Edoardo Mortara: the Hopes and Fears of a Racing Driver
Edoardo Mortara (Photo under licence and © FIA Formula E)
In Formula E, there are different kinds of driver. There are, increasingly these days, the very young drivers with something to prove, such as Nyck de Vries, there are the tough, wizened veterans, who know both how to win battles on the track and also in the interview room, people like Sam Bird and Andre Lotterer, but there are others, too, who don’t easily fit into a box. Edoardo Mortara might not be the kind of brash, rentaquote driver who necessarily enjoys getting headlines, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a punchy competitor when driving. It’s just that he backs it up with soft-spoken sensitivity when not behind the wheel.
Mortara’s Venturi in Valencia testing, October 2019. (Photo under licence and © FIA Formula E)
Venturi Racing has, in truth, never been a title-favourite Formula E team - indeed, last season, Mortara’s victory in Hong Kong, claimed after Sam Bird was penalised for his incident with Andre Lotterer, was the team’s first win, making them the last of the original Season One organisations to win a race. This time around, though, the small Monaco-based company, maker of niche electric vehicles such as the Fetish, has potentially found a way of closing the gap with the highly-resourced multinational manufacturers; it’s partnered with Mercedes.
Mortara was keen to play down any suggestion that his having tested the Mercedes powertrain last season was an advantage. Indeed, when it was brought up that he’d run the Mercedes at an in-season test with Stoffel Vandoorne, he first said “did I?”, smiling.
“For me, personally, I don’t think it was such a big advantage. Of course it’s always good when you’re in the car, testing, but it’s not a huge thing. Based on the drivers that were using the Mercedes powertrain, I guess I was the one with the most experience of the championship, so I guess it was useful for me to give my comments for the development of the powertrain.” In spite of his modesty, Mortara’s having helped develop, at an early stage, the powertrain his team is now using is undoubtedly of benefit to everyone involved.
Master of Macau
It is not only Formula E in which Mortara has raced with distinction - he is also the most successful active driver on the Macau Guia Circuit. Mortara’s FIA GT World Cup race in Macau on Sunday was a disappointment for the Swiss. Between 2008 and 2013, he was a winner of at least one race each season, with most official records pointing to a total of ten victories across multiple car configurations, having first gone there for the blue-riband Formula 3 race.
Mortara contested the statistic of ten wins. “They said ten times, but I don’t… It’s weird. I know I’ve won seven times, like, the main race, and if you count other stuff, probably more than ten times, so I don’t know where ten is coming from!”
“It’s a special race track, personally, for me. I like going there. It’s always a pleasure to drive around that race track.” He had reservations, though. “Saying this, I’m not saying I’m getting older… there have been a few accidents, like, in the past where you think, as a driver, getting older, you think, I’ve proved that I can do well there, ‘why should I risk it this year?’ So it’s been a more and more difficult choice to go there, year after year. I don’t know if this will be my last year or if I’ll do some more, but this decision is getting more and more difficult.”
“Getting older, you think, I’ve proved that I can do well there, ‘why should I risk it this year?’ So it’s been a more and more difficult choice to go there, year after year. I don’t know if this will be my last year or if I’ll do some more, but this decision is getting more and more difficult.”
The horrific accident Sophia Floersch suffered in 2018 clearly weighed heavily on Mortara’s mind, as it had on the rest of the racing community. The young German Formula Three driver had the fortitude to return to Macau at the weekend, but such incidents serve to highlight the risks taken by racing drivers whenever they go out on track, especially on a street circuit with necessarily limited safety provisions if a driver loses control, such are the tight confines of the island’s roads.
Did these serious accidents suffered by other drivers serve to highlight the risks Mortara, 32 at the time of writing, signs up for due to his job? “Yeah… sort of. You’re not thinking about the risk when you’re driving. If you’re thinking about the risk when you’re driving, you should stop. But before going into the race weekend you should still think about these things.”
