Rebuilding a struggling Formula E team
An informal language barrier caused NIO 333 to drop to the foot of the Formula E standings. For the new owners, it’s time to face reality
“IT WAS PAINFUL, WE EXPECTED PROBLEMS. WE’RE TRYING TO TOTALLY REBUILD THE TEAM”
The fall from Formula E grace for NIO 333 has been severe. Entered into the inaugural 2014-15 season as China Racing, its leading light Nelson Piquet Jr clinched the drivers’ title, while the team – already rebranded as NEXTEV TCR – ended the campaign in fourth. Another three name changes later, and having finished bottom last season, NIO 333 again props up the table after five races of the interrupted 2019-20 campaign. Only it and Dragon Racing haven’t scored a podium since the start of the 2018-19 contest.
The main cause of this decline was a language barrier. Not in the literal sense between the Chinese ownership and the Brilliance In Excellence (BIE) race team, which runs out of three Donington Park workshops and an R&D facility at Begbroke Science Park, near Oxford. Rather, there was a disconnect between the business interests and the engineers.
When car maker NIO listed itself on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018, it needed a halo product to help the share price. That was the EP9 – an all-electric 1340bhp supercar that blitzed the production car lap record at the Nurburgring Nordschleife. It’s no doubt an impressive technical showcase, but the development was aided by the FE race team and so occupied some engineers.
While the squad continues to run under the NIO banner this term owing to a title sponsorship deal, in stepped Lisheng Racing – circuit owner and promoter of the Chinese Touring
Car Championship, and which bought the majority stake on the eve of the 2019-20 season.
In any sector, when a new owner comes in there are two routes. Employ new management who use terms like “blue sky thinking” and “synergies” and hope they offer some kind of magic bullet, or respect the talent they already have – the ones who have stuck by through thick and thin. You promote them internally, as they’re already dialled in and can start picking at the “low hanging fruit”. Lisheng Racing went for the latter.
Ex-benetton, Renault, Marussia and Williams Formula 1 head Christian Silk was promoted to team principal. Mike Henderson
moved from his role on Oliver Turvey’s car to become chief race engineer, and Roberto Costa – who has run ex-f1 drivers Rubens Barrichello, Giorgio Pantano and Pastor Maldonado among others– was boosted to team manager.
As Costa says: “If you’re working as a race engineer and you then start doing the team management, I think you have a much more cohesive view with the other colleagues. Between us all, we have a fairly good idea of what we need to do. We certainly work very harmoniously because we’re all seeing it from the same page. We know all the programmes that we’re doing, everything we were striving for. It’s one direction.”
NIO 333 took the red pill and decided to confront the reality of its ailing performance. Last summer, with just three months until the first pre-season test at Valencia, the bold call was made to switch suppliers to Integral Powertrain, which also provides much of the running gear for Dragon.
The knock-on effect was a need for all-new control systems; that meant a fresh data set to work from and, in turn, it rendered the team’s simulator largely redundant as a reference point. In the first instance, it put NIO 333 massively on the back foot.
But in the medium term, the belief is that it’s one step backwards for two or more steps forwards.
The team’s executive director Alex Hui recalls that it was “a critical decision to make with three months. It was painful, very challenging, and we expected problems. The plan we’re trying to put together is to totally rebuild the team.”
Even though the in-house powertrain for 2019-20 was already developed, Lisheng Racing wanted to address the lack of results and decided to change tack. While Dragon has by no means set the FE world alight, switching to components shared with their rival’s outgoing machine was one of few options that NIO 333 could implement in such a tight timeframe. What’s more, following homologation from the FIA, it retains manufacturer status.
“The Integral Powertrain option, which takes in various suppliers that we had worked with, was the one that fitted the bill in an immediacy point,” says Costa. “We could get access to it and we needed to be able to adapt the carbon structure to fit the rear suspension and driveshaft. In a matter of a few weeks, we turned that around. People couldn’t quite believe we were going to do it, but we presented ourselves for the test in Valencia with another powertrain option. That was a huge challenge.”
The team did consider the “perfectly valid route” of using a customer powertrain but, in the same vein as the team’s publicly stated ambition to always run a Chinese driver, it’s proud of its nationality and wanted to remain a bona fide constructor.
Costa continues: “In the long term, we really want to continue as a manufacturer, and we want to make a statement as a
Chinese team. I know there are other Chinese groups involved in Formula E [such as the Envision Group, which is the majority owner of Virgin Racing], but they are participants within a project rather than leading the project.”
But before NIO 333 can go trophy hunting, the team has had to focus on the reliability of the car. Turvey’s qualifying effort in Santiago, good enough to progress to the superpole shootout, is quite possibly the lap of the season so far. A points finish was squandered, however, by a technical problem that meant he slid in the race from fifth to 11th.
“PEOPLE COULDN’T QUITE BELIEVE WE WERE GOING TO DO IT. THAT WAS A HUGE CHALLENGE”
Silk continues: “We are focusing now more on performance. The first thing is that the car’s got to be reliable and legal. Our focus started off here. As far as performance on these cars is concerned, unlike Formula 1, which is totally dominated by aero, this formula is much more about efficiency. We’re trying to maximise the electrical energy to make the car as fast as possible.”
The current coronavirus-enforced pause on the motorsport season has enabled NIO 333 to perform a deep dive and sift through all of its data to identify where that performance can be found. “There’s always plenty of areas where you can improve,” Silk adds. “But you can’t attack everything at the same time. We just worked through the job list as normal, we set our priorities, analysed the data, we see what areas of development we think will best advance the performance of the car, and we tick those off.”
If that all comes to pass, NIO 333 can head into the 2020-21 campaign with more solid foundations. FE and the FIA have introduced new homologation regulations to cut costs while the season is on hold until the end of June. Teams can either continue with their current powertrain for another year, or they can introduce an all-new set-up for the 2020-21 term and retain it for two seasons. Now that NIO 333 has put in the legwork to understand the baseline of its new Integral Powertrain set-up, it’s a safe bet that the squad will go for the second option and bring a heavily developed iteration to run for back-to-back campaigns.
Hui adds: “I think we will have a very competitive powertrain in season seven [2020-21]. We will use season six for our development year for the control systems, we are adding resources in that area for the wisdom. We are a good race team so I think there’s no reason why we can’t be a regular finisher in the points – although finishing in the points is not an easy task when all 24 cars are very close.”
Despite the importance of retaining manufacturer status, NIO is not a big OEM. Unlike Mercedes, it does not have the board of Daimler breathing down its neck, but that’s no reason to question the team’s motivation. “No one’s in racing to come last,” Silk says. “We want to move consistently forward up the grid. That’s got to be our first target. [As team principal] I’m looking to build the team as best as possible over the next year or two. I’ve been really fortunate in my career to work for some of the great teams. I put NIO up there, and the engineers I’m working with are one of the great teams.”
With the talent already in place and the roadmap now more clearly defined, NIO 333 can begin to push up. The team isn’t setting unrealistic targets in a championship that doesn’t normally permit one team to dominate. But the foundations to take that next step are now far more stable than they have been over recent times.
The more pragmatic Lisheng Racing owners identified that taking evolutionary steps with the powertrain was not going to yield substantial or fast enough progress. That’s inspired the ground-up rethink. Now that the race team can get on solely with the business of being fast in FE, it means the engineers can begin to show their true talent and shake off the shackles of former management.