#ICYMI - The Electrifying World of Formula E

In case you missed this episode on the Playing with Science channel… Race down the track with hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice as they explore the electrifying world of Formula E alongside DS Virgin Racing driver Sam Bird, adventure journalist Jim Clash, and Williams Advanced Engineering Technical Director Paul McNamara. Batteries Included. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/the-electrifying-world-of-formula-e/ Photo Credit: Shivraj Gohil, courtesy of DS Virgin Racing.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:09Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:10Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 0:11Gary O'Reilly?

  This is Playing with Science. Yes, it is. Imagine you are driving down a street in New York, Paris or even Berlin, but you're doing 140 miles an hour, oh yeah, and you're accelerating 0 to 60 in less than three seconds and here's the kicker, you're not using a single drop of gas.

• 0:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, that sounds like a dream. That's because you, my friends, have gone electric. Formula E has been tearing it up since 2014 with such illustrious names as Piquet and Prost behind the wheel and Renault and Audi fielding teams along with BMW, Mercedes and Porsche, all joining in the next two years. Exciting.

• 0:55Gary O'Reilly?

  It is. And to give us the view from behind the wheel is DS Virgin Racing's Sam Bird. Seriously, you're gonna love this interview and it's coming up very, very shortly. What he is racing today, you will be driving tomorrow.

• 1:11Chuck Nice?

  Isn't that the great thing about this sport is the fact that all of the technological advancements that are being made will eventually be found in our cars very shortly.

• 1:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, they will.

• 1:23Chuck Nice?

  Which is why I think BMW, Porsche and Mercedes are all joining it, not to mention soon you'll have like Tesla, right?

• 1:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Jaguar in.

• 1:31Chuck Nice?

  Jaguar.

• 1:32Gary O'Reilly?

  The i-Pace.

• 1:32Chuck Nice?

  Right. Did you notice I said it like you? Jaguar.

• 1:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 1:35Chuck Nice?

  Right on. Go ahead.

• 1:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Go for zebra.

• 1:37Chuck Nice?

  Zebra.

• 1:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you. I love that.

• 1:39Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 1:40Gary O'Reilly?

  That interview with Sam Bird is up shortly, but just to let you know, we will have the technical director from Williams, the people who supply the batteries for Formula E. Yes, and of course, if it's on wheels and it goes really, really fast, which Formula E cars do, then we have to speak to Jim Clash, who is our resident expert on things that go fast.

• 1:58Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So that's all coming up shortly, but first now, let's get that interview with Sam Bird. Chuck and I caught up with him a little bit earlier on. Enjoy. Major difference for you between driving a Formula E car and other formulas? Because you've driven several other types of racing cars. So I'd be interested to hear what you feel the difference is between Formula E and others.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, just to give you guys a background, I mean, I've been involved in Formula One. I was a reserve driver for Mercedes F1 for three or four years. I came second in GP2, which is now called Formula 2, so the series below. So I've driven some high-powered single-seaters. And now, for the last four seasons, I've been involved in Formula E. It is a completely different formula. It is only based on city circuits. So we go to tracks that are made up in inner cities and we race on them, which is highly exciting. The cars are fully electric. It's the first all-electric, single-seater championship in the world. So in those two respects, it is completely different.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  With an electric power output, there's different torque curves. Normally, torque curves in normally aspirated engines are not linear. This is obviously completely linear. When I ask for full throttle, I really do get full throttle. So there are many differences.

• 3:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Is there any sort of time lag on the normally aspirated engine to the powertrain that you're experiencing with the electric cars?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  No, it's absolutely instantaneous. So it's pretty impressive in that respect. You have to remember, when you drive a normally aspirated vehicle, it's only, in the best of cases, it's probably 35, 40% efficient.

• 3:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  When you're talking about electric, you know, EVs and their efficiency, the efficiency can be up to 85, 90% efficient. So when you get on the power, absolute linear torque curve, immediate response.

• 4:01Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's pretty impressive. So now, I understand that all the cars are essentially the same. What is it that your team has to do to give you an edge, aside from having a totally capable driver such as yourself?

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  So yeah, you're right. The the monocoque chassis and the battery and the tyres that we're given are all the same for every single team. What changes is after what happens after the battery at the rear of the car. At the back of the car, every manufacturer has the ability to design their own drivetrain, their own gearbox.

• 4:41Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Converters and use their own materials in order to achieve the lightest, the lowest centre of gravity and the most efficient. And the teams that are quick have achieved these things. Um, so that that's where different manufacturers go. I like the fact that it's only open in this area, because if you start opening up the battery technology so early in a championship, you'll get teams with huge budgets coming in and romping away with the championship. This way, Formula E can control the championship a little bit more. And it means, you know, you go into any weekend and anybody can win it. You know, with the driver calibers we've got in this championship, you go in, there's 20 guys that can win a

• 5:27Speaker 02

  race.

• 5:28Chuck Nice?

  So what is your favourite city to drive? Because you you guys now have, uh, your circuit is set and it's always a cityscape behind you. Uh, what's what's your favourite city to drive?

• 5:41Speaker 02

  I mean, whenever you win at these places, it always fills you with a fond memory and you land up naming the ones that you've won. Um, but in all honesty, I'm not just saying this because I'm on the show now already for New York, but I would say that New York for me was the best. Before the race last year, I'd never been to New York before. So, it was a it was a very nice introduction to a great city.

• 6:03Chuck Nice?

  Cool, man. Cool.

• 6:05Gary O'Reilly?

  So when you when you're on a racing, you will always memorise a track, correct?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes.

