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According to foreign media reports, in order to alleviate the financial pressure, Lvlai Motor has sold the FE Electric Formula one team. Lisheng Racing, a well-known Chinese racing group, is the new owner of FE, but is no longer the owner of the team, but supports its race by investing or sponsoring it.

As the company invests heavily in Formula one but has little income, it hopes to focus more on the development of electric vehicles in the next few years after the introduction of new investors.

Shanghai-based Lisheng Racing is a key investor in the FE team, which operates racing, is the owner and organizational promoter of the CTCC China RV Championship, owns the copyright of TCR China, and operates the China go-kart Championship.

Lisheng racing executives visited the team's technical bases in Donington and Oxford on Friday and are expected to inform employees of more details of the plan this week.

After the sale, Xilai is no longer the owner of the fleet, although the name of the team may still include the brand of the Chinese electric car manufacturer, but it appears more as an investor or sponsor, and the operation and technical management of the fleet entity will be carried out by QEV Technologies of Spain.

In September 2014, NIO officially launched the FE race under the name of "NEXTEV". However, NIO is just a newly born brand, and consumers do not know much about it. In the 2015 season, NEXTEV won FE's first annual championship, which attracted a lot of attention and became famous overnight.

After that, NEXTEV changed its name to NIO, and then released the pure electric supercar EP9, which began to focus on the research and development and manufacture of mass production cars, and successively launched pure electric SUV models such as ES8 and ES6. It can be said that FE brake driving has become the beginning of domestic car building new power head enterprises, but also established a high-end brand image.

The sale of the FE fleet is also due to the shortage of funds, declining sales and continued losses, which makes the demand for funds extremely hungry. According to the financial results released by Xilai Automobile, the net loss in 2018 is as much as 23.3 billion yuan.

In the first quarter of 2019, the total revenue of Xilai Motor was about 1.631 billion yuan, down 52.5 percent from the previous month; the net loss was about 2.624 billion yuan, a decrease of 25.1 percent from the previous quarter, an increase of 71.4 percent over the same period in 2018. Xilai expects total revenue of 1.134 billion yuan ($169 million) to 1.294 billion yuan ($193 million) in the second quarter of this year, down about 30.5% to 20.7% from the first quarter.

A total of 3989 new cars were delivered in the first quarter of this year, down 50% from the previous quarter; 3553 were delivered in the second quarter, down 11% from the same period last year, and a total of 7542 vehicles were delivered in the first half of the year. In the second quarter, NIO expects to deliver a total of 2800 to 3200 units of ES8 and ES6, compared with 29.8% and 19.8% in the same quarter.

Recently, the end of the transition period of new energy vehicle subsidies, coupled with the ES8 spontaneous combustion recall, has a certain negative impact on sales and funds. At a time when there is a shortage of funds, I am afraid it is helpless to sell the NEXTEV team at this time.

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