Electric Track Days Inbound: £150k Buys You A Retired Formula E Car

First-generation Formula E cars are set to go under the hammer, and they're quite reasonably priced...

21 Aug 2018

A dream garage should be made up of eight and twelve-cylinder cars, shouldn’t it? And if you are super rich, and can get your hands on one, maybe you’d have a W16 Bugatti Veyron or Chiron in the mix. But if you want exclusivity it would seem electric is the way to go: for a cool £250,000 you can get your bum in the seat of a battery-powered car. But not any old car. Oh no. We are talking about a ‘Formuala E’ race car.

With a new ‘Gen2’ model (below) taking to the track at the end of the year, it means the current crop of machines are being retired from service. But rather than store them in the corner of a shed under a dusty sheet, these are being put up for sale by their owners. Prices for each example will vary, however, with these dependant on how successful a particular car has been during its competitive career and who drove it.

Electric Track Days Inbound: £150k Buys You A Retired Formula E Car

That means figures will range anywhere from between £150,000 to £250,000, according to Bloomberg. For that, you get a race ready car and all the kit you need to top up the Williams Advanced Engineering-developed Lithium-ion battery, which is capable of covering a race distance of seventeen laps.

If you thought Formula E cars were slow, you’d better think again. With a 270hp electric motor, they can sprint from 0-62mph in three seconds and reach a top speed of 137mph.

Bosses at Formula E admit that most cars are going to join private collections, but given how simple they are to recharge (a mains supply is all you need), we see no reason why you couldn’t use one as a very left-field track day weapon…

By Jason Craig

Comments

This has be added to the list of cars I’d buy if I won the lottery that’s so cool that the teams are selling relatively new cars to the public most nascar teams sell cars that are 6+ years old

I mean… it’s cool but £150k for a road-illegal track car that deserves and is dependent on persistent care when you could buy a Caterham or even a GT3 for less money and less hassle makes this seem an awkward option.

Well, a slightly used R8 GT3 can cost upwards of $400k without considering the intensive maintenance, fuel and everything, that a FE won’t take.

This is honestly something I would try to buy if I had 150k and nothing else to buy, it’s actually extremely interesting. One can only think of how much they will be worth in a decade, and that’s a hell of a deal for something that has been the F1 equivalent in electric car racing. I would 100% track one of these.

For 150k in a track only car, i’d rather buy this Ligier JSP3 :
https://racecarsdirect.com/Advert/Details/92189/ligier-js-p3

Hey, sorry to be off topic; but why are new posts being published by the CarThrottle account rather than either of the Matts?

Probably because the Matts are
A. Busy
B. Sick of CTzens criticizing them for doing their job
C. Writing, researching, or generally doing something else.
D. A mix of all the above

So for 150k you get a car that looks like a futuristic f3, goes like an f4 and can do quarter of a trackday before having to recharge for half a trackday? What a deal…

17 laps is a quarter of a track day?

This is extremely interesting. It’s going to cost a lot less in maintenance than a GT3 or GT4 car, as an example, and it’s probably a lot more reliable as well. And on the investing side, having a field which evolves extremely fast makes a product obsolete very fast, which is very interesting, because these are going to be rarer in the future. In the 60s, an 10 y-o race car could be obtained for almost no money, since they were obsolete and not competitive anymore, and because of that, they weren’t given as much care as one may think, and it made them disappear pretty fast. Now look at a mid 1950s-early 1960s racecar and try to get something with a minimum of racing history for less than six figures.

Plus, these are the very first generation of Formula E cars, which is going to make them worth a lot in the future.

That’s again just the investing side, not the racing side, where these are going to be interesting track cars.