“I mean, in the end, I’m responsible also for the life of my wife and kids. That’s also making you see life differently, it’s not all about you any more. The second thing is,” Mortara added, referring to the package he had been given in previous years when driving in the GT Cup at Macau, “you want to go there and have the chance to compete at a certain level, and the last [few] years, it wasn’t really like that, and it annoyed me a little bit,” he said, prior to the 2019 Macau race, adding he was sure he had an improved chance of success in 2019. Mortara finished sixth in the GT Cup race, after a qualifying clash with his former Venturi Formula E team-mate Maro Engel.
Venturi: Promise and problems in Season 5
If you drew a graph showing Venturi’s points-scoring in Formula E Season 5, it would look quite hump-shaped. After some initial struggles with the box-fresh Gen2 car, Mortara showed speed and promise as his team-mate, the Brazilian former Formula One driver Felipe Massa, struggled. Fourth in Santiago for Mortara was followed by third in a thrilling Mexico City E-Prix, just behind Lucas di Grassi and the unfortunate Pascal Wehrlein, as Massa consolidated a strong qualifying session with eighth.
There were some difficult weekends for Mortara in Season 5 (photo: under licence and © FIA Formula E)
Hong Kong and the first win was the peak of Mortara’s season, as he failed to score a point thereafter, with six retirements leaving team and driver with food for thought as to where improvements could be found in the new season. Massa continued to show increasing confidence, particularly in a third-place finish next to his apartment in Monaco, which is also Venturi’s base.
If there is a concern held by some for Venturi, going into Season 6, it is that they may not be able to compete adequately with global OEMs such as Audi, BMW, Nissan, and Porsche, when Venturi is far closer to the business model of the sorts of companies entering Formula E when it began.
Team Principal Susie Wolff, speaking during the 2019 Berlin E-Prix event, disagreed. “I’m in no doubt that each manufacturer will come under huge pressure from its board to deliver results. I don’t underestimate that competition at all. I see our size as an advantage,” Wolff explained.
“When I sit in strategy meetings as Team Principal, I can make decisions quickly, because I don’t have a board to report back to, I don’t have a big management structure to get things signed-off with. I actually see, with this platform and how it’s going to develop, that to be a small team is a big advantage. We need to pick our alliances very carefully, and tap into the technology that can bring performance.” Looking back at that quote, it looks like Wolff was thinking ahead to using the Mercedes powertrain in Season 6.
Mortara shared Wolff’s positive outlook. “I have no doubt we’ll do better. We had some technical issues in the second part of the season, a few brake problems, but with the way we’re going to approach this year, we’re going to do better. It’ll take a bit of time to get right, and I’m expecting some problems at the beginning, but for sure, the rate of improvement during the year compared to last year will be a lot steeper.”
Nonetheless, he was noncommittal on what would make a good season, as far as he was concerned. “That would be trying to set some expectations, and it’s too early for that. We don’t know where we are against the others. We’ll set a goal in the second half of the season. It’s a whole new powertrain, it’s a whole new group of people, in terms of the powertrain, who are going into their first Formula E season, so we shouldn’t put too much pressure on these people.”
Less food for thought?
(Photo: under licence and © FIA Formula E)
The discussion turned to travel, and to food, and Mortara talked about how careful he needed to be, to ensure he would be as light as possible when driving. “For us drivers, Formula E is very tough in terms of what we can eat. They’ve put a minimum weight for the cars, and we are part of that weight, so we need to be as light as we can. You have a few tall drivers [Mortara is tall in comparison to much of the jockey-like Formula E grid], and when you start to be over a certain height, your weight is quite high, and you need to be on the edge.”
“I suffered a lot in recent years because I had to drop the weight and I was quite sick. This is something that is problematic for me, I hope in future years they change a bit this, because it should be different. You should be able to do this work without compromising in this way.“
Anyone who enjoyed watching Mortara’s Macau-honed street-racing expertise in action last season will await with baited breath some more eye-catching performances in the Venturi.
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