Bringing motor racing back to London looked like a fanciful dream before the arrival of FIAFormulaE. As gazzasportscars explains, the tale of racing’s return to the UK capital is a long and winding one 📝
Motor racing proper - as opposed to short-oval competition, that is - had been absent from London since the Crystal Palace circuit shut its doors almost exactly 50 years ago. It would take until 2015 to return when the maiden season of Formula E climaxed with a thrilling double-header in Battersea Park.
Despite this political will at London City Hall, FE founder and now chairman Alejandro Agag always knew there would be significant hurdles to be cleared in London, probably more so than in other cities around the world.Photo by: FIA Formula E Battersea emerged as plan B at this stage, though ExCeL and its indoors-and-out track layout was definitely in the mix to host the London FE round on the inaugural schedule. News that the 200-acre park in London was the venue being most hotly pursued by FE was broken by Autosport in March 2014. The site in the London Borough of Wandsworth was subsequently announced as the “chosen option” to take London’s place on the 2014/15 FE calendar at the official launch of season one that June.
The Battersea venue undoubtedly played host to some exciting racing as Nelson Piquet Jr became the first FE champion with the China Racing/NEXTEV squad now known as NIO. It was the most dramatic championship finale on which this writer has ever had the joy to report. FE had its back to the wall, doubly so because there were problems brewing for the Moscow E-Prix, the penultimate weekend of the championship scheduled for the start of June. It would eventually be cancelled in early May.
Crystal Palace was a popular venue for Formula 2 races in which the likes of F1 ace Jochen Rindt turned out, before its closure in 1972“The problem was that the amount of work required was more than significant because of changes to the park and the development that has gone on since the 1970s,” says McCrudden. “There wasn’t the will at FE to invest the kind of money that would have been required.
Agag talked openly at the time of his aspirations to host FE to a track including sections of the Mall, Horse Guards Parade and a link through St James’s Park “One of the reasons why we were told we couldn’t do it was that we would have to vacate the premises in the case of the passing of the Queen,” explains Agag. “That would be one of the restrictions on using the Mall and we couldn’t dismantle the walls in 24 hours. As much as I would have liked to have gone to the Mall, it was too difficult.”
One of the problems with ExCeL was the shiny low-grip concrete surface of the exhibition halls, which made it unsuitable for racing and left it outside of the FIA’s technical requirements. That forced FE to come up with an imaginative but permanent solution involving the removal of a shallow layer of the concrete and then bonding on a new polymer surface to create the required level of grip for the indoors section of a track that initially measured 1.398 miles.
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