Rally News: M-Sport goes electric

M-Sport has started working on a new electric rally car. The car will probably be based on the Ford Fiesta r5 and will be used at domestic, single day events in order for M-Sport to research and see what power they can make.

Here's what team leader Malcolm Wilson told Autosport:

We're always looking for ways to challenge ourselves. And this is the next step in technology in the sport.
I'm not going to give you any of the technical details - I can't because we're working with other companies who share this vision and we've signed NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) - but suffice to say we're on with it and if things continue to happen and we're able to continue and make progress then I would hope that we could have a car running this year. That would be something in an R5 shell, it wouldn't be the finished car.

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At the moment this isn't about the World Rally Championship. All I'm interested in to start with is producing a car that's going to be capable of winning a one-day event at a competitive price.
There's definitely a market for a four-wheel drive car like this and I'm confident the technology is there to do it.
If you look at a modern electric car, they're capable of running for 300 or 350 miles between charges.
A BTRDA round or an event at that sort of level is around 35-40 competitive miles with not a huge amount of road mileage."

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