No, this is not morphing into a sports column. In fact, I’m not much of a sports fan at all, lacking both the fervour of a fan and the attention span needed to keep up. Sign me up for a bout of mixed martial arts, which even at the champion level doesn’t last longer than 30 minutes. But I have become quite hooked on Formula E.
Okay, “hooked” is exaggerating things. I don’t really know about the teams, I don’t follow Formula E news and I stoically maintain my knowledge of the sport through insights of people I know. I’m not even sure who is in the lead this season. But I love watching it, particularly as a fan of technology.
Formula E is the electric car league of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, the governing body of most things involving vehicle racing. At face value, a Formula E car looks a lot like its peers in Formula 1, except it runs off batteries. At this stage that means they are far slower — often topping out at only 150km/h with a ceiling speed somewhere in the low 200s. But to compensate for this, Formula E takes place on street tracks with plenty of twists and turns. The BBC has a nice introductory video about it.
This plays well into the league’s design: whereas combustion engines build up their power output or torque, on an electric engine it is immediate. The result is a little like how Scalextric cars would dart out of their corners, slow down sharply and then shoot out again without missing a beat.
The Formula E cars do the same. They also have some other design differences that really change how they handle. Add in a roster of accomplished yet eager drivers, all tackling what is a rather new racing style, a whack of interesting innovation (like traction braking that feeds power back into the batteries or the game-like “fan boost” button) and there are fireworks. Well, at the start there was. It became a running joke of how often the safety car came out due to accidents.
Eventually, the drivers started getting a grip on things and fewer cars are getting written off. But the furious aggression still pumps through Formula E’s heart.
Still, why write about this on a technology site? Well, because there is plenty of technology to be had (and might explain why semiconductor giant Qualcomm is a major sponsor). Since the cars run off batteries, the power output can be adjusted. This creates an interesting collection of tactics that the drivers and their teams are learning. At present, the top drivers are those who can get the best speeds while depleting their reservoirs the slowest. In Formula E, watching the percentage of the draining batteries on each car is part of the thrill.
But I also find it interesting for its apparent data culture. Each driver has two cars — they swap during a pit stop. Yet even if a driver crashes early on, they still jump in the spare car. That is partly because they might be able to use the earlier vehicle if it is repaired. But I suspect that even a losing race produces a lot of data that the teams use to fine-tune their performance.
Above all, Formula E is history in the making. Combustion engines have hit a plateau of sorts, eking out performance here and there. Formula E is only at the start of its technology journey — even Richard Branson, who owns one of the teams, said as much in what is admittedly a bit of PR fluff.
I wonder how long before these machines not only match their F1 rivals, but surpass them with breakneck speeds. Can an electric engine produce speeds of above 500km/h? I have no idea, but Formula E is where we’ll find out.
For some reason, Formula E has yet to break into the mainstream. Perhaps the idea of electric engines creates a natural bias against them. But I doubt it will remain this way for long. Even companions who argued they would miss the roar of petrol engines have been converted by the clearly different behaviour of these cars, including one of the racers, Marco Andretti.
It actually annoys me that plans are afoot to bring F1 back to South Africa. Why do that when we could get into this bleeding-edge league? It uses tracks based in cities, not racetracks, and I can easily imagine a Formula E event in Cape Town or Durban. Maybe that will happen one day.
For now, though, it’s a perfect blend of racing and technology. And in true technological spirit, there are unofficial YouTube channels that post the races. So fire one up and take a look. The Monte Carlo and Malaysia races are well worth your time.
- James Francis is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in several local and international publications
- Read previous columns by Francis