• 6:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, how long, A, how long does it take you to memorize a track? And how on earth do you compensate for the fact it's now a cityscape? And not a rolling countryside or a more rural landscape, you'd say like with a classic F1 track?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, going back to the first point, I mean, I've done seven, eight hundred laps on the simulator to prepare for this weekend beforehand. So every single track we go to, we go to Paris with DS Virgin Racing. And we do two, three, four days of simulation before. I practice the circuit and it also gives the engineers an idea of how much energy we're going to use per, per lap. Um, and we sort of get to see a bigger picture of what to use per lap. Um, energy figures, energy numbers, what to expect, what the pace will be. So we cover everything before we go there. Um, it's as if we've done two or three race weekends there before we even get there. So it's great, it's great preparation.

• 7:12Gary O'Reilly?

  You can gain all of that from the simulator in terms of, so you're as much as energy output as energy recovery and where you are expecting it.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Absolutely everything. We, we come up with all of our maps through the simulator and they're within one percent of where they need to be for the race weekend. It gives us a really good starting point. And obviously it needs some fine tuning. A simulator can never be absolutely perfect, but it gives us a great platform. Now with regards to my, uh, attacking a street circuit in comparison to a conventional circuit, it is different. You find yourself having to build up to being a hundred percent. You can't overdrive the circuit and come back like you could at Silverstone, Spa, Hockenheim, some other places where you can use the track limits, go over them and then come back to find the limit. If I go over the limit, guys, I'm in a wall.

• 8:07Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  There's, there's, there's that element to it, so you have to be, you have to build up to these things.

• 8:14Chuck Nice?

  So with that, in that respect, and with that in mind, um, what is the strategy difference for the type of track that you're driving on? These hairpin turns are so tight and you're going into them, especially at the beginning of the race, with so many other drivers around you and they're so difficult to navigate. I mean, it looks terrifying to be honest, but then, but then coming out of them, you know, you have your, you know, your S-curves and the long straightaways. So what kind of speeds are you getting up to on those stretches? And then how are you navigating those tight hairpin turns that you guys are making,

• 8:59Chuck Nice?

  especially when you're making them with a bunch of other drivers?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's our job at the end of the day. We've all been practicing this for the last decade of our, of our careers. Um, negotiating a race circuit as fast as we possibly can is in our blood. It's, it's in our DNA and that's why we're paid to do what we do. A bit like how an NBA player can, can shoot three points from pretty much anywhere on the court, um, which astounds me. You know, that's negotiating a tight hairpin with 19 other world-class drivers around me. I have to do that week in, week out. So for me, that's, that's my bread and butter. Um, you know, the, these cars that we're racing at the moment will be doing around about 140 miles an hour down the front straightaway in, in New York before breaking into the tight hairpin.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Next year, with the, with the next generation of car, we'll, we'll, we'll see speeds of up to around 170 miles an hour on some of these street circuits, which then becomes really interesting.

• 9:58Chuck Nice?

  By the way, that's, you know, people are used to hearing F1 and they're used to hearing speeds of, you know, two whatever. Uh, 117 miles an hour, just so anyone knows, on a city street is, is actually faster than 220 miles an hour on a track. It's, it's-

• 10:18Speaker 02

  It certainly feels like it when you're, when you're that far away from a wall.

• 10:21Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm saying. There's, it's because, because of the way the track is situated. Uh, there's, at those speeds, there's really no room for error. I mean, I think your percentage of error is about four or five percent. It's crazy.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Oh, I would say less. I mean, the thing is, this championship is so world-class now with the manufacturers involved, the teams involved, but also the drivers involved are pretty spectacular. You break two metres too early and you're off the pace.

• 10:48Chuck Nice?

  And you're off the pace.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  You break two metres too late and you're in the wall.

• 10:51Chuck Nice?

  In the wall.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  You have to be absolutely precise and perfect in order to be at the front of this championship.

• 10:57Chuck Nice?

  So I heard that they limit the speed on the car, that the cars actually go faster than that, but they limit the speed. Is that true?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Well, the car is capable of more kilowatts per hour than what it outputs. But in order to make it fair for everybody, to make it an absolute level playing field, because every battery, the cells are slightly different, slightly different age, slightly different decay rate. So they've basically capped it so that everybody has the same amount. A little bit like if you've got a battery in a computer. Imagine you've got the capability there to have 100% of its life, but instead you're taking 95% and every single battery is the same.

• 11:42Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 11:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Sam, before we have to let you go, the science aspect of it, the technology that's evolving and pushing itself through, you seem as if you're quite immersed in it. Are you that kind of driver that is all over the analytics and the data? Or are you the guy that just gets in, "Let me go racing"?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  I'm a bit of both, to be honest. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of sorting out one mill of ride height here or one click on the dampers there, I trust my engineer completely to choose the right change at the right time. He knows my driving style, he understands track evolution, weather, stuff like this, and what to expect the changes to be from qualifying to the race. But I do like to get quite analytical when it comes to what I can improve with. So I do spend a lot of time, as much as I can anyway, downtime, looking at data, analysing what I can do to improve as a driver and make myself faster at every single race.

• 12:42Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 12:43Gary O'Reilly?

  And that's brilliant, and I admire you totally for that. Where can Formula E go, and I don't mean a location, I mean as a sport? You know, you're on a track, you'll go around in circles, Gary. Now, where can it go? Where can it put itself in the sporting calendar as we've got to be? Like you talk about F1, it's Monaco. Where can Formula E go and make that sort of happen?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  I mean, look, Formula E is still new, uh, and it's, it's like a baby that's growing up still, but it's gaining followers, which is great. The technology is, uh, drawing in, um, big manufacturers, which is very important. And I think it's important to recognize the fact that Formula E is relevant technology to the here and now and to the future. You look at Formula One and I, I love Formula One. I was involved in it and it's great to have Formula One still around. But the technology that is in Formula One, I believe currently is only relevant to supercars and hypercars that you can buy for $1 million plus. And that, that's, that's the, the technology that's in Formula One.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  The technology that is going into Formula E cars is going to filter down onto the production line and is going to be in the everyday vehicle, the new EVs that are going to be coming out in the next few years. And let's face it, that's far more relevant to every single person that's sitting at home right now. Because in four or five years' time, people will only be driving hybrids and electric vehicles. So I think that's what makes Formula E quite exciting, quite relevant, current and, and good for the younger generation of fans. So I think the sky's the limit, to be honest with Formula E. I think it could grow and grow and progress and progress to the point where it is watched by millions of people worldwide.

