49 XTREME G1 Series
No matter how you slice it, car racing is a sport for the very wealthy. A young driver, looking to start his career towards pro Formula One races will be shelling out €300,000 per season – and that’s just for the lowest, Formula Four category for junior drivers. This means that there are brilliant drivers out there who are never going to have a chance to compete at the highest levels. Griiip’s mission was to democratise the sport of auto racing by designing and manufacturing high-end, affordable cars. “As the technology has changed, the drivers themselves have moved farther and farther away from the viewers and fans,” explains Griiip CTO Gilad Agam. “If you look at old photos of car racing, you see fans standing at the fences, or you see drivers who are also mechanics that everyone knows, always giving interviews. Now you have drivers encased in a monster with a team of 20 or 25 people. You don’t feel connected to what is happening on the track.” BACK TO BASICS Griiip built the G1, the first Formula 1000 car, in 2015. The car uses a motorcycle engine and is constructed of steel tubing, rather than carbon fibre. It is much cheaper to maintain, and to own, than a high-end Formula One car. Running one of Griiip’s G1s will put an aspiring racer back €75,000 which includes the leasing of the car (the price of the car itself is €52,900). Not peanuts, but still a price likely to open the sport to a flood of unknown talents or invite participation from countries without a long motorsports tradition. G1 racing – which the company will promote through its G1 Series – also levels the playing field in terms of race technology. “It really allows a driver to show his abilities. It’s no longer McLaren versus Mercedes. It’s G1 versus G1. Let the better driver win.” In addition to getting the car back to basics, the Griiip team intentionally stripped back the idea of a massive support crew for racing. “The big team of experts around the driver is the main problem. They shift the balance from the driver to the whole team. You get the best mechanics and engineers and the team ends up being the financial body, with the driver just there for the funding. We want to bring the control back to the driver.” So, in addition to mechanical innovation in its car design, the Griiip team has integrated innovation in data. Each G1 car transmits data from its sensors –
ntil last year, Israel didn’t even have a race track. In fact, high- speed car racing was forbidden by law due to safety regulations.
ONCE YOU HAVE THE DRIVER DATA... ALL SORTS OF FAN ENGAGEMENT BECOMES POSSIBLE
Now Israeli start-up Griiip is on its way to becoming a disrupter in the world of high-performance car racing – and in the world of car race audience building as well. While at university, mechanical engineers and Griiip co-founders Tamir Plachinsky and Gil Zakay undertook the challenge to build a race car – from design to implementation – in just one year. With that know-how, their university collaborators and a passion for high- performance engineering they founded Griiip in 2015.
FINDING THE RIGHT FORMULA By using technology to lower entry costs, racing will be opened up to a much wider range of people
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