As Formula E kicks off its fifth season on December 15, 2008, huge automakers like Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz are finally joining the electric-racing circuit. Is this the beginning of the end of internal-combustion racing?
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Following Formula E’s debut four years ago, plenty of auto enthusiasts saw the circuit as a fool’s errand—surely motorsports fans raised on the roar of internal combustion would never love the zip and whine of electric cars rounding a track. But the league has risen from side attraction to headliner event, and it’s happening because Porsche is just one of many manufacturers shifting resources from combustion-engine racing to electric. Audi ditched Le Mans a year ago to enter Formula E, and Nissan, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz are also entering the electric circuit, which begins its fifth season on December 15. It’s a big step up for Formula E from its first season, when only a single automaker, Renault, was involved as a factory team.
Why? Racing isn’t just sport and frivolity. Car companies put hundreds of millions of dollars each year into motorsports to develop technologies that trickle down to the cars we drive on the street, technologies that let future family sedans use more fuel-efficient engines or let SUVs send less pollution out the tailpipe. Dollars always lead back to the company’s main business of selling road vehicles.
So, in an era when car companies are pledging to electrify their entire lineups in the 2020s, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that those companies want to invest their racing dollars in electric tech. Rather than EVs and hybrids complementing the main business of selling combustion road cars, EVs are to become the main business.
Formula E is the first (and still only) fully electric racing series to catch serious media attention and manufacturer money, but make no mistake: The electrification of motorsports had already started. Back in 2009, the open-wheel Formula 1 series began allowing the use of KERS regenerative braking systems that fed recovered energy to a small electric motor that supplemented the gasoline main powerplant.
The WEC made room for hybrid cars earlier this decade. After Toyota raced the first one in 2012—its gasoline-electric TS030 Hybrid—Audi followed with the diesel-electric hybrid R18 e-tron quattro, and Porsche in 2014 came with the gasoline-electric 919 Hybrid. All of this competition advanced electric car technology.
The technical revelations introduced for hybrids in LMP1 were revolutionary, Porsche says, and solving those technical challenges led directly to breakthroughs that were passed onto its road cars. Yet Porsche says that type of innovation-spurring challenge no longer exists in the WEC. Once Audi retired from the series, Porsche says the rules stagnated and no longer presented challenges that would benefit road cars, and so the automaker abandoned the classic series.
Besides the obvious electric powertrain technology, there are new rules and features for Formula E’s 2018/2019 season that made the series more attractive. In prior seasons, drivers had to switch to a second car mid-race because its batteries couldn’t last an entire race. It was awkward and strange, a slapdash solution to range anxiety. But for season five, Formula E uses a second generation of battery that lets a team use one car per race.
That was BMW’s prerequisite for entering Formula E, company spokesperson Jay Hanson says, the logic being that BMW wants to get into electric car racing to transfer electric drivetrain experience to its road cars, and normal drivers aren’t hopping out and into a second car when the battery’s depleted. “The borders between production and motor-racing development are more blurred at BMW i Motorsport [BMW’s electric performance division] than in any other project,” says Hanson. BMW i’s road car engineers are also its racing car engineers, he says, so you have the same people who developed the powertrain for the BMW i3, a tiny electric city car, also working on BMW’s iFE.18 Formula E racer.
The same kind of thinking is in play at Porsche. “The decision to enter Formula E is tied very much with our strategy to road cars,” says Viktoria Wohlrapp, a spokesperson for Porsche’s Formula E team. Technology from the 919 Hybrid led straight into the 2019 Taycan, Porsche’s first all-electric road vehicle. The Taycan’s 800V electrical system and liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery were designed initially for LMP1’s 919 Hybrid, and had Porsche not competed in LMP1, the Taycan could have turned out to be a very different animal. Once Porsche enters Formula E next season, they say this type of knowledge transfer from racing to production vehicles will intensify to a greater level.
For big car companies accustomed to huge investments in racing teams, Formula E is going to take a little getting used to. The circuit is intentionally more minimalist than its petrol-powered forebears to make a point about sustainability. In practical terms, each Formula E team is limited to 20 people. Compare that to Porsche’s LMP1 team, which at its peak employed 260 people. (Porsche shuffled its racing pros to new projects. Twenty went to the Formula E project and took with them four seasons’ worth of expertise racing the 919 Hybrid in LMP1. The rest went to Porsche’s GT racing programs, still an internal-combustion engine series, while a few combustion-engine specialists head a research program.)
Formula E makes a number of other changes for 2018/9 in addition to the one-car rule. Power increases from 190 kW to 250 kW, or from about 255 to 335 horsepower, and so the cars’ top speed bumps from 140 mph to 174 mph. Races won’t run a fixed number of laps anymore. Instead, they’ll run for 45 minutes, and then after time expires they’ll run one more lap. Oddest of all, by far, is that driving through certain sections of track off the racing line will signal the car’s motor to produce an extra 25 kW (33.5 bhp) for a temporary speed boost.
At the season opener in Ad Diriyah, Saudi Arabia, on December 15, nine manufacturers will take the grid. Some, like China’s NIO and India’s Mahindra, will be newcomers to headliner auto-racing events of the kind Formula E has become. Others, like BMW and Audi, will be old professionals from the hallowed race tracks of Le Mans and the Nurburgring. All will be treading new ground as combustion-engine companies feel out the early days of electric racing on their paths to becoming electric car companies.
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