Tag: Rosberg X Racing

“This is pretty much Extreme E…never give up. Anything can happen.”

The words of Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky have never been more apt.

Going into Sunday’s Extreme E season finale in Chile, Ahlin-Kottulinsky and her Rosberg X Racing teammate Johan Kristoffersson only needed to finish ahead of Acciona Sainz’s Mattias Ekstrom and Laia Sanz to ensure they were champions.

As is often the case with the all-electric off-road series, things were far from straightforward, with Kristoffersson surviving a near-roll on the opening lap, and Ahlin-Kottulinsky wrestling home the car with three working wheels as Acciona Sainz’s hopes crumbled.

It was something of a reversal compared to last year, where the team were again championship forerunners going into the final round, but for a roll to set off a run of bad luck that saw the team overhauled.

“I’ve been in enough championships to know that anything can happen, especially in Extreme E,” Kristofferson – who recently added a sixth FIA World Rallycross title to his packed resume – told RACER. “We saw what happened last year. We just lost at the finish line there, really. This year, we managed to take the win at the finish line. It’s a bit like revenge from last year.”

After Kristoffersson’s lap one incident, the team could do nothing but wait and see how the race would unfold in front of them. The tip onto two wheels after he dug into a rut at the second corner left the team with a puncture, sliding a lap down. When Ahlin-Kottulinsky took over the car halfway through the race, the damage had developed into a broken track rod.

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“I was trying just to be open minded for everything and stay calm because I do feel last year…that roll that cost us the championship, so my goal this weekend was just to keep calm, [make] no big mistakes,” she said of the job she had to do wrestling the wounded car home. “Of course you get a bit down, but then I was thinking, ‘Nope, don’t give up,’ and the team was thinking the same

“So then I just went out there and understood if we could pass [Sanz] we would be champions.”

The results will show RXR finished more than 4m behind eventual race winners Veloce Racing, but with the Acciona Sainz entry on its roof, speed didn’t matter — they just needed to get past.

“We were more or less in the same position as last year, and of course, you know, the experience from that is helpful,” said Kristoffersson, who is now Extreme E’s sole two-time champion driver. “Every time you managed to win a championship, your shoulders and your stress levels will be lower than next time you face the same situation.”

For Ahlin-Kottulinsky, the rebound from last year grants her a maiden Extreme E crown.

“It was an honor to be asked to join the team last year after they won the championship the first year,” she said. “Then to not be able to bring home the championship last year was a tough one to swallow. It took me a while to get back and [I was] really eager to take it this year. Now in the end, we did that.

“It feels great that Rosberg has their faith in me to keep me even for the second year, even though we didn’t win last year. Now we did, so it feels really good to be able to give that to the team.”

Not only is it adding to the legacy of Extreme E’s most successful team, but it comes at a time where the series has never been as competitive, or as busy, with the calendar expanding from five races to 10 this year. RXR made it to every final this season, but didn’t lead the standings until the penultimate round.

“I think that this year is definitely the strongest year of competition throughout the whole field,” Kristoffersson pointed out. “In pace, looking at the field, it’s so tight.”

Rosberg X Racing’s Johan Kristoffersson and Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky claimed the 2023 Extreme E title in bizarre fashion after a crazy final in Chile where both title-chasing teams hit trouble.

RXR, which won the Season 1 title, entered the final round of 2023 with the points lead, with a narrow advantage over Acciona Sainz’s Mattia Ekstrom and Laia Sanz. They needed to merely finish ahead, or hope that Acciona Sainz finished out of the podium positions, in order to secure the title, but a poor start handed an early advantage to the Spanish team who eventually hit trouble of their own.

After Ekstrom’s strong start, it looked as if a maiden title for Acciona Sainz was a certainty after the first lap. Kristoffersson meanwhile was shuffled back, then was pitched onto two wheels after clipping a bank just before Waypoint 4.

RXR sustained a front right puncture as a result of the near-roll, but Acciona Sainz’s win was far from secure. Veloce Racing’s Kevin Hansen applied the pressure on Ekstrom but the gap remained around 0.5s, increasing to 0.647s at the mid-race driver change.

