Formula E occasionally has heroes and villains, personified for many via a tremendously irritable end to the season at London Excel last month. So, it seems entirely fitting that Jeff Dodds, one of the drivers of Formula E’s Gen4 narrative via his CEO positioning, should indeed be a huge Marvel comics fan.
Dodds’ favorite character is granite-skulled hard-nut ‘Thanos’, who during his school years (Thanos’ not Dodds’) was a committed pacifist, who would only play with his brother Eros and their abundant pets. By adolescence though, Thanos had become hypnotised by nihilism, falling in love with the physical embodiment of ‘Mistress Death’. Think, a kind of sexy skeleton-stress. We’ve all been there, right?
Anyway, what does all this to do with Formula E, as it embarks on its Gen4 racing and business fantasy adventure of its own?
Well, Marvel comics is now owned by the Walt Disney Company, which in turn will be a major broadcast and streaming partner for Formula E from this season on. Disney’s characters are defined, legendary and most importantly highly monetised. In a sense, those three goals are what Formula E desires and needs right now.
It may have crossed Dodds’ mind that Formula E needs a touch of Disney, or perhaps even Marvel magic, when it comes to colour grading its participants. Formula E is full of characters from the happy-go lucky Antonio Felix da Costa; the intense professionalism of Mitch Evans; the everyman nonchalance of Jake Dennis and Oliver Rowland; the cool automaton vibe of Pascal Wehrlein; and of course the sometimes-surreal cheekiness/spikiness of Dan Ticktum.
Much more are within those tropes of course, and it’s been nowhere near close to being excavated properly yet. Will Disney supercharge that aim? Dodds thinks it can.
“I always say, one of the complications of our sport is the duration of the race footage, you don’t even get to see the driver because they’re wearing helmets,” Dodds told FEN last month.
“So, building the characters of drivers out within a race environment is quite challenging. I think Drive to Survive as a model did it quite well for Formula 1.
:I love a lot of those (F1) drivers, I know some of them, and I would argue they’re not the biggest personalities either or characters either, but they’ve been given a platform to become superstars and good for them.
As Formula E’s platform grows, the visibility of the drivers will grow. That’s a given. But actually, doing it in a credible way, without patronizing existing fans won’t be easy. Go too far and it’s just too forced. Go too light on the touch and no one will notice.
“People love the cars, but in the end it’s a driver mistake or a driver moment of brilliance that wins a race. So therefore, they are the stars,” adds Dodds.
“They have characters. We want to allow them to show them. And Disney are the best storytellers
“This is what they (Disney) do for a living. And whether it’s animated versions of them, whether we’re creating our own animation, which includes the drivers and the cars, whether it’s how we upgrade the broadcast graphics to start to bring more characterisation into it, we’ll be learning from them. We’re going to learn from the best.”
That’s the reality. But back to the fantasy.
‘Thanos did nothing wrong became a popular internet meme a few years ago. The film Endgame, which Thanos stars in, provides some evidence in favor of that view, especially when Captain America said: “I saw a pod of whales when I was coming over the bridge … There’s fewer ships, cleaner water.”
In light of the climate crisis, largely driven by human interference in eco-systems all over the globe you could indeed argue that Thanos ‘did nothing wrong’
That means one of Dodd’ heroes actually might just be more relevant than you think as Gen4 gets ready to change a lot of Formula E’s games.
