Challenges Ahead for Formula E's Gen3 Reboot Attempt
(picture: Mahindra Racing)
The first time members of the public got the chance to see the Gen3 Formula E car, it was at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in June. Nick Heidfeld revisited the hillclimb course where he had set the fastest time back in 2000 in a Formula One McLaren, and drove the Mahindra-powered test car up the hill. The reaction since has been a microcosm of the discussion over Formula E’s future.
The first problem, arguably, was the choice of venue. The sort of spectator who goes to Goodwood is likely to be older, and potentially conservative in outlook and politics. They’re, on the whole, the kind of crowd that makes it an away match for any EV manufacturer showing off its new model on the hill. While it’s unfair to tar all Goodwood spectators as “boomers”, it’s also reasonable to ascertain from the YouTube comments under the video of Heidfeld’s run that not all wanted the Gen3 car to be a success.
Arguably if Formula E had not had a presence at Goodwood, it would have been an own-goal, but maybe the past eight years has shown us that there are greater marketing gains to be made among people who do not currently take an interest in motorsport, rather than petrolheads. Maybe tech conventions, such as Web Summit and CES, are better places to espouse the Gen3’s potential.
The other problem was that, on the weekend Heidfeld set a respectable time up Lord March’s garden path, former F1 driver Max Chilton had clung on for dear life in the utterly ridiculous McMurtry Speirling. Next to an electric car that sucked itself to the ground and obliterated Heidfeld’s record, it was a hard sell to tell anyone that the Formula E car was the future of motorsport. In terms of “new next best thing”, it felt like if Buddy Holly had lived long enough to open for Jimi Hendrix. There’s still time for Formula E to show the wider audience how exciting the Gen3 is, but this public debut, straight out of the box with almost no testing, was inauspicious.
The Gen3 car is the vehicle, both literally and metaphorically, which Formula E is placing all its future hopes on. The Gen2 car was angular, but its successor takes the wedge styling to new places, and because it is both more rakish and smaller, it has been the recipient of extreme reactions. To be fair to the new car, so did the Gen2, though at that time there was an acceptance that Formula E had to do something different to create clear blue water between it and other formulae. This time, there has been a clear disparity between expectation and reality for many long-time Formula E followers.
(copyright FIA Formula E)
The design brief will have been demanding. The creative agency Stellantis Design Studio, which is owned by the automotive giant, have had an input into the design, which needed to, again, differentiate Formula E from other series with its styling, while also allowing for close racing. There are elements in the Gen3 car which lightly evoke the Peugeot 9X8 Le Mans Hypercar, such as the sharply-pointed airbox and the angled front-wing endplates, which are reminiscent of the Hypercar’s lights, though those are angled the opposite way.
(copyright FIA Formula E)
One of the reasons the car looks so strange in comparison to others is the packaging challenge it represents. With a new, fast-charging, battery from Williams Advanced Engineering in the car, the aim was to accommodate that while also giving the car a smaller overall footprint than its predecessor. The result is a car which, certainly in plain-coloured liveries, looks bulbous and ungainly around the middle and rear of the car, while also not looking intimidating like the Gen2 did when it first came along, appearing to the eye to be closer to a Formula 3 or old Formula Vee car.
The positive spin on that is that the Gen3, if it brings racing of the kind we have seen more often than not with the Gen2, while also being significantly more powerful and faster, might provoke favourable comparisons with the direction in which Formula One has gone with its 2022 rules. F1 talks a good game about being environmentally conscious and eventually running sustainable fuels, but the cars are as long and wide as SUVs, and as Sebastian Vettel said after running the Williams FW14B at Silverstone, the modern F1 car is much heavier, and feels it too. Formula E cars are heavy because of what they need to carry, but in some ways the Gen3 is a miracle of packaging.
(Daniel Crossman Design, Twitter)
The result may eventually grow on spectators, and if it does, the way teams choose to display their sponsors and corporate colours will go a long way towards that. Early concept liveries of what a McLaren Formula E car could look like, which were followed by a real iteration from the team which was equally striking, showed how use of exposed grey carbon can create the illusion of a narrower silhouette, hiding the central triangle that some had compared to a paper aeroplane.
McLaren is entering Formula E officially as a customer team in spite of using staff from the outgoing Mercedes team, but manufacturers such as NIO 333 have headed out on track in various testing liveries which demonstrate that much is possible on the Gen3’s canvas.
The eventual McLaren livery (picture: McLaren Racing)
Lucas di Grassi has been practically alone among current Formula E drivers in offering serious scrutiny of the Gen3 car. Ask the majority of the grid, and you get shrugs, grunts about “focusing on this season”, and an unwillingness to be put in print criticising the championship in which they compete. Di Grassi has stressed that he feels the Gen3 is not enough of a step forward from the Gen2 car, and that it doesn't offer enough technological innovations. The lack of four-wheel-drive is one of the things di Grassi references.
“What’s the rationale when you look at the racing car?” di Grassi said, in an interview with The Race. “It’s to look at what is the optimal way to go and then you take [it] back from there. Essentially you want to be optimising the tyre contact patch with the ground at any given time. So, you’re generating positive force, longitudinal negative force braking, acceleration, braking, steering, and kinematics.” He continued, “you could have a car that has zero camber at braking, and wheels change the camber corner-by-corner. This is the holy grail of racing.”
(picture: Nio 333 Racing)
It’s true that, in the battle for column inches, it has proved difficult to excite people about 250kw regen being possible through the front axle, even though that is a significant breakthrough. It’s just something that is harder to explain than “it’s four-wheel-drive”. However, the Gen3 car, even in its compromise spec as we know it now, boasts 350kw at full power from the rear wheels, with that maximum to 250kw of regen available from the front axle. That, theoretically, is more than enough to project a much-improved feeling of speed on race broadcasts, even if Heidfeld’s initial run was not able to show that.
This is the issue that Formula E faces going into its ninth season: not the expectation, but the relative lack of it. This motorsport category that once prided itself on doing things in a quirky way now has a quirky-looking car as its standard-bearer. To keep up with sportscar racing’s latest reboot, along with a Formula One which has finally worked out how to market itself to new audiences, Formula E will need to unite with its teams and drivers to create something that looks powerful and super-quick, even through the deadening filter of a television set.