It was at the Switch that Acciona Sainz’s title hopes began to unravel. Veloce’s Molly Taylor got the leap on Sanz at the exit of the Switch Zone, immediately turning the team from hunted to hunter.

Sanz had a look up the inside of Taylor at Waypoints 20 and 21 but Taylor remained resolute as Veloce chased a third win of the season after dropping out of title contention on Saturday. Sanz continued to push, but spun at Waypoint 2 on the final lap, and as she attempted to rejoin the track, she spun again, then rolled, ending the team’s race.

Puncture repaired, RXR returned to the track a lap down but then had to contend with a broken right-from track rod when Ahlin-Kottulinsky took over the car for the final two laps. Nevertheless, with Acciona Sainz unable to progress further, all RXR needed to do was get by stricken car. Their push was aided by a retirement for X44’s Vida Carbon Racing who retired after sustaining heavy damage from McLaren’s Tanner Foust upon entry to the Switch Zone.

Ultimately, the carnage gifted Veloce a relatively straightforward victory, while Ahlin-Kottulinsky wrestled RXR’s Odyssey 21 back, over 4m adrift of the race winner, to take second and lock in the title.

X44 made it past Acciona Sainz before retiring to take third, while McLaren’s race ended at the mid-race Switch as a result of damage from the contact.

Copper X Prix II Final

Veloce Racing, 8ms31.760

Rosberg X Racing, +4m19.110s

X44 Vida Carbon Racing, DNF

Acciona Sainz, DNF

NEOM McLaren, DNF

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Acciona Sainz had started the day stronger as well, with the team winning its Q1 heat while RXR finished second behind McLaren, that team’s new signing Hedda Hosaas putting in an impressive display to resist a charging Ahlin-Kottulinsky.

Both teams ended up in the same Q2 heat, with X44 winning ahead of Acciona Sainz and RXR, who sustained damage after a hit from Carl Cox Motorsport’s Lia Block at the Switch entry.

In the Redemption Race for the five teams that didn’t make the final – four teams at this round after Andretti Altawkilat withdrew after sustaining heavy damage on Saturday – GMC Hummer EV Chip Ganassi Racing’s RJ Anderson and Amanda Sorensen dominated, making a strong getaway from the middle of the grid. An early challenge from Carl Cox Motorsport’s Timo Scheider dissolved at the start of the second lap thanks to suspension failure, allowing Ganassi to cruise to the win.

Copper X Prix II Final

GMC Hummer EV Chip Ganassi Racing, 8m34.434s

Abt Cupra, +14.909s

JBXE, +20.993s

Carl Cox Motorsport, DNF

RXR took its second title – and first for Ahlin-Kottulinsky after Taylor drove for the team in 2021 – with an 11-point gap to Acciona Sainz. Veloce wound up third, with X44 and Ganassi completing the top five.

Extreme E Season 3 final standings

1. Rosberg X Racing — 182
2. Acciona Sainz — 171
3. Veloce Racing — 155
4. X44 Vida Carbon Racing — 121
5. GMC Hummer EV Chip Ganassi Racing — 113
6. Abt Cupra — 81
7. Andretti Altawkilat — 71
8.  NEOM McLaren — 68
9.  Carl Cox Motorsport — 50.
10. JBXE — 50

Entering the final day of the Extreme E season with Rosberg X Racing atop of the championship standings is a familiar story.

The team won the first season of the all-electric off-road championship before narrowly missing out a repeat last year. While RXR having the box seat in a championship fight may be something we’ve seen before, it wasn’t until Saturday where the team actually held the championship lead in 2023, grabbing it after a win in the final ahead of Acciona Sainz’s Mattias Ekstrom and Laia Sanz. Now the duo of Johan Kristoffersson and Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky go into the second day of racing at the Copper X Prix with a six-point lead.

“It helps that we were in a similar position last year in the championship fight on the last day of the championship,” Kristoffersson told RACER. “That always helps to have that experience and it’s great to see Rosberg be in the championship fight for the third season in a row.

“It’s always the goal to come to the last day of the championship and be in…contention and now we are actually in the lead for the first time this year, so that’s great.”