• 14:34Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, Chuck, that's the amazing, what Sam races today, we will be driving tomorrow. He will take maybe a little bit of a higher center of gravity.

• 14:43Chuck Nice?

  Well, I hope, I hope what's-

• 14:44Speaker 02

  It is already, it is already happening with, with, uh, some of our, our opponents at the moment. The, the software that has gone from their race cars has actually filtered down into production cars that you can buy today that people can actually afford. So it is working already.

• 15:01Chuck Nice?

  Well, what you're racing today, I was hoping to race tomorrow because I was going to show up and just ask, can I drive your car?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, sorry. I'm driving it.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  I want to win this thing.

• 15:12Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 15:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, well, look, um, we've had a great time.

• 15:18Chuck Nice?

  Hey, yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks so much for talking to us.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  No worries, guys. Thanks very much for having me on the show.

• 15:24Gary O'Reilly?

  That's our interview with Sam Bird. Hope you enjoyed it as much as Chuck and I did. We are going to take a break and when we come back, Williams Advanced Engineering. Yes, they're the people that supply the batteries for Formula E. We'll be talking to them straight away.

• 15:41Chuck Nice?

  Right now, we have the great pleasure of being joined by Paul McNamara, who is the technical director for Williams Advanced Technology. And they are the company that builds the batteries for the amazing Formula E cars that we have been talking about. Paul, thank you so much for joining us.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  No problem. Good to speak with you, Chuck.

• 16:04Chuck Nice?

  It's our pleasure indeed. Let us talk about this super exciting technological advancement that you guys are working with in the battery for Formula E.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Okay, so if you were to go and have a look at a Formula E car and the Formula E battery, what you're looking at is a carbon fibre box.

• 16:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  And that box plugs into the car and actually forms a structural part of the car. So the front of the car goes off the front of it and the back of the car on the back. And you take the loads through. But the clever bit's inside that box. And inside the box, essentially, we're joining up what we talk about as cells, which I think most people would probably associate with the battery. But we're putting all those cells in series so that we can create a high enough voltage so that we can get the power and the performance out of the car. And the task we have is to connect all those up, to control them, to measure them, to keep them operating under the vibration and crash and temperature conditions that they might see during a normal race.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  And to make all that work together so that the big black box does what it needs to do on the track.

• 17:13Chuck Nice?

  Awesome. So we're kind of talking about roughly, what would it be? 200 kilowatts that you're generating when you're with the battery?

• 17:22Speaker 03

  That's right. So the battery for the most recent season's been set up for a maximum of 200 kilowatts of power. So that's what it will give.

• 17:31Chuck Nice?

  And that would be the equivalent of what? In terms of, what would a person associate 200 kilowatts? Which gets you like a speed of like 100 and what? 150 something miles per hour?

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, I guess most people think about horsepower, so uh two hundred kilowatts is, you know, three hundred and thirty or so horsepower, so that's that's the sort of power that that we can deliver from that battery.

• 17:57Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing. That, I mean, that's truly amazing. Three hundred and thirty horsepower, and you're talking about a Feder White-like car. That's a tremendous amount of power that you're talking about.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  That that's plenty of power, yeah. So so I mean, they are uh fast cars. Um. The Formula E racing is all about the electric powertrain and making that efficient and technically efficient. That's how the teams win.

• 18:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Um but yeah, to to make the spectacle exciting, then we need plenty of power and fast and competitive racing.

• 18:27Chuck Nice?

  So the competitive edge that a car uh team will get will be in how they convert that power plant into actual like torque for the drivetrain. Is that really where the difference comes for the cars?

• 18:43Speaker 03

  It's so so I I guess we haven't said for the listeners that um the batteries are the same for all the teams. So everybody's got the black box, I've just spoken about two hundred kilowatts. And what they've got to do is they've got to take that power that battery will give, and exactly as you say, convert that to torque at the wheels. Um now, by and large, you'll be able to deliver the torque, the power. What's interesting is how long you can keep that going for. So the efficiency of the energy stored in the battery tends to be the differentiator. So in a in a Formula E car, you you're effectively fuel limited. You can, if a driver wants to go quick, he can go really quick.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Trouble is, he'll come to a stop before the end of the race. So he's got to sort of manage how that is. So the more efficient the engineers can make it, the longer he can push at high power, the more opportunities he's got to overtake, and that's the differentiator.

• 19:39Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. That that's absolutely very exciting when you think about it, because it's it's kind of like, everybody's given the same amount of money. Now, here's the deal. How are you going to spend that money to get to the end of the race with and and still be able to cross the finish line?

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah, exactly. So a lot of, a lot of internal combustion engine formulas do have a number of gallons of fuel limit on them, but generally it doesn't tend to be a big limiting factor. Certainly here in Formula E, it's what you're, you're, you're fighting with and racing with.

• 20:12Chuck Nice?

  And so now I know that they changed cars during the race because of course the battery can only do and go so far. Is there,

• 20:24Chuck Nice?

  right now, do you see a time when they're going to have no need to change a car? Or with, or maybe extend the race to twice as long with the car change?

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Okay, so with, with the Formula E series, the, the guys running and setting the regulations for it, set out this vision of the first four years. Um, we've just finished the, uh, last race of the first four years in New York a weekend ago. And, um, that was the two cars per race vision, the sort of technology that got engineered in four, five years ago, and then we've developed. Next season, which is the season, the fifth season of Formula E,

• 21:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  we have a whole new car and a new battery for that across the series. And those cars will run the entire length of the race on one battery. So we no longer have the changing of cars in the middle. And that's a reflection on how the technology has moved on across the last five years, both in terms of the cells themselves, I was talking about earlier.

