London E-Prix: The Barrier Wasn’t the Building

Level of Challenge

★★★★★

Moderate challenge

I went to the ExCeL expecting to fall in love with Formula E and spent most of Saturday wondering what everyone else could see that I could not.

That is an awkward thing to write. I am a motorsport person. I have spent a lifetime around cars and racing, and here was a championship built on sustainability, running some of the most technologically interesting machinery in the world, with a grid stacked with drivers who have raced in Formula One and at Le Mans and everywhere in between. On paper it was made for me. I had press accreditation, which meant the paddock and the pit lane were open to me, and I stood a few feet from cars that most people only ever see on a screen.

By Saturday evening I was on the train home wondering whether it was worth going back.

I did go back. Sunday was one of the best days I have had at any event this year. What changed between the two days is the whole point of this piece, and it has almost nothing to do with ramps, lifts or toilets.

Friday, When the Place Was Empty

Friday was free practice, and Friday was easy. The ExCeL was quiet, the concourse was clear, and my accreditation got me everywhere without a single query. I could walk at my own pace, stop when I needed to, and take in a venue I did not yet know.

If you have any choice in the matter and your ticket allows it, an early, quiet day at a big event is worth more than any amount of pre-reading. You learn the building while there is nobody in it.

Joshua was on security at the pit lane entrance. He had time to talk, so we did, about Go Anyway and about what his job actually involves across a race weekend. He then walked me to a spot where I would get a decent photograph of the cars coming into the pit lane. Nobody asked him to do that.

Saturday, and Nowhere to Watch From

Saturday was a different building. Crowds, movement, competing light sources, and the general business of a sell-out weekend finding its seats. My usable vision drops sharply in that environment, and it dropped.

Then I hit a problem I had not anticipated at all. Qualifying was about to start and I had nowhere to watch it from. I did not have a grandstand ticket. I assumed, as I have at other events, that I could use one of the accessible viewing platforms.

I could not, and here is the thing worth knowing before you book.

At the London E-Prix, the accessible viewing platforms are a paid seating category. They are ticketed in the same way a grandstand seat is ticketed. You select the accessible platform when you buy, and a companion ticket comes free of charge alongside it on a one-to-one basis. What you cannot do is arrive with a legitimate need and expect to be accommodated on the day. This is different from several events I have covered, where an accessible viewing area functions as a facility rather than a product, and it caught me out completely.

To be clear, that is my error and not the organiser’s. The information is published. I simply did not read it as carefully as I should have, because I had assumed a pattern that did not apply here.

I watched qualifying in the media centre instead, on big screens with a proper sound system, in a room full of people reacting in real time. It was, unexpectedly, rather good. There is something about watching a session with a crowd, even a professional one, that a solo screen at home cannot replicate.

The Noise, or the Lack of It

I had braced myself for disappointment on sound, and I was both right and wrong.

The Gen3 Evo cars run at somewhere around 80 decibels. A Formula One car is well over 120. That difference is not incremental, it is a different category of experience. There is no roar. There is no chest-thump on the pit straight. If you follow motorsport primarily by ear, as I largely do, that removes a great deal of information.

What I did not expect is how much is still there. Up close they are far louder and more physical than the television broadcast suggests, with a rising, layered whine under acceleration and a very distinct noise off the throttle as the car harvests energy back into the battery. It is not a poor substitute for an engine. It is a different sound doing a different job.

The circuit does something to it, too, and this is unique to London. The ExCeL layout runs partly inside the exhibition hall on a smooth, high-grip surface, then out through a strip of slippery metal onto the abrasive asphalt around the outside of the building, before climbing back up into the hall to complete the lap. Twice a lap the acoustics change completely. Reverberant indoors, flat and open outdoors, then back again. Once I understood what I was listening for, I could hear the cars leave the building and hear them come back.

That understanding arrived on Sunday. On Saturday it was just noise I could not place.

Going Home Flat

Martina in the media centre worked hard to solve the seating problem once she understood it. She and a colleague made several phone calls, and eventually she arranged access to Grandstand 2 so that I could watch the first race properly and report on what a paying visitor actually experiences.

I watched the race from there and came away underwhelmed. I could not tell you who was leading without the screen. I did not know the drivers well enough to care about the order. The championship was on the line and I could feel that other people knew it mattered, in the way you can feel a room reacting to something you have missed.

I left on Saturday genuinely unsure whether Sunday was worth the journey.

Sunday, the Same Event and a Different Person

I spent Saturday evening watching the qualifying session and the race highlights back. Not for pleasure, particularly. I wanted to know who I was listening to.

By the time I arrived on Sunday I knew that Pascal Wehrlein had converted pole into a win and taken the championship lead. I knew Jake Dennis was five points behind him and that Mitch Evans needed a result Jaguar could not realistically deliver. I knew Jaguar and Porsche were still fighting over the teams’ championship. I knew this was the last time these cars would ever race, and the last time this championship would ever visit the ExCeL, because the Gen4 car cannot run here and London moves to Brands Hatch next May.

The same event became a completely different experience.

I watched qualifying from the grandstand this time and felt like part of it rather than adjacent to it. By the time the final race started I could not wait. The last hour of that afternoon was as good as live sport gets. Taylor Barnard, twenty-two years old, took his first ever Formula E win with a pass on the final corner. Wehrlein finished fourteenth, out of the points, and won the championship anyway. Dennis retired from the incident that decided it. Jaguar took the teams’ title. I was on my feet, shouting, gasping when the crowd gasped, reacting a half-second late but reacting.

Here is what I want to say plainly, because it complicates the story I usually tell. The barrier on Saturday was not the building. The ExCeL is one of the more accessible large venues I have worked in. The floor is flat, there are no bridges to cross and no lifts to hunt for, both stations are step-free, and staff are everywhere. Almost everything Go Anyway normally measures was in good order.