The day could hardly be described as straightforward for RXR, or any of the other title protagonists for that matter. While GMC Hummer EV Chip Ganassi Racing and Veloce Racing were both involved in car-breaking crashes and Acciona Saiz suffered an electrical issue, RXR’s day began with a puncture in Q1 after contact with NEOM McLaren’s Tanner Foust.

“There was quite a lot of crashes in Q2 which was maybe not so great to see, but yeah, we didn’t have the best Q1 – Tanner was a bit over excited, forced us to [have] a puncture,” Kristoffersson said. “That happens. That’s how it is, so we just knew we had to fight back from there.”

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A Q2 win followed before a tense fight with Acciona Sainz in the final, whereby Kristoffersson snatched the lead from Ekstrom in the dying moments of his stint after two laps of sparring with his former World Rallycross rival.

“I had a few tricks for him in the first couple of corners, but he knew what I was up to so he covered that one off very well,” he said. “But it was a very enjoyable final, to just have one or two laps of just driving with no issues, now yellow zones, just drive, try to pass Mattias and enjoy it, so that was fun.

“We had quite similar pace, he did a few mistakes, I did some mistakes first, I dropped back a bit and then I managed to catch him back. Then I managed to just get ahead of him going into the Switch, tried to stay as close as possible to hand the car over to Mikaela in a great spot.”

Ahlin-Kottulinsky was handed a clean car and the race lead, but faced a far from easy task resisting the charging Sanz who’d took over the red machine that was breathing down her neck.

“I knew Laia was strong and that she was going to be really quick, so for me it was more about trying to keep clean lines and knowing where she was, so just try to see her in the rear mirror,” Ahlin-Kottulinsky told RACER. “I couldn’t [see Sanz]. The team was really quick in giving me information of where she was, so I just tried to keep tight lines, keep her behind me.”

The win, RXR’s third of the season, prompted jubilant scenes from Ahlin-Kottulinsky and the rest of the RXR squad, but they were short-lived, with there still being another full championship round to go and a job to finish off.

“Crossing the finish line, we were super happy,” she said. “I mean, everyone here getting up at [5 a.m.] to head to the track and [be so late getting back]… It’s a new day tomorrow so we’re focusing on what we can improve for tomorrow.”

The team, once again, heads to finals day as the one everyone’s chasing, something that Kristoffersson quips is “not a disadvantage at least.”

“How the turntables” – famous words spoken by Steve Carell’s Michael Scott once upon a time, but in the case of the 2023 Extreme E Island X Prix, poignant words, too.

A year ago the series ran its first-ever doubleheader event on the Italian island. The first round of the weekend was won on the road by Rosberg X Racing, only for a penalty to snatch that victory away and hand it to Chip Ganassi Racing. A year later, we saw something of a repeat, albeit with the tables turned – Ganassi were the winners on the road, but RXR were declared the winners.

It was a dominant display by GMC Hummer EV Chip Ganassi Racing’s new-for-2023 lineup of RJ Anderson and Amanda Sorensen. The duo have been gaining speed with each session they’ve contested this year, culminating in a maiden podium at the Hydro X Prix in Scotland last time out. This time, in Sardinia, the site of the team’s first win one year ago (with previous drivers Kyle LeDuc and Sara Price), the team was all set to make yet another step and claim that first win of the year.

After a skirmish off the start with Andretti Altawkilat’s Timmy Hansen and RXR’s Johan Kristoffersson, Anderson blasted into an early lead, handing a clean car and a comfortable advantage to teammate Amanda Sorensen, who maintained that advantage for the second half of the race.

However…

The team left the driver switch area a fraction of a second before the mandatory 45s, resulting in a 15.7s penalty for the team – 15 seconds as punishment, plus whatever advantage they were deemed to have gained.

The penalty — a cruel twist to what had been a fantastic culmination of this fresh pairing’s progress over the year — instantly drew comparisons to the same race one year ago, where it was Ganassi that benefitted from RXR’s own misfortune on that occasion.

The irony wasn’t lost on Kristofferson.

“I think I crossed the finish line first in every race in Sardinia. Now we didn’t cross the finish line first,” he told RACER with a smile, having been declared winner alongside teammate Mikaela Ahlin-Kottulinsky after crossing the finish line in second.

