Mercedes' recent announcement of the AMG-Project ONE hypercar may leave some dreaming of laying their hands on a vehicle using the same V6 turbo hybrid engine as the one approved by Lewis Hamilton for the Formula 1 car. But the wind is turning, and favourably to Formula 1's sister all-electric race: Formula E.
The I-TYPE 3 will be Mitch Evans and Nelson Piquet’s new toy in representing Panasonic Jaguar Racing in the upcoming fifth season of the Formula E Championship. The all-electric auto racing competition starts on December 15 this year in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and will take the 11 teams on 13 races across 12 cities.
This year marks a change from the last as the FIA unveiled in March its Gen2 car, with a battery that significantly improves the amount of usable hours of energy it can store compared to previous versions. The 85 per cent increase in usable battery energy crucially means the end of pit stops. For the first time in five seasons, the Formula E car’s battery is specified to last throughout the entire 45-minute race, instead of forcing drivers to stop mid-race and jump into a fully charged alternative vehicle.
What’s at stake for the competing teams is therefore to make the most of this new feature and build the Gen2 car with most efficient motor, hardware and software. For team director at Panasonic Jaguar Racing James Barclay, the decision to build a powertrain completely in-house for the first time was key in making the I-TYPE 3 a next-level racing car.
“We had complete control over quality, packaging, design and final delivery of items,” he says, “so we had a higher degree of freedom to ensure maximum efficiency. The challenge was to get that full 250kW power that we can produce with the powertrain while also making it as light as possible to get the car running as fast as we can, for as long as we can.”
Challenge completed, or so it seems. The I-TYPE 3’s powertrain is 25 per cent more efficient than the I-TYPE 2’s, yet its weight has remained the same. In attack mode, it has an extra 25kW power on top of its maximum 250kW. It has a high-revving motor in excess of 33,000RPM – double what a traditional Formula 1 car would.
Evans describes training on the I-TYPE 3 as “like being in a really intense PlayStation game”. Perhaps because of the car’s acceleration rate of 0-100 km/h in 2.8 seconds.
Central to Formula E’s philosophy, however, is ensuring that in the long-run, you needn’t be Mitch Evans to enjoy the same type of driving experience. Ultimately, the technology developed in race cars is meant to trickle down to electric road cars for the benefit of consumers.
Jaguar is no exception, and the company last year launched its first all-electric SUV: the Jaguar I-PACE. With two electric motors and a maximum power of 294kW, the car drew a lot of specs from the I-TYPE 2. Barclay explains that improving the company’s race car with the I-TYPE 3 will eventually translate translate to improvements for its road vehicles. When building the I-TYPE 3, minimising the amount of energy taken from the battery and improving the powertrain’s efficiency by making key components as lightweight as possible were key concerns. And lessons have been learned for the I-PACE, too.
“We have projects within the company now to take learnings from our race program to design the hardware that will go into future electric vehicles in our consumer offer,” says Barclay. “We are making real progress and that will show in better cars in the future.”
Take Jaguar’s use of silicon carbide, for example. The material, also known as space dust due to its scarcity on Earth, was included in the I-TYPE 3’s inverter in the form of control chips. Not only because they sound pretty cool, but because they are capable of switching frequencies very quickly and therefore control temperature levels more efficiently. That all means less energy loss and smaller, lighter parts. And what’s goof for the track is also good for the road.
This is a move that should invigorate the electric vehicle market, which so far has been heavily dominated by Tesla. Last August, Tesla’s US sales of its Model 3 were far ahead of all other plug-in electric vehicles, with 17,800 sales, compared to the 2,750 sales claimed by the vehicle coming second on the list, and which was, unsurprisingly, its Model X. Last year, the company said that it would invest $32.7 billion in electric vehicle projects over the next five years – a towering sum that contributes to consolidating Tesla’s current position in the market.
Tesla’s road cars, however, are now comparable to Jaguar’s I-PACE. And while the latter has not yet caught up with the EV giant – the I-PACE’s range, for instance, is 470km, up against 537km for Tesla’s Model S – consumer preferences are likely to change, especially as new companies enter the market with electric road cars that perform better.
Guillaume Maureau, deputy general manager at car leasing company ALD Automotive, explains that Jaguar’s I-PACE is a good fit for the type of consumers addressed by his company – individuals looking for a luxury car that is also eco-friendly – and as a result it is already stealing some of Tesla's market share. “We have only added the I-PACE to our range for a few months,” he says, “and before then, most of our sales were mobilised by Tesla. But we can already clearly notice that consumers that have turned to the I-PACE for long-term leasing are those that had exactly the profile to lease a Tesla model.”
More European manufacturers are following Jaguar in offering luxury cars that are electrically powered. And as they jump onto the electric car bandwagon, Tesla is going to have to share its cake with more competitors.
Earlier this month, BMW i Motorsport presented its own Formula E evolution race car, the BMW iFE.18 with similar showroom glamour to that of Jaguar. The car specs are supposed to be similar, with the regulatory 250-kW powertrain, and so are BMW’s goals of bringing race car technology to its consumer car range.
Both BMW Motorsport engineers and BMW i series engineers – the company’s consumer electric vehicle series – worked together on the Formula E powertrain with the goal of making the transfer of technology between the two branches as effective as possible. And for that exact reason, the iFE.18 powertrain will be key in further developing on the future generations of BMW i models.
In the four years since it was founded, the technology involved in Formula E has developed incredibly quickly. In that time teams went from using a battery that could only last half a race to one that lasts a full race, while at the same time improving on speed. For Barclay, those developments show that Formula E is paving the way for more and more competitors to enter the consumer market. “In the next five years, you will see a huge amount of change,” he says. “More change than you have seen in the last 15 in terms of what will be offered to consumers.”
Read more: The Germans are hatching a plan to overtake Musk's Tesla Model S
And with Porsche having recently been accepted by the FIA to enter the Formula E competition next year, the list of traditional car brands using the sport to drive electrical R&D continues to increase. Parallel to its entry into the championship, Porsche announced a £5.4 billion investment in electric mobility before the end of 2022 as part of Mission E – the company’s all-electric vision, that is scheduled to launch an electric road sports car, the Taycan, in the next two years.
The German company has already smashed it with its Le Mans program featuring the 919 Hybrid, which won the championship three years in a row between 2015 and 2017 with an 800 Volt electrical infrastructure. This will be deployed in the Taycan.
Porsche's Formula E team, led by Andreas Seidl - who led the team working on the 919 Hybrid - will be focusing on building their own powertrain, but also on finding efficient solutions for different technologies ranging from the brake-by-wire system to the cooling system, through to the transmission, the driveshafts or the inverter. All in the aim of pushing the car's performance and energy recovery systems.
Testing its own electric motor and battery components in Formula E's competitive motorsports context seems to be the way to go for Porsche to ensure technical developments for both race and road teams. Michael Steiner, head of research and development, confirmed this when Porsche announced its entry into the championship: "Entering Formula E and achieving success in this category are the logical outcomes of our Mission E," he said. "The growing freedom for in-house technology makes Formula E attractive to us."
While Porsche has remained vague on the exact launch date of the all-electric car it is promising, and while many electric vehicles projects are still in the early stages of development, it all points to the fact that the traditional car companies no longer want Elon Musk to lead research in EVs. Whether he takes matters to Twitter remains to be seen – but what is certain is that the shift to all-electric auto has never been more real. And competition is finally getting ready.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
