Autocar Awards 2021: Alejandro Agag named Motorsport Hero

“That’s where I feel comfortable, when there are problems,” he rattles off in his trademark machine-gun delivery. “That’s where I operate better. When everything is normal… Look, I’m clearly not a day-to-day manager. So that’s why I want to start new things.”

Agag was born in Madrid in 1970 and enjoyed one of those other-worldly privileged international upbringings in his birth city, Paris and New York. He is fluent in English, Spanish, French and Italian, and his political rise was astonishing following university. He was personal assistant to the Spanish prime minister at 25. In 1999, at 28, he became the youngest Spaniard to win a seat in the European Parliament, but he quit politics in 2001 and dived into business, including motorsport. As partner with Briatore, he bought Formula 1’s TV rights in Spain just in time to cash in on Fernando Alonso’s double title glory, then later he took over the Campos Racing GP2 team. Among it all, he ended up (an unpopular) chairman of Queens Park Rangers after buying into the football club with Ecclestone, Briatore and Lakshmi Mittal, then he founded Formula E with business partner Enrique Bañuelos. Life has been a whirlwind. But he doesn’t sound much like an eco-warrior.

“I don’t see myself as a saint – I’m a businessman,” he confirms. “But I love businessmen that do good at the same time.”

So where did the climate change ‘activist’ spring from? The short answer is a place of pragmatic opportunism. “The inspiration came from a sponsor that didn’t want to sign a contract in F1 for environmental reasons,” he says. “I was working on a deal with Bernie for a sponsor for the race in Barcelona. We were almost there and then they said: ‘We are not going to do it, look at the trail of emails.’ People within the company wanted a sport that had sustainability, that was ‘green’. That was the turning point, to say we have an opportunity rather than a problem, that we could make a contribution. That was about 15 years ago."

Just because the initial trigger was economic (and there’s nothing wrong with that), don’t think Agag is insincere about his ambition to make a positive impact on climate change. The Extreme E ‘legacy’ programme he’s created to justify the choice of remote and environmentally vulnerable locations needs refining, but it is early days. Face to face, he sounds almost evangelical on the subject.

“I would like to create a great entertainment product, a great race at its heart, then I’d like its impact to be real on the climate action side,” he says. “I want this to be a real contributor to climate action, to take on real projects, to involve as many people as possible. I want Extreme E to be an agent to bring companies together to work on climate action.”

He has invested heavily in EVs but openly accepts battery technology alone will not solve the world’s crisis. “I’m convinced the solution will be a combination of technologies,” he says. “I think EVs are great and we are pushing them, but they are not everything. They are clearly the best solution for cities [it’s why Formula E takes place on pop-up street circuits]. Hydrogen is very interesting. E-fuels I’m still not convinced by, but I’m open to be convinced. They work for motorsport, but I’m not sure they work for road cars. The question I ask is: ‘What if I put e-fuel into a car fleet today?’ If you have a new engine, fine, but in a current engine, you still get emissions. You still get particulates and NOx, which is a big problem.”

He has a funny, pertinent analogy on e-fuels based around one of his own bad habits: “If you have solar or wind energy and that powers an electric car, that is zero emissions. But if you have solar energy to capture carbon [out of the atmosphere] and then you release that carbon back… it’s a weaker argument. People give me sh*t because I smoke cigars, that I’m emitting CO2 and I say, yeah, but the leaves of the tobacco plant I am smoking have already absorbed the CO2 I’m emitting. A cigar is a cigar, a car in the city is a bit different.”