Formula E is new to me. Looks like it’d be fun to watch, I’ll have to check out streaming options.
Formula E’s 12th season, the last season of the Gen 3 cars, starts on December 6 in São Paulo.
One thing that’s fun about them is since they are artificially limited to run a little conservatively for heat generation, there is a bit of thermal headroom available. The league decided to make use of that by assigning various videogame style “boost” mechanics. The flavour of which are still constantly being iterated on. At one point it was earned by taking an alternate “long cut” for a part of the track, and then they could choose when they used the power boost after that point. Currently they are doing it by choosing to do a sort of pit rapid charge thing, every driver has to do it once per race, they choose when, and once they have taken that pit stop, they can then activate the boost any time afterwards.
There was also a controversial version that probably never should have made it past discussions. They had the audience vote on favourite dirvers, and doled out the boosts to the winners of the popularity contest… I don’t know, maybe they wanted to encourage a positive attitude on and off the track or something.
Was pretty interesting seeing the Gen3 car they had in the fan area at some of the Formula E races last year with no rear brakes. They still had front brakes (article states otherwise, not sure if they meant rear or if there was some later change I am not aware of).
At any rate, definitely exciting to see the performance levels starting to eclipse the combustion counterparts while being lower cost.
I can’t wait until Formula E replaces Formula 1. We’re years away, but it’s exciting to dream about.
Since they announced FE I’ve been counting the years. It’ll be inevitable.
However I’m still not sure how it’ll happen. Sure eventually FE will over take F1 in viewers, money, and prestige. But will F2 and F3 switch to electric? Will there be different lower tier F2e and F3e. Will F1 last another 50 years or more? Or will F1 go electric and FE discontinue as a brand?
Let’s be honest, F1 is antiquated now. It’s living off of nostalgia. It doesn’t even really innovate any more. Certainly not things that couldn’t be applied in FE. I get that fans want to hear engines roar, but I think they’ll quickly get used to hearing engines whirl. Big Oil can’t stave off the electric revolution for too much longer.
But now you’ve made me think of it, perhaps F2 will be hybrids and and F3 full ICE
Not to mention: a multiclass exhibition event (or series?) with FE + F1 might be pretty cool to see - especially as a way to make it clear to fans that ICE is actually the slower class nowadays.
Also, my inner child would LOVE it if they rebranded FE to FZero 🤩
