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ELECTRIC SERIES ON THE ASCENDANT
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ith its dramatic, aggressive bodywork, lack of rear wing and huge diffuser, the Gen2 ABB FIA Formula E car is about to make quite an entrance.
The batmobile-inspired car is faster and more powerful than its predecessor – its maximum power is 250kw, with a standard race power output of 200kw, the previous maximum – and, crucially, each FE team will now field one car per driver. The range anxiety-inducing car swaps of the old Gen1 machines are gone. FE has come of age.
“The car looks absolutely amazing and I think the battery is a huge leap and is what we were looking for,” says FE boss Alejandro Agag. “It is a fulfilment of a four-year project, [which] now comes to fruition. We said we were going to do this but I didn’t know if we were going to be able to do it, and today we know that we are going to be able to deliver it. For us it is the accomplishment, it is more like mission accomplished.”
For its fifth season, which gets underway with the Ad Diriyah E-prix this weekend, the FE grid has grown to 11 teams. HWA has signed up to the enter the championship as a customer of Venturi. But the Mercedes-affiliate outfit that won the DTM eight times for the German marque will only have a short life as an FE act in its own right. Next year, Mercedes itself will take over the entry. HWA will still run the race squad in 2019/20, but the first Mercedes powertrain will be built by the manufacturer itself, with technical assistance from its Brackley-based Formula 1 team.
“We have to be realistic and need to be fair in managing expectations,” says HWA boss and FE team principal Ulrich Fritz. “The expectation is not that we are a winning team for this year – maybe we can have a few successes – but I think in general the main goal is to learn a lot and to stabilise the operations and then being able to compete and hopefully fight for the championship [as Mercedes] in season six.”
There are also two new manufacturers preparing to make their debuts in the upcoming campaign – BMW and Nissan. But both will be familiar to Formula E as BMW has been in a technical partnership with Andretti, which still owns and operates the entry, since season three, and Nissan replaces alliance partner Renault at the e.dams set-up.
These two teams had wildly contrasting fortunes in pre-season testing, which took place at Valencia in October. BMW topped all three days with Alexander Sims and Antonio Felix da Costa, and enters the new season as one of the favourites due to its headline pace and comparable performances on the limited long-runs that were conducted at Valencia.
“We honestly came [to testing] with no expectations,” says BMW team boss Roger Griffiths. “It was quite a pleasant surprise. We didn’t go out there to set a laptime [early on], we had a test programme – long runs, short-runs, stuff with different power levels. So, we did that and it wasn’t like we said ‘OK, we’re just going to for it’. I kept drilling into the drivers – ‘You have to leave some margin because we have no spares’. When we repeated it one-three [in the order] on the first afternoon I said, ‘OK, perhaps, this is real’.”
Nissan lost two days of running with one of its cars due the situation surrounding Alexander Albon erupting as the test got underway. Despite being in the paddock on the first morning in Valencia, the 2018 Formula 2 title contender never turned a wheel. It is understood that he had been approached by Red Bull about rejoining its fold and racing for the Toro Rosso F1 squad in ’19, with his lawyers telling him to hand in his resignation at Nissan. A contractual wrangle ensued, but Albon got his way to head to F1 and Oliver Rowland, who arrived in Valencia to take his place for the final day, will take the FE race seat instead. That meant Nissan completed 247 laps in testing – the fewest of any team.
But team principal Jean-paul Driot does not hold anything against Albon for wanting to follow his dream to F1, and he’s pleased to give Rowland – who raced for the team’s DAMS arm in F2 in 2017 – another chance in a major single-seater championship.
“I had Rowland in mind [originally] – it would either have been Albon or Rowland,” says Driot. “Because I don’t want an old guy – old for motor racing – and I wanted a young quick driver who is able to develop in the right direction with the right people.”
In total, there are seven new drivers preparing to make their FE bows. Former Ferrari, Williams and Sauber F1 racer Felipe Massa joins FE with Venturi, while ex-mclaren F1 driver Stoffel Vandoorne and 2018 DTM champion Gary Paffett will race for HWA. Maximilian Gunther joins Jay Penske’s Dragon Racing, with BMW factory driver Sims handed an FE slot alongside da Costa. Pascal Wehrlein will race for Mahindra Racing, but only once his Mercedes contract ends on December 31, which means Indycar-bound Felix Rosenqvist gets an FE swansong in Saudi Arabia.
Rowland has one race of FE experience (with Mahindra in Punta del Este in season two), but is really a category rookie, while Tom Dillmann (NIO) has made 10 previous starts, but has never completed a full season. Robin Frijns returns with Virgin Racing alongside Sam Bird after leaving Andretti at the end of season three due to his factory Audi links, with the British team now running power units from the German manufacturer, which had the best package on the grid in 2017/18 and won that season’s teams’ championship.
This new crop joins the experienced FE hands, including its first four champions – Nelson Piquet Jr (Jaguar Racing), Sebastien Buemi (Nissan), Lucas di Grassi (Audi) and Jean-eric Vergne (Techeetah) – in having to learn a completely new race format system.
Without car swaps, FE has introduced a new race format of 45-minutes plus one lap, and a system designed to add strategic variation called attack mode. This approach raises a driver’s power level from 200kw to 225kw once they have travelled through an off-line activation zone – designed to slow them down temporarily – to provide a Mariokart-inspired boost for eight minutes per race. This is likely to be split into different time allocations – for example, four lots of two minutes, two lots of four minutes or one eight-minute period – per race. The teams won’t know the precise configuration of the attack mode until one hour before each race.
“We don’t want the teams to do simulations,” says Agag, “So, it is going to be really difficult for the teams and the drivers to manage. That is what we want.”
The group qualifying system has also been overhauled. Drivers will still be grouped by championship position, but the top six will always
be the first to take to the track, with the remaining groups going out in descending standings order. In theory, this could mean a regularly shaken-up superpole session, but Buemi believes, in sporting terms, it is the switch to 45 minutes plus one lap races that could make the biggest difference this year.
“It is a very difficult one, because you need to constantly calculate where the leader will be according to the timing,” he explains. “If you calculate to finish and be at zero energy and let’s say the leader is crossing the line at 44 minutes and 58 seconds, you need to do an extra lap. And if you have no more energy, you are going to be stopped on the side.”
The new look show also heads to different locations in season five. As well as the season-opening race in Saudi Arabia, FE will race on new tracks in Sanya – on Hainan Island, off mainland China – and Bern, while Monaco returns and the Santiago event takes place in a new part of the city.
There’s a lot that’s different, but once crucial thing remains the same. The Gen2 cars are still very low downforce, despite the huge diffuser and lighter rubber that will degrade more than the previous tyre.
Exciting looking cars, new drivers hungry to prove themselves, racing on narrow, bumpy city tracks – FE’S latest adventure could be its most explosive yet.