I am often asked whether the driver or the engineer is the most important element in Formula E, because the cars run so close together for the whole race. Clearly I am biased, but I would say it’s still the driver who makes the biggest difference, as you need a set of skills that is different from virtually every other racing series.
Take for example the brakes in Formula E – we have carbon brakes that only operate well when they are hot. But you don’t want to heat them up like normal combustion racing series for the start and waste energy, so you put zero heat in the brakes, which means they’re completely cold, the tyres too. As the battery is completely full, you can’t have regenerative braking and, for the first few braking zones, you don’t have any recuperation.
Braking with cold brakes and cold tyres is just one of the unique techniques you need to master, especially on tracks that only exist once a year before they go back to being public roads. It’s not like…
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