The Jaguar I-Pace eTrophy is no more

After only two seasons of racing, Jaguar will disband the one-make race series it set up in 2018 for the all-electric I-Pace. Yup – the I-Pace eTrophy, which runs alongside Formula E, will cease to exist “following the final race of this season”.

Only nobody knows exactly when that’s going to be. Just three races in the discipline’s second (and, as we now know, final) season was able to take place before the coronavirus shut everything down, and there’s no knowing when (or even if) another one will be able to go ahead.

Depends if Formula E gets going again – the series has postponed all racing until July at the earliest, but the last two races of the season in New York and London (scheduled for 11 July and 25 July respectively) have apparently already been full-on cancelled.

James Barclay, Jaguar’s Formula E team director, says the eTrophy “has realised many of the targets [the company] set out to achieve”, but “during these unprecedented times of the coronavirus pandemic, we have reviewed our strategy and made the decision to withdraw the Jaguar I-Pace eTrophy series after two successful seasons”. Jaguar will continue to race in Formula E.

The cars themselves (click here to read our review) use the same battery pack, inverters and motors as the production I-Pace. Weight has been stripped out – there’s no real interior and some of the body panels were replaced with carbon items – but these things still weigh around two tonnes, which is a hell of a lot for a race car. And they run road-legal Michelin rubber rather than sticky slicks. So the racing itself simply isn’t very exciting, nor very fast. Expensive, too. Buying your way into the eTrophy’s first season apparently cost around £800,000 all-in.

Will you be sad to see the eTrophy go?