• 21:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  But also in the way you extract energy from them and patch those together.

• 21:29Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so speaking of the cells, uh, this really interests me. So I'm holding in my hand right now, my cellphone, okay?

• 21:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:36Chuck Nice?

  And, uh, they used to call them a cellphone because, you know, there were cell towers. Now there's an actual cell inside of my cellphone. And if I use my cellphone for any period of time, it gets hot. So my question to you, Paul, is you're looking at this huge power plant. How do you keep something that big, that's putting out that much energy from generating or overheating, because it's, I'm sure it's generating heat. How do you manage that? Because it would seem like it would just get hot and melt.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right. I mean, certainly when you're when you're chucking out two hundred kilowatts of power to the wheels. You're also having to get rid of something in the order of twenty kilowatts a heat. Twenty kilowatts a heat is a lot, you know, so that that's. Uh, six or seven three kilowatt fires around your house. That's keeping a whole house warm easy, yeah, through the through through the winter. Um, so if you if you look at the cars, a bit like Formula One cars. Um, there's two great big radiator grills either side of the driver sucking air through. And actually, we we devote one side of that to cooling the battery. So we've got a radiator in there and a cooling circuit around the battery. And the other side is cooling the electric motors and the inverters, which are a power conversion device in in the car.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  So we, so another part of the competitive edge for a team is how efficiently they can package that cooling arrangement. But within the battery, as the battery engineers, we've had to develop some quite interesting technologies to make sure we can cool that battery inside. Get the coolant right up against the cells, make that as efficient as possible to make it lightweight.

• 23:25Chuck Nice?

  Wow, super cool. That is super cool. So, um, when when you talk about that, how do you monitor? Because I'm thinking about like the intricacy of what you just said. Is uh are are uh is there some type of computer monitoring the battery itself as you're driving? Because this is a lot of things that you're juggling that you have to keep kind of track of during the race.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So another important part of a battery within a Formula E car, and actually in a battery anywhere, is the so-called battery management system. And that in in essence is a computer sat on the top of the battery, doing a lot of monitoring. Now, in the case of the Formula E one, every single cell, we are measuring the temperature of it. Every single cell, we are measuring the voltage across it. The algorithm in there is detecting anything going slightly out. It's it's it's uh making sure the health of the battery stays good and. Um, regulating if it needs to, the power that could be extracted from the battery, if anything's getting slightly too hot. Um, during the race. So we have continual monitoring of the battery.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  The driver himself is not interfering with the battery. The battery is just a sort of supply on demand device. But the driver does have a lot of intricacy about operating the car under his control. About how he chooses to use the power, how it goes, the balance of the brakes. And all that sort of information he's dealing with. So actually, from an energy conservation point of view, there's a lot that the driver has to do with what we call the powertrain, which is electric motor, inversion gearbox. But not so much with the battery itself.

• 25:02Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's pretty cool. That is very cool. So, uh, uh, uh, we're, we're, we're getting down to the end of the segment here, but there's a couple of things that I really. Want to know, and I'm sure our listeners want to know, and that is, you guys are making all of these advancements. Um, you know, Formula, Formula One at one point. You know, was responsible for seeing a lot of technological advances in regular cars. Um. Where, where do you see Formula E in terms of battery development? How soon will we start seeing these advancements that you're making coming to the streets?

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely right. So as you say, Formula One has, has put a lot of advancements, you know, uh, into the road cars. And I think Formula E has been very much set up with exactly the same ideas in mind, that you set up a racing formula with some controlled rules. It provides a framework for people like us to try things out, see how well they work on a, on a racetrack. And if they work well, then that's something that can come over in, into cars. So. Right now, we at Williams are trying to take those technologies and move them across. So just a few examples. So the first one is control algorithms. So the control algorithms that have gone on to the race cars are going on to road cars right now that we're innovating. We've worked with, um.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Couple of universities here in the UK on developing new ways of measuring state of health of the battery to try and extend its life, make it more reliable. That's important for racing, but it's also important for race cup road cars, we put that across. Um, I mentioned before the crash structure and the structural structure of the battery, so the battery is forming part of the car using carbon fibre to keep the light, the weight down. We're applying that into high-performance electric cars at the moment that will have carbon fibre-based uh batteries um to shield and protect everything. Um, and there's a few, so it tends to be around the details of how you make these things, how you make them lightweight ideas we've tried out on the racetrack, the work that we're putting into road cars now.

• 27:10Chuck Nice?

  So here's a final thought. Um, this is not necessarily the case when people say this, but fossil fuels come from dinosaurs who died millions of years ago. Doesn't really work that way, we know, but I will ask you, Paul McNamara of Williams, are gasoline cars already dinosaurs right now?

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't think so. I mean, again, we've got to be um uh sensible about how new developments come in and flow through. Um, we can only deliver electric cars at the moment at a certain rate and certain applications. Um, so we're seeing those on the market. There's a lot of engineering to do yet to make the products at the right cost, at the right range, at the right rate of recharging. There's a lot of engineering to do about making sure everybody can easy recharge a a car. So the reality is gasoline is a convenient and available fuel source for us.

• 28:17Speaker 03

  We've got to make electricity as storable, as easy to use, as easy to get hold of as gasoline is. And as engineers, once we've done that, then electric cars can start to think about completely replacing gasoline, but there is some some distance to go on that yet.

• 28:34Chuck Nice?

  Well, I'm sure it's a distance that you will cover and I'm sure that I'm I'm absolutely sure that that will happen and uh thank you for speaking with us and uh continued success with everything that Williams is doing and uh long live Formula E because it's an exciting sport and I have to tell you, I'm hooked on it.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Fantastic. I'm really glad about that. So it's been great to talk to you Chuck.

