The Extreme E off-road racing series, due to commence its inaugural season in 2021, will use tires supplied by Continental, and the vehicles will also feature the company’s ContiConnect tire monitoring systems.
With a calendar of events that spans locations from the deserts of Saudi Arabia to the rainforest of Brazil, having a robust tire monitoring system will be a key element in teams achieving reliability.
Throughout each race, the ContiConnect system will collect data on tire pressure and temperature in real time, via internal sensors on each wheel. This data will be displayed to the occupants via a cockpit display, with visual and audio warnings triggered if an issue is detected, while also being transmitted via a telemetry link to support crews.
The Continental system was originally developed for commercial vehicle applications in 2013 (although tire monitoring systems were in use in motorsport well before this) as a retrofit for fleets, and is able to transmit tire data directly from the vehicle either via a stationary telemetry station, or a cellular network using a Continental-developed app.
Continental’s development of the tire package for the Extreme E series was covered in-depth in the March 2020 issue of Tire Technology International; the article can be directly accessed here.
