How Jaguar got its teeth into Formula E's Gen3 development race

Jaguar chose not to launch its latest Formula E machinery - the I-Type 6 - in the environs of its base in Oxfordshire, nor at its automotive headquarters in Coventry. Instead, the Big Cat disrobed in the cutting-edge climes of East London, exposing itself to the Greenwich skyline within the dusky walls of the Magazine events building. It had its own new livery to match; teal was deemed passé after a few years on Jaguar’s colour palette and has been replaced with white and gold on a carbon black canvas.

It’s a refreshed and revitalised Jaguar; a team that hopes to have found its own cutting edge for the advent of the Gen3 era of the all-electric racing series. With each year that passes, Jaguar has inched ever closer to glory.

Mitch Evans, the irrepressible Kiwi leading the British marque’s charge on track, gave eventual champion Stoffel Vandoorne a real run for his money throughout the 2021-22 season, but the outside bet for a title quite literally ground to a halt in London. A man who has likely never thrown in the towel in his life, Evans gave his all in Seoul and collected a win in the first of two races – but the electronics issue at the ExCeL had already taken its toll.

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In an alternate universe where the Gen2 era continues, one can imagine Jaguar inching closer to a title as it had done in the four-year tenure of the rules, continuing a similar trajectory. Instead, a complete overhaul in the regulations with almost no carryover will break every manufacturer out of their inertia. To succeed, a team must get the recipe right with the new rules and hope it doesn’t bark up the wrong tree with its development path. That goes beyond simply designing the most efficient powertrain, and there’s many other variables to consider.

First, there’s the single-spec motor now at the front of the car, which offers an extra 250kW of regenerative capacity in addition to the upscaled 350kW drive motor. Then there’s the shift to relying solely on regenerative braking at the rear of the car, the switch from Michelin tyres to Hankook boots, a lighter package overall...and trying to manage all of those spinning plates with limited track time each weekend. It’s the same challenge for everyone but, with Jaguar choosing to remain in Formula E while some of its bigger rivals have departed, those changes come bearing both opportunity and pressure.

When faced with a new ruleset, a team must make a series of decisions and choose a path to follow while effectively blindfolded relative to the other teams. The eye masks will come off in Mexico, and only then will the teams know if the direction has been the correct one. In that situation, intuition and experience are the only guiding factors.

The Gen3 era poses a total reset for the championship, although Jaguar has continuity in its driver lineup and technical staff

Photo by: Jaguar Racing

Phil Charles, Jaguar’s technical director, is not someone to shy away from that challenge – in fact, he's relished being able to piece the puzzle together, and the process of being able to apply lateral thinking to the regulations etched in black and white. Handily, he’s also the person you go to when you need something very technical broken down into an easily digestible format, so he’s best placed to talk through the pitfalls that the Gen3 project has brought.

Speaking to Autosport ahead of Jaguar’s launch, Charles picked through the most pertinent challenges, starting with the need to find balance with the addition of the front-mounted motor unit.

“This is a really ambitious change, from an engineering point of view,” Charles effervesces. “If you look at those individual bits, if you take the MGU where we had 250kW before, we have it at 350; 100 kilowatts over 250, that's a big delta. If you put a front powertrain kit in the car, that's a really big change to suddenly have that capability of regen-ing at such a rate.

"It's been a really exciting challenge for the engineering group. I keep saying that we've turned the engineering knob up to maximum, because this is what this is all about" Phil Charles

“The battery tech has had to move really quickly, and to be able to take account of the way that we can map that that front axle. Suddenly, you've got much more power on a vehicle dynamics tool to stabilise the car. Just on the first two things we've touched on, they’re big, big changes.

“We've now got a brake by wire that's supplied to us as well, another fairly complicated system. We've got a change in tyre, that's another big change. If you take all these items, these aren't small changes; they're big changes, they're complex systems on their own, each of them. You've got to get them all working in beautiful symphony. That's actually quite a tricky process. That’s something that we've really enjoyed, and the engineering group have really got their teeth into that.”

Charles elaborated on finding that balance between the front and rear motors, particularly under braking. The key trade-off here is imbuing the driver with the maximum of confidence on the pedal, but also being able to harvest as much energy from both to pump back into the battery. But, equally, what might work for the front-mounted motor may not necessarily work for the rear; finding the best compromise for both axles is ultimately going to yield the best performance on all fronts.

It’s effectively an ongoing loop. The engineers find more performance out of one axle, explore how it affects the other, and then try to find a solution that confers the best performance from both sides.

Understanding the compromises inherent with the Gen3 car will be crucial to improving its performance

Photo by: Jaguar Racing

“Let's say for example, in mapping the front axle you start to play with that front powertrain kit, and you work out how best how best you think to slow the car down,” explains Charles, “you then say, 'Okay, that's controlling in a certain way, I need to try and have something that works in sympathy with the rear axle'. You get the car balance under braking, then you start to play with the tools. And as part of playing with the tools, you realise if we use for that front powertrain kit in maybe a different temperature range, or in some of the different blending with the brake materials, as well as the regen, I suddenly find another version of braking is even better.

“Then you have to go back round that loop and say, 'Okay, that works in a different way or a better way, I now need to make the rear axle complement that as well'. It may be what works for the rear axle at the absolute optimum doesn't work in unison with the front axle. There's lots of systems on the car where you're doing loops, as you evolve. And when you learn that, you have to go back and feed that into the system and go again.