• 29:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back. I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 29:05Chuck Nice?

  I'm Chuck, guys.

• 29:05Gary O'Reilly?

  And this is Still Playing with Science and it's all about Formula E. So like I said at the top of the show, if it's on wheels, goes really, really fast, then we can only talk to one person.

• 29:15Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 29:16Gary O'Reilly?

  And that is our very good friend Jim.

• 29:17Chuck Nice?

  Jim Clash.

• 29:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes. Forbes Magazine.

• 29:21Chuck Nice?

  What's up Jim?

• 29:22Gary O'Reilly?

  And that jacket, it says what on it?

• 29:26Speaker 04

  Uh, it looks like a Formula E jacket, but it really says Virgin Galactic on it. I have a space ticket to fly with Virgin Galactic.

• 29:34Gary O'Reilly?

  And it says.

• 29:35Chuck Nice?

  It says.

• 29:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Future astronaut. Chuck and I in no way jealous.

• 29:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly. I am also a future astronaut. Oh no, I'm a future space cadet. Damn.

• 29:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh well. So Formula E, Sandbird told us that they are going to take the brakes off and these things are going to kick on to another, what, 40 miles per hour, probably get a little bit faster. We've got BMW entering the party for the next season and they've got batteries that are twice as powerful, half the way, a third the size and produce twice the performance.

• 30:14Chuck Nice?

  That's unbelievable.

• 30:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Well, you'll be going from, I think they're maxing out about 140 miles an hour now.

• 30:19Gary O'Reilly?

  At the moment, he said to us they're limited.

• 30:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I think you'll see more like 170. It won't be F1 performance yet, but but it's, 170 is cooking.

• 30:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, when you think about it, like 170 F1, that's a course, you know what I mean? That's, like, you're pretty much, you know, you know what's going on. 140 on these, with the way they have these courses designed and how tight they are, that's like doing about 200 and something miles an hour easily. I mean, I'm trying to figure out how these drivers deal with reaction times. I mean, you know what it is to travel at those speeds.

• 30:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Football field a second is 200 miles an hour.

• 31:00Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 31:02Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that's

• 31:04Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 31:04Chuck Nice?

  That's insane.

• 31:05Gary O'Reilly?

  I thought you were gonna do wow.

• 31:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, let's put some Doppler effect on that.

• 31:10Gary O'Reilly?

  You didn't, you didn't go there.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  No, it's more like wow.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  You're right, that's it, that is kinda what it sounds like.

• 31:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Please send us your best Formula E impersonation.

• 31:18Chuck Nice?

  Please do.

• 31:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, that'd be great. But the thing is for me, that sat me back, is when he said, when you throttle, and I love this, formally, a normally aspirated car, you'll get about thirty-five percent of the power coming through. So when you throttle a Formula E car, you get seventy to eighty percent of the power straight away. Now, that has to be a real kick in the pants when you're taking off from stock.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  It's pulling some Gs, it's going up there with the drag racers where you're really just accelerating at a ridiculous pace. Where do they go from zero to a hundred miles an hour in less than four seconds?

• 31:55Chuck Nice?

  Yes, three point whatever.

• 31:56Gary O'Reilly?

  They're not to sixty in under three.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's fast.

• 31:58Chuck Nice?

  That is very, very fast. And, you know, I don't know if anybody who has the opportunity, if you go online to the Formula E YouTube page,

• 32:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Chuck Nice?

  and it says the new sound of racing, and just look at those videos, and it's so cool. Like, because they, you know, when you hear it like unlocking, it's like, clop.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's, it gets you right here.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  So does Formula One, and so does IndyCar, and so does NASCAR. They all have different sounds.

• 32:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And now, that's the thing that I'm kind of interested to know, is what it sounds like. I've never seen a Formula E race live, but what does it sound like live when these cars are going by?

• 32:47Gary O'Reilly?

  I've been in Star Wars, I think one of the very early ones where they attacked the Death Star. It must be a little bit like, without the lasers.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's all combined. So you've got how many different cars with all these noises in different parts of the track? So you get this sort of vibrato, a symphony of sounds.

• 33:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 33:03Gary O'Reilly?

  I touched on that magic thing, NASCAR.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 33:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Are NASCAR looking over their shoulder at Formula E and saying, "We've, well, we've seen off Formula One, that's really never taken hold here in the USA"?

• 33:16Speaker 04

  No, it hasn't, it hasn't.

• 33:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Is Formula E possibly the next one up to to challenge NASCAR and and the Indy?

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Well, well, I I think, you know, first of all, Formula One has had trouble in the US because we don't have a US driver.

• 33:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  Formula One. Also, there's not a lot of passing in NASCAR and in Indy car, you see a lot of passing.

• 33:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Um, Formula E is trendy right now. Formula E is electric, it's environmental, uh, and obviously it is the wave of the future. And like Formula One used to be, people now are able to test what's going to be in future cars, electric cars with Formula E.

• 33:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Used to do it in in Formula One, but now the the stuff is so.

• 33:55Gary O'Reilly?

  It's still out there. It's.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  It's not helping.

• 33:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Unless you're building hypercars.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:00Gary O'Reilly?

  You're not going to be testing anything in Formula One.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:03Gary O'Reilly?

  And a lot more of it is, and you, with the way business is now, I can imagine stuff that's happening in a Formula E car isn't going to sit there for 10 years. It's likely to sit there for 10 minutes.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:14Gary O'Reilly?

  And straight into production.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  But the other thing about your question is NASCAR Indy car looking over their shoulders. I think they're already thinking about doing it themselves. So you'll have a.

• 34:23Gary O'Reilly?

  An electric NASCAR?

• 34:24Speaker 04

  NASCAR, you'll have an electric Indy car.

• 34:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  Probably a hybrid first.

• 34:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  These people are planning way out. I heard a rumor that Roger Penske is going to get into Formula E.

