Actually good
Ever since I first started excitedly squeaking about Formula E on Twitter there has been a depressing pattern of people in my mentions going “but did you know that it is, in fact, bad?”
Hmm, no, I didn’t know that. And although I have the feeling that I, a Formula E journalist, may have looked into whether or not it is bad somewhat more thoroughly than you, a Twitter opponent, let’s never censor ourselves in the name of restrained logic. You may see me or indeed other people — perhaps gigantic German car manufacturers or champion drivers — enthusing about how much we enjoy Formula E and what an excellent series it is and you may be tempted to explain to us that actually we are wrong and I can’t stop you doing that.
But perhaps I can help you avoid the most basic arguments and encourage the discourse into a more nuanced position, as we head into Season 4 and you, I don’t know, order some more F1 merch or whatever.
Honestly, this isn’t even as hostile as I’m making out and I really don’t care if you are determined to not be into Formula E despite every evidence that you might have some fun in your life for once if you took the petrol pump out of your ass. I’m just so bored of the whole thing and want to have a chance to talk about power train positioning without someone telling me that in fact, if I was really interested, I would see that it is not good.
Formula E is good. Great, even — I’m so disgustingly excited for Season 4 testing I literally woke up in the middle of the night to have a think about it, which as a freelance journalist is a rare treat from the usual sweaty panic nocturnal intrusions.
So, this goes out to all the haters because I cannot be bothered to keep writing this out in individual tweets. Pin it, everyone.
1. “Actually, it’s slow”
Sadly, my mind is incapable of realising that the horsepower differential between a Formula E powertrain and a Formula 1 car’s engine is really quite astoundingly huge and therefore I had been operating under the belief they did exactly the same things. No wait, that is not true at all.
Of course it’s slower than a Formula 1 car. The top speed ever recorded by a Formula 1 car is 231.5mph, which is pretty flipping fast (and 12 years ago) but a good 75mph or so slower than 307.9mph recorded by a Venturi Buckeye Bullet in 2010, while taking the FIA-officiated electric vehicle land speed record.
“Oh well that’s not the same thing at all!” I hear you cry.
Let me just line up some chin hand emoji because are you …saying that it would be… unfair… to compare completely different… vehicles with… totally different purposes… and then declare one less good just because it went slower due to different mechanisms? HmmMMMM?
Formula E is developing a different technology to Formula 1. The way that it races, the requirements of the series, are totally different to Formula 1 — they’re both top flight series, it’s not a fight. Even if it was, backing the scrappy little underdog seems more fun than the ageing behemoth.
Formula E racing is about the rapid acceleration of a power train, balanced against the intensive braking requirements of regeneration. It’s about screeching round a corner in a car that won’t get any lighter during the race, it’s about trying not to let the battery overheat — battery technology being one of the most complex — and previously limiting — elements of electric vehicle development.
It’s about cars being close together because yes, they all have to use the same chassis and focus on developing the hardware and software powering it and driver skill to gain an advantage. It’s not drag racing — the straight-line speed is a tiny, tiny part of what goes on in any form of motorsport and if you watch Formula E, it feels fast and urgent. Yes, because the tracks are tighter than a traditional circuit but that’s because FE cars can take them, hitting close to their top speed; change your expectations, this is street racing not pedestrianisation.
2. “It’s too quiet”
As a former (well, mostly) music journalist let me tell you it is a lot easier to just cover loads of Mogwai gigs in your late teens than heading off round the world to watch motorsport if you want to get tinnitus. Also: don’t get tinnitus, it’s completely horrible.
But yes, the power train does not have the roar of a combustion engine, instead making gloriously sci-fi lightsaber noises that make my tiny, cynical little heart beat with fierce excitement about living in the actual future.
Maybe that’s not your bag though. Maybe you don’t feel like you’re watching motorsport unless you can’t hear anything but the geared-up, heated straining for torque that a conventional engine screams round at — in which case I have a few questions because that sounds boring as heck.
In Formula E (like modern F1 and to some extent, Prototype endurance racing but particularly Formula E) you hear everything the car does. Every rub of the floor against a kerb, every gear change, every switch between conventional braking and regeneration, every time the driver has to drag the steering round a corner and the complex rear suspension tries to bin it. You can practically hear them breathing heavily, if the tyres didn’t make so much noise on the street circuits.
It’s a technical series — the level of complexity necessary to manage the power and the amount of that done by the driver, rather than a data engineer, is enough to have put more than a few off, over its first three seasons. Being able to hear every part of what’s going on with that is thrilling — you practically feel like you’re in the car, trackside. And isn’t a little bit of us always kind of, childishly, wishing for that?
And don’t tell me I don’t like real motorsport, my other preferred hobby is freezing halfway to death watching various forms of GT. Leave me alone, I know what I’m hearing.
