Formula E

formula-e-wraps-its-10th-season-this-weekend—what’s-next-for-the-sport?

Formula E wraps its 10th season this weekend—what’s next for the sport?

Cars, Formula E / /

gen3 eco sounds good —

Team bosses and Formula E’s CEO tell us what has worked and where things go next.

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Antonio Felix da Costa, TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team, Porsche 99X Electric Gen3

Enlarge / Antonio Felix da Costa leads the way into turn one at Portland International Raceway.

Sam Bagnall/Formula E

PORTLAND, Ore.—Formula E wraps up its 10th series with a pair of races in London this weekend. It’s been a competitive manufacturer’s championship between Porsche and Jaguar. This weekend, seven drivers are still in contention to win the driver’s title after a double-header in Portland on June 29-30 that saw cars going five-wide down the main straight as they reached the highest top speeds of the season. It was the second visit by Formula E to the picturesque Portland International Raceway, and Ars spoke with some of the sport’s bigwigs to see what they think it’s getting right and where the technical evolution of the cars is headed.

Formula E has come a long way since 2014. Racing then exclusively in city centers, the cars were slow at first. And even as they developed, they carried too small a battery to complete even a relatively short race distance. There was a big upgrade in 2018 with the start of season five: The Gen2 car now has battery packs sufficient for 45 minutes-plus-a-lap races. The Gen2 car raced well, too, even putting on a better show at Monaco than Formula 1 has been able to muster for decades.

We expected another big improvement in lap times when the Gen3 car arrived at the start of last season. The Gen3 car featured much less weight and much more power, but also a change of tire supplier. Originally meant to last multiple race weekends, the rubber supplied by Hankook this season and last has much less grip than the Michelins it replaced. That’s kept cornering speeds relatively low and made the cars even harder to drive.

There are no bad drivers in Formula E, but the cars are hard to handle.

Enlarge / There are no bad drivers in Formula E, but the cars are hard to handle.

Sam Bagnall/Getty Images.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, as the series has always written the rules to make things hard on the drivers and teams. For example, while the battery packs are larger now, they still don’t actually have quite enough charge to complete a race distance without careful energy management. But while the race officials get data-rich telemetry streams from all the cars during a race, the teams have to rely on each driver keeping tabs on their own state of charge and reporting that back via radio to the engineers in the garage so the boffins can calculate the optimal strategy.

More technical changes are in store. In 2025 and 2026, the series will move to the Gen3 Evo car, which will have on-demand all-wheel drive and more grip from better tires, among other tweaks. Meanwhile, everyone in Formula E has been thinking hard about Gen4, which is due to arrive for season 13.

What has worked?

I asked Formula E CEO Jeff Dodds, as well as some of the team principals, to start off by blowing their own horns a bit—what’s Formula E been doing right? “We’ve just announced our Gen3 Evo car, which gets to 60 miles an hour in 1.8 seconds, and we’re still an infancy business, only 10 years old, still playing around with early tech. So I think over time, a massive strength of ours is how that technology allows performance of the car to improve,” Dodds said.

At Portland, we saw pack racing down the main straight.

Enlarge / At Portland, we saw pack racing down the main straight.

Simon Galloway/Formula E

McLaren team principal Ian James, who previously led Mercedes to a Formula E championship before it quit the sport, was proud of how far Formula E has come over the last decade. “Gen2 really saw a step forward in that respect and a professionalization of the whole series. I think with Gen3 we’re really starting to unlock the performance potential of electric motorsport. And we’re going to see that take another notch up in Gen3 Evo,” James said.

Existing as a relevant arena for electric vehicle R&D is Formula E’s big strength, according to Nissan team principal Tommaso Volpe. “Representing a big car manufacturer in the sport I think the main strength is how relevant it is for a big transformation that is happening in mobility… using electrification as a key technology,” Volpe said. This is something that the motorsports cannot claim. They have other strengths, but they can not claim to be that relevant, purely speaking from the R&D perspective,” Volpe said.

For a company like Nissan, the primary benefit is still getting its EV tech in front of eyeballs, something Formula E’s deal to stream races live over Roku has no doubt helped. But there are other benefits to participation. “You cannot use the same motor, but the efforts that we put in place when we develop a Formula E car, in maximizing the energy efficiency of the hardware—so the materials we use, the solutions, the design—is something that is absolutely relevant for the core business and you can transfer some of these ideas and experience,” Volpe said.

Formula E wraps its 10th season this weekend—what’s next for the sport? Read More »

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Paralyzed driver Robert Wickens tests Formula E car with hand controls

Cars, disability, Formula E, Robert Wickens / /

give him a rookie test! —

Robert Wickens was paralyzed from the waist down in a 2018 IndyCar crash.

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PORTLAND INTERNATIONAL RACEWAY, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - JUNE 28: Robert Wickens during the Portland ePrix I at Portland International Raceway on Friday June 28, 2024 in Portland, United States of America. (Photo by Simon Galloway / LAT Images)

Enlarge / Robert Wickens looks out from the cockpit of the Formula E GenBeta test car in Portland, Oregon.

Formula E

PORTLAND, Ore.—The timing of Robert Wickens’ life-altering crash at Pocono Raceway in 2018 could hardly have been more cruel. After landing a full-time seat in IndyCar, he was named rookie of the year at the Indy 500 in June, finally showing the world his talent in a single-seat race car. F1’s loss was IndyCar’s gain, and the prospect of championships seemed certain. But a bad wreck derailed all of that, leaving Wickens paralyzed from the waist down. This past weekend, he made his return to the cockpit of a single-seater, testing a Formula E car with hand controls at Portland International Raceway.

