Eagle-eyed motorsports fans will have noted the inclusion of the ABB NASCAR EV Prototype in a commercial ahead of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship in Miami. The ground-breaking vehicle features as part of a crossover advertisement to showcase the engineering innovations taking place in the two racing series.
The prototype vehicle turned heads at the Chicago Street Course last year, with the battery electric car representing the first of its kind in NASCAR history. The result of a collaboration between Ford, Chevrolet and Toyota and NASCAR engineers, the vehicle could well prove to be a seminal creation in a first step towards potential electrification.
This time around, the vehicle was shown taking to the track against a ABB Formula E Gen3 EVO car in a commercial posted on YouTube by ABB, entitled “Electrifying Miami – ABB Formula E vs ABB EV NASCAR”. The video features actors Sung Kang and Emelia Hartford, while drivers Jake Dennis and Dan Ticktum also took part in the filming.
After watching the clip, one fan expressed their hope to see the state-of-the-art vehicle in Miami agan in the future, after seemingly liking what they saw when it was exhibited at Homestead-Miami Speedway in April. They wrote in the comments: “Maybe next year if they come back to Miami, take a little side trip down to Pensacola and Five Flags Speedway? FE on a short track would be mint.”
Meanwhile, a second fan gave their seal of approval after watching the commercial, as they simply commented: “Neat,” as a second then added: “Neat but I just can’t get excited by the crossover phase. But they cut the race off I wanted to see them race.”
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Previously, NASCAR’s senior vice president and chief racing development officer, John Probst, spoke with pride about the development of the EV. He said: “If you look out across the landscape, one thing that’s for certain is that change is accelerating all around us. We, from a NASCAR perspective, want to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to where our future is going.
“We certainly don’t want to be in the passenger seat and then someday get to the future and go, ‘Oh, where do we need to be?’ It’s not fair to the collaboration that we have with our OEM partners if we go down a particular route that they’re not interested in or is honestly not relevant to them.”
Likewise, Riley Nelson, NASCAR’s head of sustainability, also saw the innovation as a sign of the firm’s commitment towards ensuring a sustainable future. She said: “Sustainability means a lot of different things. And for our team right now, it’s environmental sustainability.
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“And so that really starts with education and getting people to understand that this is what our role is. That what our team is doing is we’re trying to reduce NASCAR’s carbon footprint. And that happens in a variety of different ways.
“But the bulk of it is it’s not going to be just the NASCAR IMPACT team or the sustainability team that’s doing it. It’s the entire company and the entire industry that needs to think differently and think about some of these solutions and problem-solving ways to reduce carbon as a sport.”
She added: “And that’s why the education piece is so important because I’m not a car engineer or a car designer, CJ is. John is. So it’s important that they’re also thinking about the way that we’re thinking about sustainability and implementing that into their individual organizations and lines of business, and that’s slowly how then change happens across multiple departments and teams, which then affects across the industry.”
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