Plante fails to get Formula E case thrown out
Mayor Plante has failed in her bid to get the Formula E case thrown out of court. The city may now owe $16 million the Formula E body demands after the city cancelled promised races in 2018 and 2019.
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Kate
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Faiz Imam 21:12 on 2019-06-07 Permalink
Unfortunate.
Without knowing what the details of the contract are, its hard to judge, but in hindsight my thoughts are that it would have been better to keep the race but to shift it away from such a heavily used central area to somewhere less disruptive, perhaps more industrial.
But if the city was forced to do it the same way as it was done before, then ripping up the contract was probably worth the cost.
Kate 21:25 on 2019-06-07 Permalink
Move it somewhere obscure and it would’ve become more of a joke. The only reason most of the sparse crowd was there in 2017 was free tickets.
Faiz Imam 21:42 on 2019-06-07 Permalink
It’s actually too bad from Fe’s perspective as well. It *was* largely a joke in 2016, a gimmick series to get the FIA a bit of green cred. But as a racing series its gotten massively larger since it started, and is one of the only forms of racing seeing any serious growth.
Major automotive players that abandoned F1 are joining Fe, and there are serious conversations that F1 is not worth the cost and many of the teams currently in are talking about switching as well. If they were still around Montreal they would have gotten much more interest now.
It would be really interesting to see them come back and race at Gilles Villeneuve, but with this legal stuff, who knows how their relationships are.
I recall listening to their CEO talk, and they said they wanted to be in the middle of cities so that “urban residents would see EV’s as legitimate and start buying them”
As the series shift away from a marketing gimmick and becomes more of a serious racing product, I hope using proper tracks would become more common.