It wasn’t his first time in a racing car since 2018—for the last few years he’s been running in IMSA’s Michelin Pilot Challenge series, taking the 2023 TCR championship in a Hyundai Elantra N. But Formula E’s GenBeta car weighs almost 900 lbs less than Wickens’ Hyundai and boasts far more power and that immediate electric torque. More power than the Gen3 Formula E cars that lined up to race the following day, too—the 530 hp (395 kW) GenBeta machine is Formula E’s test bed and is able to deploy energy from its front electric motor (in addition to the rear motor) instead of just regenerating energy under braking.

I spoke with Wickens a few hours before his test and asked what he was expecting in terms of performance. “It’s an entirely different beast to an IndyCar,” he said. “So I know here in Portland that they actually had the exact same straight line speed as IndyCar [170 mph/275 km/h], obviously achieving in very different ways. The aerodynamic differences between the two and the whole philosophy of the series are entirely different. You’ll never really compare them, apples to apples, I don’t think, but, I’m really excited to give the Gen beta car a go,” Wickens said.

The GenBeta car is Formula E's rolling test bed.

Enlarge / The GenBeta car is Formula E’s rolling test bed.

Formula E

Unlike the steering wheel and accelerator and brake pedals most of us use, there’s no standard hand control setup, especially for a racing car. When Alex Zanardi competed in the 2019 Rolex 24, he used a wheel-mounted hand throttle to accelerate, but braked using a hand lever. That would be a challenge to fit into the tight confines of a single-seater cockpit, but that’s not the only reason Wickens and Formula E haven’t gone that route.

Hand controls

“When I was very early in my recovery, I had the luxury to talk to Alex several times. And he told me that if you need something easy, doing the brake lever off the steering wheel is the quickest solution to get into a car. But if you want to be as competitive as you can be, you have to have the brake on the steering wheel in some capacity,” Wickens said.

“It’s not like a sequential gearbox where you just downshift and then your two hands are on the steering wheel turning in—you’re trail-braking all the way to the apex. In Daytona, for example, you’re in the whole first section of the bus stop one handed—it’s like you can’t be 100 percent committed to the corner entry with one hand,” he explained.

I suggested that sounded like trying to race someone while holding a cellphone at the same time. “Pretty much yeah. But then unfortunately that cell phone is manipulating the balance of the car,” Wickens pointed out.

The advantage of a lever is the amount of force it allows the driver to send to the master cylinder. In his current setup in the TCR car, there’s a pneumatic actuator that helps apply sufficient brake pressure, “because I can only squeeze so much with my hands. And the difficulty with it is, there’s a small latency in achieving peak brake pressure. And that latency is not the same every time,” he said. While most of us would be rightfully terrified at having inconsistent brakes on track, Wickens adapted his driving style, something he says won’t transition to faster cars, though.

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Here’s how Jaguar will relaunch as an all-EV brand

Cars, Formula E, jaguar, Jaguar Land Rover / /
A rendering of three futuristic coupes

Enlarge / Its unlikely the next electric Jaguar will look much like these extreme coupés, designed by the brand for Gran Turismo.

Jaguar

MONACO—It may be hard to remember, but not too long ago, Jaguar made a very nice electric vehicle. The I-Pace arrived in 2018, and it was the only EV other than the bare-bones Chevy Bolt that could compete with a Tesla on range. It was great to drive, too. An electric replacement for the XJ sedan was meant to be next until it was canceled months before production was supposed to begin.

“I’d seen the car, it was a beautiful car, but when I look at the designs that we have now, when I look at the technology that we’ll bring in the vehicle, it’s night-and-day different,” said Rawdon Glover, managing director of Jaguar. “I think that previous car would have been sort of a segue into something else, where we’re doing a step change.”

And a step change is what Jaguar Land Rover CEO (and Glover’s boss) Thierry Bolloré wants for Jaguar: for it to move upmarket, the way Range Rover has. Tearing up the electric XJ was a bold step—it meant the only new electric Jaguars to debut from 2021 until 2025 would be the brand’s Formula E race cars.

Racing driver Nick Cassidy is one of the few people to drive a new Jaguar this year, as he and his teammate Mitch Evans race in Formula E for the OEM.

Enlarge / Racing driver Nick Cassidy is one of the few people to drive a new Jaguar this year, as he and his teammate Mitch Evans race in Formula E for the OEM.

Jaguar Racing via Getty Images

But 2025 is getting close. Later this year, production of the XF, E-Pace, and F-Pace will all end, as will the I-Pace. The F-Pace production line at Solihull in the British midlands will be revamped to build the first of three models built on an all-new EV platform, Jaguar Electric Architecture. That first model will be a four-door electric GT, a space that’s about to get very competitive as the established Porsche Taycan is also joined by alternatives from Lotus and Polestar.

Jaguar is not quite ready to start talking specifics of that JEA platform, although Glover told me to expect about 400 miles of “real-world range” (700-plus miles, according to the WLTP test cycle) and a battery pack that can fast-charge to 80 percent in 15 minutes. I’ll admit, I’m looking forward to finding out more—Jaguar’s history has often featured financial troubles, but it’s also been jam-packed with innovation.

Formula E is making future Jaguars better EVs

I met with Glover on the day the team’s cars took a 1–2 victory on the streets of Monaco. They put on a good show—unlike Formula 1, Formula E cars can actually race around this place—three wide at times, and overtaking happens (occasionally, memorably, into a corner where most people think you can’t overtake).

The ePrix can’t quite compare to the F1 Grand Prix in terms of glamour, but it’s not too far off; the harbor had a decent complement of yachts packed with important sponsors in need of some VIP treatment. As an event to visit as a spectator, you’ll see better racing and have to battle smaller crowds if you choose the ePrix, not to mention save some euros in the process.

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