Tanner Foust interview: The Extreme E tech we could see in road cars of the future

The penultimate round of the Extreme E season took place at the weekend with the Copper X-Prix being hosted in Chile.

An entertaining weekend of racing saw team X44 take victory but only after NEOM McLaren XE had crossed the line first and saw a time penalty applied.

Indeed, this was arguably McLaren’s best weekend of the season so far, with Emma Gilmour and Tanner Foust at the wheel of the Odyssey vehicle.

A seriously quick, electric off-road car, part of Extreme E’s mission is to bring new sustainable technology to the masses in due course, and we spoke to Tanner to see which bits he thinks will drip through to road cars in time:

“I would say that there’s probably a whole list of innovations in the construction, the materials used, the recycling of materials,” said Foust.

“But from a driving standpoint, you have something that will definitely make its way into road cars and that’s the complexity of the torque vectoring, you can literally choose where you send the power based on steering angle, based on lateral load, and based on braking and speed. You can send the power into different areas, which is something that lets you kind of cheat physics a little bit.

“In the past, you’ve only been able to turn by changing the direction of the front tyres. But now you can send the power in different places to help them drive the car forward, kind of like canoeing, you know, paddling on the outside of a canoe to turn.

“Once you get really creative with that technology, you’re really utilising more of the physics available, and increasing the performance and possibly the safety of the cars. So I think certainly that side of it makes its way into streetcars.

“But again, there’s a whole host of battery challenges and with