What excluded me on Saturday was that I did not know enough to follow what I was hearing, and I did not have a seat. Neither of those is an access failure in the conventional sense. Both of them stopped me participating just as effectively as a flight of stairs would have.

The Things That Made It Followable

Three features of this event did more for me than any accessibility policy on the website.

The giant screens with live commentary, everywhere. Not just at the grandstands. The commentary runs continuously across the site and it is genuinely descriptive. On several occasions the crowd around me gasped at something on the screen, and within two or three seconds the commentator had told me it was a collision and who was involved. That gap between the crowd reacting and me understanding is usually where I lose the thread at a live event. Here it was closed for me, constantly, by somebody whose actual job is to describe what is happening.

The lights. The circuit is lit with neon that faces the grandstands, there to make the track look spectacular for the crowd and for the cameras. When there is an incident, the whole lot flashes yellow. It is decorative lighting doing a safety job, and it is the best sensory alert I have come across at a sporting event. It is enormous, it is high contrast, and unlike the marshal panels down at track level it is pointed directly at the people in the seats. Every time it fired I knew to start listening.

The venue’s own quiet. More on that below.

None of these three appear in the accessibility information. All three mattered more than most of what does.

The Fan Village, and the Corridor Beside It

The Fan Village is loud, dark, full of flashing light and heavy on neon. It is aimed squarely at a young audience and leans hard into the futuristic, technological branding, which is a legitimate choice and clearly a successful one. It is also sensory overload by design. Navigating it was the hardest thing I did all weekend, harder than the pit lane, harder than the grandstands.

It also has no direct view of the track. You follow the racing on screens from there.

The saving grace, and it is a significant one, is that the ExCeL is a permanent exhibition centre. Step out of the Fan Village and you are in a wide, brightly lit, comparatively quiet concourse with seating and a full range of food and drink outlets that exist there all year round. The event brought its own catering in as well, so there is plenty of choice, and yes, there are queues, as there are at every large event on earth.

If the Fan Village is too much, you are ninety seconds from somewhere it is not. Very few outdoor events can offer that.

The People

Annie was on the Porsche stand, and she is the reason I will remember the commercial side of this weekend at all.

She showed me the new electric Cayenne, which she clearly could have talked about for a week. What struck me was not the pitch. It was that I walked past that stand several times over three days, at quiet moments and at chaotic ones, and I never once saw her doing anything other than talking to somebody properly. Not scanning the crowd for a better prospect. Not going through the motions at the end of a long day. She would pick up a conversation with me where we had left it hours earlier, and the enthusiasm was exactly the same every time.

That matters more than it sounds. Manufacturer stands at events like this are where a lot of disabled visitors quietly decide they are not the intended audience, because the person on the stand is looking past them at somebody who might actually buy the car. Annie did not do that once. She was interested in whoever was standing in front of her, and she was interested in the car, and she made both of those obvious. If Porsche are reading, she is doing your brand more good than the livery is.

Beyond her, this event employs a large number of people and I had a correspondingly wide range of interactions. A handful of staff were vague or under-briefed. Most were excellent. That balance is normal and I would not hold it against the organisers, but it does mean your day can turn on who you happen to ask.

Transport for London had staff at Custom House pointing people towards the right exit, which sounds minor and is not. The moment of highest anxiety in any unfamiliar journey is the one where you leave the station and have to guess.

Tom, one of the marshals, I met in a queue for coffee. He works everything from club races to Formula One at Silverstone. Motorsport does not happen without marshals, and standing there talking to one about his weekend made me feel like I belonged in the building.

And there was a member of Formula E staff whose name I never got, who saw me looking lost while I was trying to find a media grandstand, came over unprompted, admitted she did not know the answer, then pulled in a colleague and made several phone calls trying to find out. She did not solve it. It did not matter. At the point in the weekend when I was feeling least included, two people put real effort into a stranger’s problem, and it changed how the rest of the day went.

What I Would Do Differently

I would learn the sport before I went, not after the first day. That is the single biggest thing. An afternoon spent learning nineteen names and the shape of a championship would have transformed Saturday, and it would have cost me nothing.

I would book the seat, or the platform, at the same moment I booked anything else.

I would go on the Friday deliberately rather than incidentally, and use it to learn the venue.

I would not try to cross the Fan Village at peak time. I would go around it.

Final Reflection

Go Anyway exists on the argument that barriers should be removed and challenges should be prepared for and attempted. I have written that sentence a lot. This weekend was the first time an event made me notice how much work the second half of it is doing.

Formula E at the ExCeL had, by any reasonable measure, dealt with its barriers. Level access, step-free stations, staffed throughout, commentary everywhere, screens everywhere, and a genuinely quiet, well-lit refuge thirty seconds from the loudest space on site. If you scored it purely on provision it would do well.

And I still nearly walked away after day one, because provision is not the same as participation. What stood between me and this event was ignorance and a ticketing decision, and both were fixable in an evening.

The attempt is the unit of value here, and the honest version of the attempt is that it half failed on Saturday and I went back anyway. What I got for that was Taylor Barnard on the final corner, a championship decided by a collision, and a room full of strangers making a noise I will remember for a long time. I will be watching every race of the Gen4 era. I am already looking at Brands Hatch next May.

Reader Challenge and Invitation

Have you ever had a first day somewhere that nearly stopped you going back for the second? I would like to hear what made you return, and what you found when you did. Whatever your challenge is, go anyway.

All accessibility details in this article were verified against the organiser’s published information at the time of writing. This reflection is based on my personal experience on the day.