, I think.

Look out for it soon.

One other thing then that I wanted to discuss this week.

Lotus Electra.

Yeah.

They're full EV, EV only SUV.

Until now.

Yeah.

And they put a hybrid in it.

They've gone and put a hybrid in it.

It's got a turbocharged four cylinder, hasn't it?

It's still got a big battery, I think, 70 kilowatt hour battery.

So a good 200 mile range, which is a lot for a plug-in hybrid.

But now you've got the petrol engine.

It'll do 200 miles on electricity.

So, okay, okay.

Well, okay.

Okay, well, in fact, that's interest.

That really interests me.

It's no heavier than the full EV.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, good, I guess, but you'd expect it to be lighter, wouldn't you?

But because it's still got a 70 kilowatt hour battery.

Yeah.

So that's really interesting.

I don't know another car on sale, which has that kind of blend of,

you know, you tend to find cars with 30, 40, 50, 60 miles of EV range of the plug-ins.

Or if they're hybrids, they've got almost none at all.

All their pure EVs.

So having one which will do some hundreds of miles.

On paper, by the way.

Yeah, of course, but what you're actually doing then,

you're almost back into sort of range extender territory then, aren't you?

You're almost back to sort of I-3s and that sort of thing.

Where most of the time, the internal combustion engine won't be doing anything at all.

The vast majority of even quite long journeys.

You know, I could get from where I am in the Y Valley up to London and it would never...

Okay.

So I think it's quite interesting.

I think it is quite interesting and how nice it is to be able to say,

you know, I'm still not sure that a big SUV is a Lotus,

but then again, I can remember that a time when I thought a big SUV wasn't a Porsche.

So we can't criticise it for that.

That could be quite interesting.

Yeah.

But the curious thing here is that

Lotus didn't plan to turn the Electra into a hybrid.

No.

That was never part of the strategy.

No, absolutely not pure EV.

Yeah.

But they've said that this car is out in China I think now or very soon

and it'll be in Europe and the UK in the summer.

So why have they done it then?

Well, because the electric one isn't selling.

We're pretty confident of that, aren't we?

Well, if you only have to look at the layoffs and the sales predictions

and the reality of which are fractions of what they originally announced.

So I mean, it's not a matter for speculation.

No.

Even though we love a bit of speculation on this podcast.

No, we know the car has not performed.

So it'll be really interesting.

I think they had to do it because I mean, these are brand new cars.

They couldn't exactly can them and go, well, you know,

forget those, we're going to do something else.

So I think fair play to them.

And it's lovely to have something positive to say about Lotus.

Do you think I think a lot of cars these days are engineered from the ground up to some extent

to be powertrain agnostic, even if your business case is for a full EV.

I think to some degree in the design process in the very early stages,

you are thinking, how can we mitigate?

How can we configure this thing so that if we need to one day, it could be done?

I think ultimately anything can be done is whether it can be done in a way

that is remotely financially viable.

You know, you talk to the Jaguar people with their new platform for the Jaguar GT.

They will say there is no way.

There is no way that within all common sense.

And if you look at the architecture, the skateboard architecture that you get,

where all your batteries are laid out between the wheels,

how you turn that into something with a big lump of metal rather than stretched out,

you know, very shallow, but over a large area into something very dense and concentrated.

I don't know how you do it, but if Lotus did kind of protect the design for that,

then that's a smart thing to have done.

But if they'd done that, I'm not sure why they didn't do it from the outset.

I mean, why would you not have had both cars on sale in the same way that, you know,

BMW, you know, you go buy a five-series in BMW, it can be petrol, it can be diesel,

it can be plug-in, or it can be a full EV.

And you let the market decide.

I was talking to BMW, actually, and there's a story going out this week.

I've driven the new iX3.

Yeah.

And I had exactly this conversation with one of the guys from Munich who came over,

and he said, there is no way that an iX3.

And don't forget, this is the first of the Neuer-classer BMWs,

the platform on which, essentially, BMW has staked its future.

And he was saying, forget it, there is no way we could ever turn this into an i-scar.

The EV-ness of it is so inherently, completely, inextricably baked in.

We simply couldn't do it.

So I wonder if Lotus must have protected that package a bit.

A bit, in the same way, I guess, that Porsche must have protected the Boxster Cayman EV

package a bit to enable.

I mean, I think they were, I think Porsche was in a better position,

because they didn't have a skateboard, because that would have raised the driving position.

And so they'd put the batteries behind the driver in a sort of mid-engine location.

So that's a far easier swap to do.

But I still can't imagine it could have been easy.

So it would be great for Lotus, wouldn't it, if this new strategy brings a bit of volume

to that car at last?

Yes.

Yeah, it would be fantastic.

And I think, and I've said this on the podcast before, I actually think it's a smart way to go.

I have said, you know, the range extender i3 was exactly the right car at exactly the wrong time.

And I think that today, if you were in the market for an EV, but were frightened about

range and recharging, but the back of your mind, you knew there was always this little engine there,

which could ultimately just keep the thing chugging along.

I think people would be massively more keen to adopt than they are at the moment.

And if that's what Lotus have done and it works, I couldn't be happier.

Yeah, fair play to them.

Well, we're running out of time.

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