In the paddock: Scott Mitchell

If you said hello to battery competition in Formula E, then you’d be waving goodbye to its future, says our electric-racing guru

AN ELECTRIC-RACING SERIES NOT GETTING manufacturers to build their own batteries? That sounds a bit fishy. Especially for a championship that prides itself on being a development hub for electric vehicles. No surprise, then, that news of Formula E pushing back battery competition into the middle of the next decade – at the earliest – has been met with scorn and derision from some.

But what may appear as a stagnation that calls into question the premise of FE as a technological hotbed is really the series avoiding the blind pursuit of a technology path that could lead it to oblivion. The manufacturers are unified in not being fussed about building their own batteries, but it’s valid to ask why, given the importance of battery technology.

If FE went ahead with allowing manufacturers to build their own batteries, it could quickly turn a €20-30-million-per-season formula into something far more expensive as exposure and financial recompense expand at a slower rate. The risk of creating unsustainable development programmes would be high.

It could also annihilate one of FE’S strongest fundamentals: close racing. In Hong Kong’s Sunday qualifying session at the start of this month, 16 drivers (from nine teams) were covered by less than 0.9 seconds, albeit around a relatively short lap of just over a minute. Compare that to the second part of qualifying for F1’s Monaco Grand Prix, for which everyone bolted on the softest-compound tyres and turned up performance, and the same gap only covered the top five. You can see why FE wants to hang onto its current competitive balance.

Also, what’s relevant to FE has shifted as the series grows and the technology evolves. Introducing all-wheel drive or torque vectoring, and allowing teams to harvest energy from the front axle, are all key discussion points at the moment and represent a much more sensible short-term move in terms of expanding FE’S technological experimentation. And the most obvious example of FE avoiding development of what’s irrelevant is its refusal to open up chassis and aerodynamics.

Battery technology is not at the same level, but its relevance is still dictated by what manufacturers need to learn. Jaguar Land Rover, for example, employs suppliers to conduct the chemistry involved in creating battery-cell technology, and JLR is responsible for packaging and integration. It’s not a chemist.

There is value in seeking a middle ground between a singlespec battery and manufacturer-built units, though. FE has not eradicated the expectation for it to go beyond a single supplier at some point. An interim phase could be to open up the number of battery suppliers to two or three, but this again comes with cost implications. Teams make a financial contribution to the development of the spec battery and as soon as you move beyond a common battery and split more than one supplier across the teams, you have fewer squads paying into the pot. Plus, the development cost wouldn’t remain the same, let alone reduce, because the rivalry would ramp up the pressure to make competitive gains to reduce the weight of the components, increase power density, improve thermal efficiency, and so on.

FE could decide that cost implications are a necessary evil. Then the focus would shift to how to control that. A maximum price on the battery and only two or three suppliers could be a compromise, as battery manufacturers may be dissuaded from investing tens of millions in the technology if teams are only paying a few hundred thousand a year to use them. If the price per annum moved into seven figures then that could change the battery supplier’s view, but team budgets would balloon. Other interim measures could be a spec cell that manufacturers build a battery around, or making an additional, smaller battery at the front – to facilitate new technologies – an area open for development. In the meantime, a battery standard among teams needn’t be standard in terms of technology. There is a tender to supply the battery and this is a competitive process – Mclaren Applied Technologies won the most recent. So, there’s a race to produce the best cells, but once those cells are chosen it’s the same for each team – costs are kept down, and competition preserved.

It also still provides valid lessons around understanding how a spec battery operates and how to get the best out of it. The physical hardware may not be directly transferable to the manufacturer’s road cars, but the knowledge is. This also extends to writing the software, which is completely open in FE and massively important to both race and road-car performance.

Working out the next move is crucial to Formula E, and any commitment to pushing technological boundaries will need to be matched with more eyeballs on TV, bums on seats in the grandstands and money in the teams’ coffers. This delicate balancing act is an unavoidable consequence of its magnetic pull to almost every major car manufacturer in the world.

Other series could learn a lot from FE as it bids to prevent a collapse under the weight of its own success.

“The hardware may not be transferable to road cars, but knowledge is”