PURE ETCR launch in France - the new disruptor

Launched today, the brand new PURE ETCR series looks deliver a new electric racing experience, with a new twist.

First, let’s sort out some confusion — ETCR is the technical regulation, and PURE ETCR is the name of the championship — so PURE ETCR is to ETCR, what WTCR is to TCR — get it?

If not, that’s OK. Let’s quickly run through it.

ETCR is owned by WSC Group — the company run by Marcello Lotti — and this is the technical regulation. All announcements to-date around battery supply, charging infrastructure etc. have come from WSC, while today’s PURE ETCR announcement, held in central Paris, was by the series’ promoter, Eurosport Events — the same promoter as the FIA World Touring Car Cup.

Today’s announcement was in three key parts — the format, the calendar, and the tyre supplier.

The tyres

Let’s address the tyres first; as this was not at all a surprise.

Goodyear will be providing the tyres for the new series, which mirrors its new agreement to take over as the official supplier of tyres to the sister WTCR — FIA World Touring Car Cup from this year.

The tyres won’t be the same; much like the tyres used in Formula E, in the interest of reducing the variations of tyres, an all-weather spec tyre will be used. “Goodyear is a leader in electric vehicle tyre development. In Europe, half of our original equipment tyre developments are for EVs and hybrids,” said Mike Rytokoski, vice president and chief marketing offficer of Goodyear Europe at the launch.

“We bring a great deal of experience to ETCR in developing tyres for electric vehicles. High-performance road electric vehicles have very different needs to their petrol or diesel equivalents.

“They are heavier and have more torque, delivered immediately. Goodyear has developed tyres that can cope with this instant power delivery, delivering high grip and traction hand in hand with low rolling resistance to increase range and efficiency.

“Our partnership with Pure ETCR is much more than just supplying race tyres. Together, we will use racing to develop technology to thrill the next generation of high-performance driver.”

The calendar and the titles

This one’s simple. For this year, there’s no title. All the events are listed as either promotional (outings at the Goodwood Festival Of Speed, and the Daytona 24 Hours next January), or ‘demo’ races.

The reason for this, says the series manager Xavier Gavory, is so the series can try things out as they go.

With two cars to be run by each manufacturer, with an expectation of five marques on the grid this year, this means ten cars will be in action during the first season. Without having a championship at stake, the promoter will have the flexibility to change the format on the fly to address any problems they may come across.

Two of the four demo races will take place alongside the WTCR — at the Salzburgring in Austria, and at Inje Speedium in South Korea.

PURE ETCR will also join the grid at the Copenhagen street race, which will also host the TCR Scandinavia and Denmark championships this year — while a date in November is being held for the final event at Guangdong in China.

PURE ETCR 2020 calendar

July 9–12 — Goodwood Festival of Speed, UK
July 24–26 — Salzburgring, Austria
August 1–2 — Copenhagen, Denmark
October 16–18 — Inje Speedium, South Korea
November (TBD) — Guangdong, China
January 31 2021 — 24 Hours of Daytona, USA

The format

OK, here’s where it gets a little different.

PURE ETCR’s series director Xavier Gavory introduced the new format as “forget about qualifying” — the new format for PURE ETCR was announced as a series of heats — with drivers placed in groups following a random draw, with the winners of the heats progressing through until an eventual “king” or “queen” (with PURE ETCR very much interested in attracting female racing drivers as well) into the series.

So here’s the draw, and from that the drivers will be placed into a series of “battles”.

For each battle, the cars will start on equal footing — starting in a line, and heading out for a maximum 10km race heat (for comparison, a typical touring car race is around 60km), so these are short heats.

Within each battle, the drivers will have a limited push-to-pass hit to play with, as long as they’re not the leader, with a ‘fightback’ setting available for anyone who has just been passed.

The final battle will see the victor of the weekend crowned.

While during the presentation, the obvious point wasn’t mentioned once, but in the journalist round table, Eurosport Events CEO Francois Ribeiro was ready to address the elephant in the room without provocation.

“I had a long discussion with Paul Bellamy, the promoter of rallycross, and I said I’m not a great believer of rallycross turning electric. I don’t think their fanbase is ready to receive electric racing — but there’s one thing of rallycross I’ve been certain of, and that’s that their format is perfect for electric racing.

“As their format, you extract 100% the maximum of the car from the first second.

“We thought about PURE ETCR’s format, and we thought is it endurance, or 60km and a copy-paste of what we do for WTCR, and we said no.

“It’s true, there’s no shame to say the rallycross format has been an inspiration to come up with what we do. But rallycross had a green-light starting system, so you have jump starts to deal with, so we want to make this more spectacular, so we’ll have a start gate with an LED screen…I think it’ll remind you a bit of rallycross, but the look and feel will be a bit different.”

Other elements

A few other key sustainable announcements were made at the launch.

First, the series will not make use of air freight, and the infrastructure will use sea freight, the same way the WTCR has done for the past two years.

The cars will be charged in a special charging station at the circuit, which fans can visit, and will utilise hydrogen generators — in innovation spotted by WSC CEO Marcello Lotti and he wanted this to be used for the new format.

Next steps

2020 is very much a showcase year for the new series — with an eight-race calendar with more manufacturers the target from 2021, along with a recognisied FIA International Series status “and perhaps more” said Ribeiro, hinting they could even try for an FIA Electric World Touring Car Championship status.

WSC Group meanwhile will continue to develop the technology, and aim to launch national and regional electric touring car championships from 2022, in much the same vein as the highly successful spread of TCR-type championships across the world.

Lotti said himself on stage, that he doesn’t expect there will be any non-electric motorsport around in just ten years — and this just demonstrates the plan is to control the move from conventional to electric racing, with TCR set to be superceded by ETCR completely by the end of the decade.