• 34:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  Now, Penske's the guy in Indy car. I think he's won, his teams have won 17 Indy 500s. Uh, I mean, if Penske's going to get involved, that's serious.

• 34:43Gary O'Reilly?

  How hardcore NASCAR fans going to take to not having?

• 34:47Speaker 04

  I heard that that, because you know that there's, there's a reason why they, they, they call it the thunder of NASCAR. I mean, would you have to, for instance, um, have a recording of an engine playing out of the car? Because like, you know, they do that with electric motorcycles. Like, there are some very high-speed electric motorcycles, and you can pick what kind of motor you want it to sound like, because when you're on the road, one of the things that your friend and a motorcycle.

• 35:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Ice cream truck.

• 35:25Chuck Nice?

  So yeah.

• 35:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Two hundred miles an hour with the with the theme from green sleeves.

• 35:34Chuck Nice?

  How's that sound at the Doppler effect going by at a hundred and something miles an hour?

• 35:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Imagine being overtaken by something.

• 35:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 35:41Gary O'Reilly?

  That sound.

• 35:43Chuck Nice?

  And have your kids just screaming, "Ice cream!" from the car.

• 35:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Chuck Nice?

  But go ahead.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  But to your point, um, you know, NASCAR fans probably wouldn't put up with that. I think they know, uh, they would know enough, uh, that if you had a fake engine sound, uh,

• 35:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, they wouldn't.

• 35:58Speaker 04

  They wouldn't put up.

• 35:58Gary O'Reilly?

  I can't imagine.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  But but again, like anything else, you know, people evolve slowly and things evolve slowly. And the E thing with NASCAR isn't going to happen tomorrow. It's going to happen down the road, maybe 10 years. I don't know. And so they're going to slowly get people interested in those sounds. Um, but yeah, I, I, I really think IndyCar and, and NASCAR are looking over their shoulders, but they're developing their own.

• 36:19Chuck Nice?

  Developing their own, yeah.

• 36:20Gary O'Reilly?

  There are some inherent issues with electric in batteries, overheating, uh, you know, you don't.

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  You know, they haven't had a battery failure in, in, in the Formula E now in what? It's been since 2015.

• 36:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Chuck Nice?

  So they've gotten a lot better.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  Well, one issue though is, is you're going to be running those high speed ovals, uh, for long periods of time. I think the Formula E race only lasts,

• 36:44Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  An hour at this point.

• 36:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  Um, that would be a problem. But again, both NASCAR and IndyCar do run road races. They run on, on city streets. At least the Indy cars do. They were in Detroit. Uh, so, you know, you could pull that off. Now, as I understand it though, with the Formula E, there's no pit stop. You just, when you come in, you get out of the car and you get into another car. So they don't work on the one car because the battery life isn't what it needs to be, right?

• 37:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  So that's a challenge.

• 37:08Gary O'Reilly?

  But I'm guessing with the introduction of people like BMW.

• 37:15Gary O'Reilly?

  That they will address that because they're already

• 37:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Gary O'Reilly?

  producing electric cars in their I series.

• 37:20Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I could totally see them.

• 37:22Gary O'Reilly?

  That makes a lot of, well, basically, is the tech, this their laboratory.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  That, that, that will all change racing dramatically, but again, when you're looking into the future right now, it's hard to see it. But I do think Formula E or electric car racing is the future.

• 37:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and I, I, I think the other thing too is now, one of the drawbacks of cityscape driving is that, or, or racing is that, um, you limit the amount of people that could come see it.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:50Chuck Nice?

  You know, however, there's nothing more exciting because you can change the course track any way you want.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Well, and it's very challenging. Uh, I think Sam said it, if, if you screw up, uh, uh, one of those, uh, street courses with a, with a Formula E car, it's gonna hurt. Even at a hundred forty miles an hour, when they ramp it up to one seventy, I mean, it could be a fatal accident pretty quick. If they don't have the barriers put up like they do on, on the Indy tracks.

• 38:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  Or even on the Formula One tracks, you know.

• 38:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  They don't have a lot of time to, to fix a, a street course.

• 38:23Gary O'Reilly?

  Imagine the guys who run Formula E are not aware of that.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  They're aware of it.

• 38:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, so they have to be very precise, and as Sam said, if you brake a little too late, or you, you, you accelerate a little too early out of a corner.

• 38:34Gary O'Reilly?

  I think they're gonna have, they're introducing a whole raft of formulas in the sense of, I believe, there's a kind of saloon car, which I believe will start with the Tesla.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  Put me in, baby, that's what I wanna go.

• 38:45Chuck Nice?

  A saloon car, is that the tandem car?

• 38:46Gary O'Reilly?

  No, no, so two seater or.

• 38:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  Get an experience for.

• 38:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Jim wants to, Jim wants to do the electric experience, but, mm, there's.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  They won't, they won't let me drive the car. I've driven a real Indy car, I've driven a real NASCAR, but E is too new. But if they do the sidecar, that would give journalists and fans a real feel for what it's like to go around the track.

• 39:05Gary O'Reilly?

  If they use the Tesla models, then.

• 39:07Chuck Nice?

  Then boom.

• 39:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Chance you're in.

• 39:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  I'm doing it.

• 39:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Good.

• 39:10Chuck Nice?

  So what about the passing? What you say is that one of the reasons F1 may not is because, you know, American fans want to see the passing, which is funny. I've always been an F1 fan, but I remember being a kid, the only place you could watch it was Sunday mornings on ABC.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  And that's still the only place you can watch it, except it's on NBC SN.

• 39:29Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 39:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, 7:30 in the morning.

• 39:32Chuck Nice?

  That's so funny. So like you.

• 39:34Gary O'Reilly?

  And it depends on the track because not every track is the same in different countries.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:38Gary O'Reilly?

  And is it the Hungarian Grand Prix where unless you're pole position and stay out in front, it's a procession.