3. “It’s irrelevant”
Gritting my teeth here with the desire to just write “no YOU are” and leave it there. But I really do struggle with this one — it’s not just that the metric of relevance appears to be entirely based on how much Sky Sports can charge you to get a look at something, it’s that anyone with a basic knowledge of engineering and the automotive industry would not believe this.
Formula 1, the apparent benchmark of relevance, certainly does drive development of some very bespoke car parts. But you can’t tell me that an aerodynamics department dedicated to making the foils of a front wing only usable on maybe a few tracks of two cars for one year is so urgently applicable to road car development that it’s not about the same level of relevant as the International Space Station.
Yes, Formula E is a spec chassis that is unlike a road car — that’s single seaters for you; if you wanted specifics then I hope you’re entirely dedicated to watching GT racing and eschew even the (RIP) Le Mans prototypes. If you’re interested in finding out how far, say, the limits of battery technology can be stretched within a restricted, almost laboratory like condition though then… well, that’s what it does.
There’s a reason manufacturers are so interested in it and it’s not just PR (although undoubtedly that’s an appeal, if you have an electric vehicle line coming out) — Formula E is literally driving the tech (especially software) that will make electric vehicles work.
Anyway I’ve never seen a bunch of people riding electric segways do a parade around a Formula 1 track while chainsmoking Gauloise and wearing inflatable dinosaur trousers so who’s really accessible to every day technology etc. etc. etc.
4. “I just can’t get into it”
Fair play love but you seem to be able to get into my mentions and the mentions of other people talking about Formula E on the reg, weird huh. 🤔
5. “Climate change was invented by-”
Please, do not. I’m older than all but four current F1 drivers and there has never been a point in my education where I did not know that we were heating the earth to irrevocable levels that would ensure our extinction as a species. Understandably, this has given everyone from Gen X onwards a sort of weird, doomed view of everything because you’re forced to use vehicles and transport systems and products that you know are literally contributing to traumatic death of yourself and any progeny you manage to create.
Parts of my brain, for years, have been screaming for the hope that there might be some way to reverse that. Or stall it, at least. Throw it into neutral.
Motorsport, like any sport, should be inspiring in the way it innovates — using technology to confront real-world problems. When motorsport first started, one of those real-world problems was ‘no cars can get up hills,’ for instance — bringing in the challenge of a hillclimb.
Now the challenge, technologically, facing us is that we have to stop using fossil fuels. We have to stop combusting hydrocarbons, the method around which not only all our engine technology but the majority of our power-generating facilities, is completely reliant on. And we’ve gotta do it twenty years ago or at least really, really soon because otherwise it’s Snowpiercer and chill o’clock.
Even if it wasn’t, I live in London (like Formula E itself) where we went past the annual air pollution limit on January 6th. I’ve had pleurisy twice this year, I feel like a Victorian orphan — I don’t need convincing that combustion engines are literally throttling us.
And yeah, pretty wild that all these manufacturers are coming into Formula E just after they’ve been busted for running a cartel that disguised the level of emissions from diesel engines for a few decades. It is literally a place to clean up your act and I’m down as heck for that.
6. “I cannot watch anything with a car swap”
Get over yourself. I’m fairly sure if you asked F1 drivers if they could eschew a lot of the fuel management necessary in modern racing by having a chance to leap into a second car mid-race they would grab at the chance. I’m not joking. I might ask Alonso, actually — he’d probably do it on a skateboard.
Besides, I think you will find that it is, in fact, both hilarious and cute.
7. “The circuits are different”
Err, yes. I don’t know why but a lot of the arguments around Formula E seem to centre on the fact that it is not Formula 1.
I know it’s not Formula 1. Everyone in Formula E knows it’s not Formula 1. We’re not rocking up to a street circuit in a city centre going “amazing that I am here to see *reads smudged writing on hand* the only racing series I can name.”
I go to plenty of races at conventional circuits — I’ll be honest, it’s an absolute pain in the butt because you have to go to the middle of cocking nowhere and then it’s some wind-blasted airstrip that only a particularly committed Blancpain fan such as myself would probably risk exposure to spend 14 hours a day at. I love that stuff, it’s all great.
Formula E doesn’t go to those circuits and that’s — that’s ok, guys! It’s ok to not reverently step up to the hallowed circuits used for anything like several decades of Grand Prix and beg to be allowed to fit to them. If you want to go about the incredibly challenging method of trying to race in a city centre, that’s absolutely fine and no one has to get upset that the whole thing’s an affront to motorsport’s fine heritage of doing things in places no one can get to.
I went to ultra-historic Shelsley Walsh the other weekend for a hill climb event. Didn’t see any of you lot who are so keen on keeping these essential tracks alive there, which is odd — it’s almost like it was built for a specific type of event and therefore doesn’t get used for other types of event. Wild.
