How will Formula E fill a whole weekend of track time during each race weekend?

This thought has been in the back of my mind for awhile – the Formula E electric car racing series will set up an FIA sanctioned race track in each of the host cities for a full weekend. The focus of the event is an electric car race, and presumably the typical schedule would be qualification and testing races on Friday and Saturday, and the actual race on Sunday afternoon.

The Formula E action won’t fill the entire weekend with on-track events. That leaves the question – what will the Formula E organizers do to fill out the schedule so that the track stays busy the whole weekend?

Over on beyondTheFlag.com they suggest a tie-up between IndyCar and Formula E. Several top people from IndyCar have joined Formula E as advisers or teams, which gives a little bit of credibility to that idea.

IndyCar is a gasoline/ethanol-driven series which would muddy the purity of the Formula E image. Also one of the sales points is that Formula E, being electric, wouldn’t require noise ordinance waivers. But IndyCar’s are not at all quiet, and would require a waiver from host cities. Finally, IndyCar is a US-only series, and would only be a solution for the two US events on the Formula E calendar.

Therefore, the suggestion that an IndyCar exhibition event would appear at Formula E events seems like a non-starter. But it does bring us to the question I started this with.

How will Formula E fill out the weekend schedule at each event?

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About David Herron

David Herron is a writer and software engineer living in Silicon Valley. He primarily writes about electric vehicles, clean energy systems, climate change, peak oil and related issues. When not writing he indulges in software projects and is sometimes employed as a software engineer. David has written for sites like PlugInCars and TorqueNews, and worked for companies like Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.