• 39:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it is. Well, yeah, it's all about the pit stop. That's what people don't realize. When they're watching the race, it's not about the race, it's about the pit stop.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and their pit stops are two or three seconds. I mean, it's ridiculous. Like in a NASCAR and Indy car, there are seven or eight seconds.

• 39:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  But so any tenth of a second, well, a tenth of a second in those cars at 200 miles an hour is like 10 yards. So, you know.

• 40:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it really means something. Yeah.

• 40:10Gary O'Reilly?

  It's interesting with, everybody thinks it's got to be about going fast. Everything's about speed. So we make it as lightweight as possible. Sort of looking at the way things are with Formula E, it seems it's about how much energy can I recover? How much from braking can I recover, put into storage and then use that again? And it becomes interesting to see the mindset of how, where and why they go about doing that. I mean, I don't know, in Formula One, they do have those systems, but is it as important?

• 40:45Speaker 04

  Um, I would say in a different way, it probably is as important in all the racing series, reaction times, the mathematical formulas within the engines and the brakes and all that. They'll figure it out.

• 40:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  But again, that that whole business of the torque is amazing when, when, you know, these, these, these electric cars take off, they're such a kick in the pants. No other race car does it except for drags.

• 41:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Drag racers.

• 41:04Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah. And it's because of what you were saying earlier, Gary, it's the efficiency, you know, the, the fact that, that, that they're basically using most of the energy that's available all at once. So as, as they accelerate.

• 41:18Speaker 04

  And they're trying to find ways, as I understand it, of taking the excess heat and everything else and converting that into recharging the battery while it's actually on track.

• 41:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  So, so that's one of the biggest problems, though. Isn't it taking off the excess heat from these, these batteries produce?

• 41:33Gary O'Reilly?

  It's, it is something that they've, they've had concerns about, but. Bearing in mind, as I said, the kind of people that are getting involved in the sport, you can only imagine the solutions will come that much sooner.

• 41:45Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 41:45Gary O'Reilly?

  As to those sort of problems.

• 41:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm just interested to see, I mean, I love the fact that you that that you're potentially, as this sport grows, you could see a race, like just an American circuit, where like in you could have a Miami race, you could have a Detroit race, you can have, you know, a Chicago race, you know, you could have like, you know, you you can put this sport anywhere, and I think that that's really uh something that they ought to capitalize on.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Well, that's because, as you say, that that they only race on city streets. The only the the big problem, though, in America, just like with Formula One, though, would be get people interested in that kind of racing, Formula E racing, because it's very different from NASCAR and IndyCar. So that's that's a challenge, and we need an American racer who's good in it.

• 42:32Chuck Nice?

  We also we also need to fix our potholes.

• 42:36Speaker 04

  And the manhole covers, got to be careful, it sucks them up in the air if you're going that fast.

• 42:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Here's one for you, and I I'm I hope I haven't imagined this, because if I have, then my imagination's far more creative than I had thought. Robotic racing.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  No, it will never work. I've thought about this.

• 42:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Formula E robotic racing.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Fans, they want to see danger, they want to see the potential of something happening to the driver. If you crash with some guy behind the controls,

• 43:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Fans aren't going to go for it. I don't think so, Gary.

• 43:03Chuck Nice?

  I I think you're right. It's it's it's like uh it's like watching a robotic trapeze artist. Like, there is no fun in that. Two robots on a trapeze. It's like one of them falls to the ground. Who gives a flying pig? All right?

• 43:19Speaker 04

  No pun intended.

• 43:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, no, you want to see the potential of the loss of human life. I hate to say it, but that's the appeal. The appeal is that dude in that car or that woman in that car might die. All right, now I'm interested. Yeah. All right, so now here's what I want to know. How can we up? The chances of these guys dying.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  No, no, come on. Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck.

• 43:47Chuck Nice?

  Look, see Jim, Jim has actually been in those cars. He's like Chuck, Chuck, what are you doing? Please.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  There, there's enough of a chance.

• 43:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Way dark sort, no more of those.

• 43:55Chuck Nice?

  I know, I'm sorry.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  But you know, in the old days, I, I interviewed Sir Jackie Stewart once, who raced from sixty-eight to seventy-three in Formula One. He said that there was a two out of three chance of dying if you raced in that series in that five-year period.

• 44:08Chuck Nice?

  Are you kidding me?

• 44:09Speaker 04

  No, two, so he said they would look around the room at the, you know, the twenty-five or so drivers. Beginning of the season, they knew a couple of them wouldn't be there at the end of the season.

• 44:16Chuck Nice?

  That's crazy.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  So, so they made the sport so much safer.

• 44:19Chuck Nice?

  Good.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  Um, but there still is that danger.

• 44:21Chuck Nice?

  Well, and honestly, here's the thing, nobody likes to hear about a death, but here's what you do like to see, and I'm sorry to say this, I can't apologize for it. You do like to see a crash, okay? Cause look, here's the thing, when you see the crash and the car kinda like explodes into all these pieces and it looks like it's disintegrating, right? And then you're like, oh my God, this is terrible. And then all of a sudden the driver jumps out and gives you the thumbs up, and you're like, that was awesome!

• 44:44Speaker 04

  Well, that, that happened at Indy, uh, Indy five hundred back in two thousand seventeen. Scott Dixon had this horrific accident where he was airborne flipping around, hit the wall sideways, the car was disintegrated. And after he stopped spinning, and it took a good seven seconds for this accident to play out. He put his thumb up and he got out of the car.

• 45:03Chuck Nice?

  And people loved it!

• 45:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:06Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, I'm too excited about this.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  But the danger's still there, make no mistake, and so I don't think, Gary, that the robotics would work. But it's an interesting concept.

• 45:14Gary O'Reilly?

  It's, it's, it's something that people are going to.

• 45:17Chuck Nice?

  Wait, I figured it out, robots that feel pain.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  All right, Chuck.

