Interview: Tanner Foust on getting to grips with an Extreme E car and his first year with McLaren

Tanner Foust is probably best known for his rallycross driving and being a presenter on the American version of Top Gear, but this year he’s been involved in something totally new; Extreme E.

The series is in its second year as it heads around the globe, looking to raise awareness of sustainability and environmental issues at each venue it arrives at and, this weekend, the championship is in Chile for the Copper X-Prix, where the issue on the agenda is biodiversity loss and water scarcity.

It’s a series quite unique compared to others in the motorsport field, and that is reflected in terms of the Odyssey vehicle Tanner and the other drivers use:

“The first feeling is you’re sitting quite high compared to a rallycross car,” the NEOM McLaren XE driver tells Give Me Sport when asked to compare the car with what he’s used to in rallycross.

“I always have this gauge [on a track walk] of like, ‘oh yeah, this turn, we’re going to be full throttle, this jump you’re flat over this flat over that,’ and then you get in the car and the Odyssey picks up speed so fast, it really is shocking how much grip and acceleration that it has.

“So that’s the thing that you notice. We are really carrying speed, there’s not a lot of noise to speak of and drama to make you feel like ‘wow, I’m really going fast,’ it’s just tires beating over the earth, and it’s very, very quick, then when you go to the brakes, you feel the mass. And so you feel like you have a lot of inertia, the suspension is very soft, I’ve equated it to driving a marshmallow before.

“It really feels like you’re sitting on a marshmallow floating over this nasty-looking stuff. But it feels actually nice and smooth in the machine. And as long as we can get the jumps to work right