8. “It’s a retirement home/for F1 failures”
You know how many rookies entered Formula 1 last season? One. Of the twenty grid places available now, four are occupied by former World Champions in their thirties, the rest an intractable midfield of sponsorship contracts tying teams and drivers into uncomfortable binds alike.
In Formula E technically eight people completely new to the series got a go in a car. Ok, some of that was Endurance scheduling shenanigans but it feels a little healthier — not least because literally absolutely none of them bought the seat straight out of a junior series.
Young drivers are starting to fight to get into the series, older drivers are letting go of other ambitions to focus on it — and the oldest drivers in the series are getting podiums, fighting to keep their rides; this is no soft option.
They don’t just talk about it as a drivers’ series because they’re in it, it’s because they know people who want to be. It’s because you can be last twice in a race and win, because a single race involves more overtaking than an entire F1 season, because even though the gap between power trains is becoming more noticeable (largely through teams making bad setup choices than anyone being spectacularly advantaged) you can see an opportunity for the only customer team in the championship to suddenly fight their way to winning at the end of their debut season.
It’s cus rookies win races — and everyone’s kind of a rookie, after all, a mere three years into this thing. And rookies are hungry, competitive, hardworking — no one cruises in Formula E (unless you’re really trying to save the last bit of battery) and that’s true of everyone I know in it, from PRs to engineers to team bosses to, especially, journalists. FE has given a lot of us a chance we didn’t think we could take, hadn’t been able to grab anywhere else — that’s not a bad thing, I’m sorry you were too busy complaining to join us.
9. “It doesn’t have any fans”
This is particularly excellent as it will be being delivered to an audience of people talking about Formula E, often people who create content about Formula E, explaining how there is neither an audience nor anything worth creating content over. Well done, everyone. It truly does prove your point to have sought out people talking about a series to show that no one does. Slow hand clap, major reward.
Yes, Formula E has a smaller global audience an Formula 1. As previously detailed, Formula E and Formula 1 are actually different things, as inconceivable though this may be, and FE is not hoping to directly replace F1. I’d dare to say it’s probably hoping to do something better — but definitely different.
Formula E is three years old. Getting on for four. Formula 1 is seventy years old. I wouldn’t worry that FE doesn’t have the same size audience, for our sake anyway — I’d probably be more cold sweating that it’s definitely growing, at a time when F1 is fighting to maintain an ageing subscription demographic’s interest, even. F1 is losing potential Grand Prix circuits and teams while FE expands its calendar and manufacturers queue out the door.
But FE doesn’t have F1’s bills to pay. And F1 doesn’t have FE’s fight to get people to notice it. They are different propositions. One having fans doesn’t mean the other doesn’t — indeed, there may even be some crossover between the two.
Or in fact — as a variant on this argument goes — it may not matter at all if F1 fans like FE. I’m an F1 fan and that’s how I found out about Formula E and no doubt some of why I am into it but for anyone poking their head through the fence in a city centre, trying to work out what the spaceship-sounding things whizzing past are, who might never have seen any motorsport before in their life — let alone attended a race — it doesn’t really matter if they’d score high on Grill The Grid.
FE set out to reach a new audience. So no, not every F1 fan may be into it but that’s a bit like looking across a group of forty year old men, concluding none of them are massive fans of The 1975 and therefore it’s literally impossible that anyone is attending their sold-out arena gigs.
Also stop sliding into people’s mentions to tell them they don’t exist what are you even doing this is logical fallacy at its finest.
10. Some variant on “you shouldn’t like the thing”
You’ve got me. I don’t like Formula E; I love it. I’ve crossed continents, spent 14 hour days in a media centre tent, thrown myself on hot concrete, nearly got run over by more tractors than I care to really think about, drunkenly embarrassed myself and made friends with some of the best people I know through it. I’ve literally altered the course of my entire previous career (which was distinctly not-shabby) because I am ride-or-die onboard this particular slab of greased lightning.
I’m not the only one, as detailed above. There’s something about Formula E — it’s actually doing something and doing it really well. It’s both got a purpose and a direction as a technologically developing series and as a campaigning force. It reps for itself and what it means.
And maybe I’m a big ol millennial snowflake but when the atmosphere’s boiling maybe we’ll wish we had a few more of them, eh. You’re not going to dissuade me from this with the shocking revelation that Formula 1 currently remains more famous than a three-year-old series doing something traditional petrolheads don’t like. Because, actually, Formula E is good and if you knew anything about it you’d agree, pal.
You can carry on researching the minutiae of why anyone who likes Formula E is wrong. Or you can come down to an ePrix — slide into my DMs beforehand and you can utterly paste me on the simulators or we’ll grab a beer en route to whatever scenes the after party holds.
Or don’t. But don’t tell me — or anyone else — that we’re the ones missing a trick, here.