• 45:24Gary O'Reilly?

  That's an improvement, but I'm not sure how much. I, I just think we have a generation coming through that will look at Formula One as a little bit dinosaur. And Formula E as the new bright shiny thing that reflects more of us. Uh, greener credentials, not harmful, da, da, da, da, da. Um, maybe, maybe they'll go towards it and. Robots, remote control drones, very much part of people's lives. Maybe they will see Formula E and the way it expands in that way.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  They probably will because we, again, we can't see the future. But the one thing I wonder about is these batteries.

• 46:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Hmm.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  That's an environmental hazard and eventually these batteries are going to die out.

• 46:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  So I don't know if people are taking that into consideration or not, but.

• 46:10Chuck Nice?

  Well, it's actually the the battery itself is not really an environmental hazard. It's the disposal of the battery that's an environmental hazard.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  That's what I'm saying.

• 46:17Chuck Nice?

  What we have to do is work on response. But that's just a problem that needs to be addressed worldwide irrespective of any any industry is that we have to find a way to properly dispose of batteries or to recycle batteries to be able to. So I think that part of what they'll do as they develop this technology is also develop that as well, you know.

• 46:38Gary O'Reilly?

  They're going to have to.

• 46:39Speaker 04

  They're going to have to because it's going to be really expensive.

• 46:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Speaker 04

  If they can't reuse parts of the batteries or the batteries themselves.

• 46:45Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, we hate landfill sites. You can imagine a big tower of car batteries and, you know, it's just, no, not going to happen. They've they've got to find that solution.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  Or they could sell pieces of them to the fans. Say this was taken off the Formula E car that P K drove or something, right?

• 47:00Chuck Nice?

  I don't mind that.

• 47:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, there is a thought, but maybe we'll not dwell on it.

• 47:06Chuck Nice?

  And now we know why none of us are planning the future of Formula E. No, I'm joking.

• 47:12Gary O'Reilly?

  So Jim, while we have you here.

• 47:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:14Gary O'Reilly?

  You're a man that goes places and does things and we won't say danger is your middle name because I don't believe it is. Um, where are you off to next? And what are you going to be doing?

• 47:24Chuck Nice?

  And where are you coming from?

• 47:25Speaker 04

  Actually, the most more interesting is where I'm coming from. I was just out at Beal Air Force Base in California and I got to fly in the old T thirty eight supersonic aircraft. And it's a small plane.

• 47:35Chuck Nice?

  Tiny planes.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  You get in it and you're thinking, oh, this is, I don't know about this. But we went up in formation. So we had another guy on our wing.

• 47:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  And we were within about three feet of each other doing these maneuvers.

• 47:45Chuck Nice?

  That's crazy.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  At ridiculous speed. Uh, scared me a little bit, but these pilots are amazing.

• 47:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  They defend our country. So.

• 47:52Chuck Nice?

  What I understand, it's like, uh, the one of the pilots' favorite plane to fly is a T-30. Well, Mike Massimino, who's a friend of StarTalk, uh, and an astronaut, uh, he used to fly that.

• 48:02Speaker 04

  The Shuttle astronauts did train that. Also, the U-2 pilots trained in that. And so while we were out there, we got-

• 48:07Chuck Nice?

  Anno flew a T-... What?

• 48:10Speaker 04

  I think U-2 was named after the U-2 spy plane. But they still operate these. So, we got to chase them as they landed, because they're very particular, and you have a guy on the walkie-talkie telling them when their wheels are down. So, we got to be in the chase car at 120 miles an hour, right behind the U-2 as it landed. I also got to try on one of the space suits, pressurized and all that. So, so that was interesting. I'm off to the Gobi Desert.

• 48:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Do you mean to go off to the Gobi Desert?

• 48:34Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah.

• 48:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Behind yourself?

• 48:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's part of it. Actually, I'll be, I'll be driving Infiniti's, one of the new Infiniti, uh, sport vehicles, uh, in the desert on the, on the sand out in the Gobi show.

• 48:46Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 48:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm excited about that.

• 48:47Gary O'Reilly?

  You get to keep one, or you just gotta give it back?

• 48:49Speaker 04

  It's like when I do a story on Rolex, people always say, "Do you get to keep the watch?" Nope.

• 48:53Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  No, you get a little swag bag, but that's about it.

• 48:55Gary O'Reilly?

  That's nice, isn't it?

• 48:56Chuck Nice?

  I like that. Swag bag.

• 49:00Speaker 04

  But, uh, but anyway, so that's, that's my next adventure. And of course, at some point, when Richard, Sir Richard gets the thing together-

• 49:06Chuck Nice?

  It's the thing together, you'll be headed to space, my friend. Or as Neil deGrasse Tyson would say, "Low Earth Orbit."

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Low Earth? No, actually, I won't even be orbiting. I'm gonna be doing a, uh, what do you call it? A, um, sub, uh, orbital flight.

• 49:20Chuck Nice?

  Suborbital flight. So you kinda just go into the-

• 49:22Speaker 04

  You come back out, yes. I'm in space, five minutes.

• 49:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  Uh, it's costing me $200,000, so that's $40,000 a minute.

• 49:30Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Let me tell ya, um, I can't do that joke. Never mind.

• 49:36Gary O'Reilly?

  And on that note, and we've landed back on Earth. Yes, back on good old planet Earth. Uh, that's been our show. Thank you to Jim Clash.

• 49:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, man.

• 49:47Gary O'Reilly?

  A privilege and a pleasure, as always.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Well, I look forward to, to coming back on the show to talk about something other than speed, but I love talking about speed.

• 49:54Gary O'Reilly?

  That's why you're on the show. And that's Formula E. Thank you to Sam Bird. Thank you to our Williams engineering people. And, uh, that's Playing with Science. I've been Gary O'Reilly.

• 50:04Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chet Nice.

• 50:05Gary O'Reilly?

  We will see you all soon.