From hi-tech to road-tech: how Jaguar found their calling in Formula E
There’s a big reason why the world’s leading car manufacturers are buying into Formula E to bring the benefits to their every day customers
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Your support makes all the difference.The tension in the pit lane of Jaguar Racing is palpable. Engineers wipe the gathering sweat from their headphones as the sun beats down onto the Uruguayan asphalt. All of them are fixated on a gaggle of screens showing a futuristic-looking car weave through a tight chicane.
Young buck Mitch Evans, a 23-year-old New Zealander and considered one of the hottest young drivers in motor sport, is ripping through qualifying and looking for his first pole of the Formula E season.
An incredible qualifying session and the subsequent Super Pole sees Evans among the leaders but as his car is weighed on his return, Jaguar are moved back to 16th on the grid because the weight distribution of his car was 300 grams outside the permitted amount. A hammer blow, but one from which Evans would eventually recover to finish fourth.
“What could have been,” he says post-race.
That race in Punta del Este, Uruguay, with its bobbing up and down the grid, gives a good insight into the emotional rollercoaster of motor racing whether the engines are electric, as in Formula E, or still powered by fossil fuels as in Formula One.
But for the teams involved in Formula E it is becoming less of a secret that participating in this championship is not just about pole positions and podiums, but also about realigning their core road vehicle business and developing the latest technology faster.
Think of it like the space race, but how much faster each country could have progressed if they had been handed the skeleton of a space ship and were told to just develop the technology for inside. The difference here is that only a small percentage of Nasa technology has ever made its way back to everyday consumers whereas the focus for the manufacturers involved in Formula E is to improve high-performance electric car technology and then use that to build better cars for the M25 or taking the kids to school.
“As a team we have a philosophy - race to innovate,” Jaguar Racing’s team principal James Barclay tells The Independent.
“That stands for a number of things, but one of the key things is the transfer of technology from racetrack to road and then back to racing as well.
“We’re quite early in the development of this technology and while the hardware might not be exactly the same as what you drive on the road, what we’re working with are components, so for example you’re trying to go as fast as you can for as long as you can with the battery. That’s really relevant learning to apply to a road car.”
For years it was F1 engineering that brought about innovation that would transfer to the cars we bought on the roads, but with cities setting emissions targets and the rise of electric vehicles there is now a new engineering battlefront.
Indeed, Oslo will permanently ban all cars from its city centre by 2019. Madrid plans to ban cars from 500 acres of its centre. In Paris there is already a ban on old cars - those manufactured before 1997 - from entering the city on weekdays in a bid to avoid pollution. The mayor has also said they will make certain streets only accessible to electric cars by 2020.
Which is why the advancements in electric car technology are so important - and, potentially, lucrative.
It is why Nissan, BMW, Porsche and Mercedes are set to join existing manufacturers that include the likes of Audi and Jaguar Land Rover in plugging themselves into Formula E, while McLaren are designing the battery that will be used in each car next season.
“For the first time in the history of racing there are more manufacturers together than have ever been in the other form of the sport - in F1 or any sports car racing - and that is significant, to have this many brands working on electric cars,” adds Barclay.
With electric car technology an essential and growing part of every automotive manufacturer’s future, the championship has moved to assist the development of the stuff that matters and so the build of each car - wing shapes and the like - is identical across the grid with teams focusing on the electric racing technology instead.
The batteries used within the sport already race faster and last twice as long as those in the first season, four years ago, and those advances will be in consumer showrooms across the world within a decade.
“The reality is the technical side of it is very different,” says Barclay.
“We develop our own e-motors, our own invertors, our own gearboxes and our own suspensions, all our control systems… and the reason Formula E do that is because we want to focus on the technologies for cars that are going to drive on the road.
There isn’t a supercar that accelerates as fast as an electric car and that’s the reality
“We could go and spend tens of millions on aerodynamics, tweaking angles, but it doesn’t improve the racing, the show, or create new technologies. We could spend £200m a year on that but it wouldn't improve the product people watch. So we’ve focused on innovations that are going to drive the development of electric cars forward.
“Jaguar were the first car company to develop a disc brake, we raced it on a C-type Jaguar in Le Mans in 1953 and that is in every road car you drive now.
“We proved that it worked on the race track and then applied it to our road cars as did the rest of the industry. But that sort of innovation doesn’t come along very often.
“Formula E is a good example of that exact thing, and that’s why we’re involved. Our ethos has always been about developing the best cars on the track and then applying that to our road cars. Formula E is perfect for that.
“The reality is that we’re going to go through a transition period from a mobility point of view where we try to get away from combustion fuels and the cool thing about this championship is that it showcases that these cars are going to be phenomenal to drive and sometimes even better - there isn’t a supercar that accelerates as fast as an electric car and that’s the reality.
“That technology is coming to road cars.”
This weekend in Rome, another E-Prix will have its fair share of thrills and spills, of disappointed drivers and those soaked in champagne.
But beyond the track there is a bigger race on, one being played out in workshops and laboratories that will ultimately affect us all.
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