“It's been a really, really interesting set of problems to deal with. It's been tricky. It's been a really exciting challenge for the engineering group. I keep saying that we've turned the engineering knob up to maximum, because this is what this is all about. And how you get on in the first few races will be how much you've turned it up so far. But even after that, it's going to keep massively evolving.”

That’s without taking the new tyres into account. After eight years on Michelin tyres, which has involved a steady progression, the teams have a very different prospect in the Hankook rubber to contend with. The new tyres are very different in construction to those Michelins; although the all-weather concept has been continued to ensure that the cars will be able to cope with a range of conditions on the same tyres, the construction is very different and has naturally presented the teams with an altogether different challenge.

As such, any development of a tyre model to base simulations around has had to start from scratch. Thus, building a full picture of the Hankooks has naturally started with something of a fog of war, and it’s only through continued use of the definitive 2022-23 compound that the teams have been able to get an idea of its capabilities. Charles explains that, as Jaguar has started to work with the new tyres and explore its working range, the team has been able to etch the key landmarks on the map.

“When we first started to use the tyre, we simply went, ‘Oof, this doesn't look as we thought it would do,’” he says. “But once you start to use it, you realise little subtleties of how to get it to work. The kind of performance that [the drivers are] achieving now is very different to day one. If we took a reference on the same side on the engineering side and said, ‘This is the tyre on day one’ with the way that we thought we need to treat it to get it to work compared to what we do now, those are two totally different tyres almost.

“You have to come back and say, ‘Okay, those decisions are made up front. Are they the right ones for suspension design? Are they the right ones for getting the best out of car across all these different conditions? I know more about how it works now in different conditions, maybe not, maybe I need to come back and have another look.’ It's been a really interesting engineering problem to have.

Constant evolution is expected as the season progresses as teams try to understand the new technology

Photo by: Jaguar Racing

“The first guess was never going to be completely right, because we didn't know enough about it. It's like an equation where you've only got one or two of the variables, and there’s 10. You need to keep chipping away to learn more and more on it as it evolves. You come back with more knowledge. It's got a very different temperature working range [compared to the Michelin]. As we've started to understand that, we've learned, the ways to optimise around that.”

As is the case for every team, those are the key engineering challenges that Jaguar must contend with over the 2022-23 season. The team has been satisfied with the mileage it has been able to achieve during its testing programme, crashes notwithstanding, and feels it has got itself into a good position with the Gen3 rules.

Charles warns, however, that there will be an “ebb and flow” to the season as teams continue to develop their understanding of the car, and that any engineering solutions will be quickly turned over for better ones in the development stakes.

"What you see at the first race, the solutions that we're all taking in qualifying with the new tyre, how best we try and get the tyre to work, that won't be what we do at the end of the season" Phil Charles

“It's going to keep massively evolving,“ he says. “Somebody else asked me the question, ‘How do you think you've compared to the others,’ and I said that everyone's on this massive rate [of development]. So if I compare somebody that's done one more test day than me, I look at them and go, ‘Wow, they're amazing.’ But then if I go and do two test days before they do the next one, they look at us and go, ‘Wow, that's amazing,’ because you're on this absolutely huge rate of development.

“That will continue to this season; I have absolutely no doubt that what you see at the first race, the solutions that we're all taking in qualifying with the new tyre, how best we try and get the tyre to work, that won't be what we do at the end of the season. You can just absolutely predict that it will chop and change.

“I'm confident that everybody's on a really steep learning curve, and that we're certainly nowhere near to kind of a stabilised, tail off condition. So it's going to be interesting. And that's going to make the championship ebb and flow a lot as you go through the first half into the second half of the season.”

As for the drivers, both appear confident. Evans, outwardly relaxed and inwardly determined, expects the team to be strong heading into Formula E’s new era, while Sam Bird says that the new car suits his driving style much more compared to the Gen2 package. Both have endured their fair share of near-misses in the title stakes and are unflinching in their desire to see a successful championship challenge to the end.

Access to a customer team for the first time in Envision will in theory help accelerate Jaguar's progress

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

Consider that Jaguar will also have Envision drivers Nick Cassidy and newly-hired Sebastien Buemi using its products next season, which can yield two sets of data. Without a customer or sister entity, Jaguar team principal James Barclay likened it to “fighting Mercedes with one hand behind our back” over the course of the year, and felt that having Envision on board can cover gaps in knowledge that Jaguar might find over the course of a weekend.

“[The relationship with Envision] is really good,” Barclay enthuses, “Sylvain [Filippi] and I speak regularly, we have a great dialogue. It's really good. It became apparent through last year that we were basically fighting Mercedes with one hand behind our back: they had four cars, we had two.

“There were days like Berlin where they didn't start the weekend very well. And they learned basically off the customer team, Venturi, and all of a sudden they had stronger results. So days like that where basically we weren't fighting necessarily equal fights. And that's something we wanted to address coming to this season.

"Interestingly, I think you've seen the whole competitive landscape readjust because now all but one manufacturer has a customer team. Especially if you're a manufacturer without one out potentially, it's a bigger disadvantage than ever before as well.”

Barclay says that “the core attributes are there” to kick off Gen3 in swaggering form, on both the technical side and in the driving line-up. Evans has been one of the standout drivers in the past two seasons, Bird has been able to overcome a series of off-track issues that made last year so difficult, and Jaguar’s technical team has a hatful of talent to overcome the challenges of adapting to the new car.

PLUS: Why Bird can bounce back after a tough 2021-22 Formula E season

For Jaguar, this is the opportunity to prove that its teeth are sharp enough to finally tear its way to the top.

Can Jaguar finally end its long wait for a Formula E title in the Gen3 era?

Photo by: Jaguar Racing