“That’s the thing — you have to be precise on these things and if you want to gamble with them a bit… But you don’t want to be too safe on the safe side. But if you’re on the other side you get this penalty, so it’s about getting all those pieces together, making everything right, and being quick,” she added.

For the Ganassi duo, as painful as the lost victory was, both Anderson and Sorensen were quick to point out the obvious positives.

“Well it’s obviously a tough one but I think it shows that at least we have good pace,” said Anderson. “We’ve been slowly getting faster through the year – it’s a bummer. We’ve been working hard, obviously, so … to cross the line first and get put back, it’s still a podium, still a step in the right direction. We’re just trying to do all the little things right. It’s Extreme E — anything can happen out here so to be consistently now running up front with the fast guys, it’s still our first year, we’re learning, hopefully that luck comes around another time where we catch the good break.

“It’s a podium, two back-to-back podiums, it’s good for our team and we’ll get back to work for round six.”

Sorensen added: “RJ held it down from the beginning. It looked really tough and I gave him pep talk. I said, ‘Don’t lift, because I didn’t lift so you can’t lift,’ and our plan worked. He gave me a good clean car, right out front. I got in the car and I knew the pressure was on considering Catie (Munnings) had a small gap on me. I just had to not make any mistakes. The track was definitely unpredictable, super-slick out there, and kind of bummed we were in third.

“There’s always tomorrow and it’s definitely a learning curve for the team, but it is what it is and we’ll get them tomorrow.”

While it’s easy to paint the picture of one team inheriting another’s well-deserved victory, that would be doing a disservice to RXR who, after the first turn on the first lap, didn’t even look like finishing, let alone winning.

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“I don’t think anybody expected that,” remarked Ahlin-Kottulinsky.

That contact between Ganassi, RXR, and the Andretti entry resulted in Kristoffersson being fired way off-line and coming to a complete stop.

“I didn’t have a good start,” he admitted. “The start line was really wet gravel so the takeoff wasn’t very good, so I was like one and a half meters behind Acciona (Sainz) and Abt (Cupra), but then Mattias (Ekstrom) dropped back, and then I was a bit too wide and hit a bump and got even further wide on the exit of Turn 1.

“I had a very, very hard hit under the car so I thought maybe the car will be broken, so I came to an absolute stop after a while – I wasn’t sure if there were any stones or stuff in the bushes.”

Kristoffersson was seconds away from giving up, but he said, “We felt we had nothing to lose,” so he got the team back on track – literally. The water on track, laid down before the final, gave them hope too.

“Then I thought, ‘I might as well try and go,’ just before I unbuckled the seatbelts and jumped out. And then I started driving and the conditions were very different and very tricky and I think that helped a lot coming from the back. I had nothing to lose and I drove as fast as I could.

“Obviously it was quite tricky when I caught Loeb with the puncture, tried to pass him in a safe way and then at the end of the second lap I managed to get past Mattias, so that was a good run, and then caught right up behind Timmy into the switch and left the car to Mikaela.”

After picking off those in front one-by-one, Ahlin-Kottulinsky was left to continue the hunt, aided by Kristoffersson’s knowledge gained through the first half of the race.

“He (Kristoffersson) was really finding the right lines, able to test different lines, found really good ones and in the switch, gave me that information… I said, ‘Copy,’ and did what he told me to do,” Ahlin-Kottulinsky said. “That is the key of the championship — it’s about teamwork between the drivers and obviously the whole team and they gave me really good information.

Before long Ahlin-Kottulinsky was shadowing Andretti’s Catie Munnings, who was running in second place, and while she was able to get by the Brit, contact between the two did pitch Munnings into a roll.

“First of all, I’m happy that Catie is okay,” Ahlin-Kottulinsky said. “In the driving, I did what Johan told me to do and I felt that I had good pace, and…then the opportunity was there to overtake Catie. Then I heard there was a penalty for Ganassi.”

The victory ends an unusually long drought for Extreme E’s most successful team. The season one champions won five out of 10 races across the first two years of the championship, but haven’t been on the top step of the podium since the second Sardinia race of Season 2 a little over a year ago, which they won without any stewards’ intervention.

“We didn’t expect that, but it feels great to be back and we showed great pace as well,” Ahlin-Kottulinsky said.