An Unlikely Race Course on the Crimson Hook Waterfront
By JOHN FLORIO and OUISIE SHAPIRO JULY 13, two thousand seventeen
Crimson Hook may look like a neighborhood out of time — a semi-industrial patch of cracked cobblestone streets, vacant lots, derelict piers and the largest public housing complicated in Brooklyn.
But this weekend, it will claim its cosmopolitan place alongside Monaco, Marrakesh and Paris, when as many as Eighteen,000 spectators are expected to descend on the neighborhood each day for a infrequent peek at professional auto racing in Fresh York City. The ePrix is hosted by Formula E and will resemble a Formula One race, except that electrical play will be powering the twenty cars speeding along the Crimson Hook waterfront.
The neighborhood does have some practice with this sort of event. The Crimson Hook Crit — an annual fixed-gear bicycle race that began in two thousand eight — now draws thousands of spectators. And several businesses located on the main commercial unclothe, Van Brunt Street, are already gearing up for the ePrix.
Pierre Alexandre, an proprietor of the year-old Dolce Brooklyn gelato shop, is boosting production, and his wifey, Kristina Frantz, also an holder as well as a gelato chef, has designed a special flavor for the event: Soul Fuel, which is made with Italian espresso beans, noir espresso chocolate chips and a drop of glycerin, a nod to the ingredient that fuels the generators powering Formula E cars. (Dolce’s glycerin is produced naturally from saltwater algae, so it’s sustainable, organic and edible.)
“I think we will have big lines,” Mr. Alexandre said recently. “Usually I have one or two people in the kitchen and two or three in the store, but for the race I will be tripling the number. We’re producing gelato every night now, and we have to find extra freezer space outside of the store.”
The outreach on the part of Formula E shows up to have been spotty. Some business owners voiced surprise that an international car race was coming to the neighborhood. Representatives of Community Board 6, including Eric McClure, a chairman of the transportation committee, said nobody from Formula E or the city reached out to them. Marcos Lainez, who represents the half-dozen Crimson Hook food truck vendors known for their presence at the local ball fields, said that he, too, had not been contacted.
Matt Lewis, an proprietor of Baked, a cafe on Van Brunt, said: “It would be awesome if there was a little more outreach. The Crit was indeed superb because they gathered all of the businesses that were on Van Brunt, and some that were off Van Brunt, too, and formed almost an interim community meeting to let people know what to expect. The Formula E, I think, attempted it, but because of timing or circumstance, they weren’t able to achieve it.”
By The Fresh York Times
Even so, the local community will most likely get a boost from the race.
“Everybody sells these big events as something that will bring a lot of money into the businesses,” Mr. Lewis said. “That’s not always the case. But no matter what, you always get some runoff. And if anything, you get some more name recognition for the neighborhood.”
Artisanal/industrial Crimson Hook might be a slightly odd fit for a corporate motor race, but Alejandro Agag, the founder and chief executive of Formula E, created the racing series to showcase the green future of the automotive industry.
“The technology of the future for cars is electrical,” he said by phone from his home in Madrid. “We created a championship that represents the vision of motor racing and also the vision of the cars that everyone is going to drive in Ten, twenty or thirty years.”
Since one of Mr. Agag’s goals is to promote how electrical cars can help solve environmental issues, the race series travels through some of the world’s most populous areas. This season, Formula E’s third, races have been held in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Marrakesh, Mexico City, Monaco and Paris. After Brooklyn, the series will conclude at the end of the month in Montreal.
Mr. Agag acknowledged that Fresh York officials approved the race only because the cars do not contribute to air or noise pollution. Formula E substitutes the roar of gas-powered Formula One cars with the whir of an electrified engine, which, even when racing at one hundred forty miles per hour, scarcely hits eighty decibels. For point of comparison, traditional Formula One cars hit one hundred twenty eight decibels, which exceeds the threshold for human agony.
“The cars make a indeed cool sound,” Mr. Agag said of the Formula E vehicles. “They make almost like a fighter-jet kind of sound. We like to call it the noise of the future.”
At a news conference in Crimson Hook last fall to announce the race, Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke to a gathering of news media representatives, as well as city and state officials. “New York City is where technology, sustainability and commerce collide,” he said. “We are thrilled to be the fresh home of the ePrix.”
As for Crimson Hook’s transformation, the challenge was to create a 1.21-mile course that winds around Pier 11, alongside the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. The idea was to minimize disruption to the pier and the terminal. Almost fifty cruise ships operate out of the terminal each year.
According to Mr. Agag, Formula E spent upward of $20 million converting the area. McLaren Engineering Group was charged with converting the site into a circuit. The effort required installing both improvised and permanent structures, including grandstands, fresh pavement, security walls, platforms and sidewalks. Bus canopies, sections of curb and pedestrian crosswalks had to be liquidated because they protruded into the course.
“The very first thing Formula E did was come up with the track layout,” said Steven Grogg, senior vice president of McLaren. The route was largely in place already. “There were some minor switches to the track to minimize the influence on the cruise ship facilities.”
An instantaneous problem was that the terminal guardhouse was in the middle of the circuit. The solution was to rebuild it onto a removable plank, so that it could be moved before and after the race. Similarly, the rigid substituted the parking lot’s gate arms with a prefabricated system that can be uprooted as needed.
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Because the technology for e-cars is still evolving, batteries last only halfway through a Formula E race. The solution is to have a midrace pit stop permitting drivers to grab cars with fresh batteries.
Mitch Evans, who drives for the Panasonic Jaguar team, visited Crimson Hook two weeks before the race and is well aware of e-technology’s challenges. “You’re attempting to go as quickly as you possibly can,” he said. “But you’re also attempting to save energy while keeping the other cars behind you. I’ll cut the throttle going down the straight and then coast into the corner, so the energy I get from the brake goes back into the battery.”
The ePrix is a doubleheader, with races on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets cost $31 to $85. As for getting spectators in and out of the neighborhood, race officials are counting on public buses, Citi Bikes and the city’s fresh ferry service, which stops in Crimson Hook and Brooklyn Bridge Park. Formula E is also providing private shuttle buses to and from Barclays Center in Downtown Brooklyn.
For the drivers, the ePrix in Crimson Hook is one of the highlights of the season. Speaking by phone from Monaco, Nelson Piquet Jr., the driver for the NextEV NIO team, said, “New York City is such an amazing place and nobody’s managed to make a race there.” Mr. Piquet is a Brazilian who grew up mostly in Europe but lived in the United States for five years. “The amount of requests from friends and people that I know in America that want to see this race is insane,” he said. “Everyone is interested and intrigued about how it’s going to be in Fresh York.”
Formula E intends to comeback to Crimson Hook every year. The organization has already signed a 10-year agreement with Fresh York City to do so, albeit it will need to renew its permit annually.
Mr. Lewis of Baked hopes that people will detect Crimson Hook as the racing series goes forward. For the inaugural ePrix event in Brooklyn, his shop is catering private viewing parties, one of which will take place at one hundred sixty Imlay, the Fresh York Dock Company building, which is in the process of a condominium conversion. “The party will be in one of the apartments that’s not finished yet, and it’s going to look out over the track,” he said. “It’s going to have amazing views. What else but Crimson Hook has the best views of the Statue of Liberty?”
An earlier version of this article misidentified the ePrix as the very first professional car race held in Fresh York City. It is not.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a representative of Community Board 6. It is Eric McClure, not McLure.
A version of this article shows up in print on July 16, 2017, on Page MB1 of the Fresh York edition with the headline: The Future of Racing Ass-plugs Into Crimson Hook. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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