When Formula E and the FIA unveiled the ambitious third epoch of its all-electric racing cars – known as Gen3 – at a glitzy showcase in Monaco’s Yacht Club in late April 2022, there was an almost tangible mix of excitement and nervousness.

The excitement was that here was a revolutionary car that would not only look different but would also redefine much of the DNA of the world’s only all-electric world championship.

For starters the car looked very uncommon. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, especially in racing cars, but here was a wedgy, stealthy X-wing-type vehicle that had as many aesthetic detractors as it did admirers.

The nervousness part came from the demanding technical attributes of the car because the step up from the second generation Formula E car was indeed sizeable.

The Gen3 would be the fastest Formula E car yet with a top speed claimed as 200mph, however in reality the speed was more in the 170/175mph bracket during 2023 races.

With more than 40% of the energy used within a race produced by regenerative braking, the Gen3’s claim to being the most efficient race car ever designed is pretty sound.

It also has around 95% power efficiency from an electric motor delivering up to 350kW of power (470bhp), compared to approximately 40% for an internal combustion engine.

Being the first-ever formula car with both front and rear powertrain kits – the front powertrain kit (FPK) spec supplied by California-based EV tech company Ateiva, and the rear cluster by the individual registered manufacturer – the Gen3 brought forth a doubling of the regenerative capability of its predecessor, the Gen2, to a total of 600kW. One of the more remarkable design traits was that it became the first car in international competition to not feature rear hydraulic brakes. It was clear that the ambition was sky-high.

Usually in such rarefied projects as the Gen3, some reality hits home hard and in Formula E’s case it certainly did so to begin with. There was a smorgasbord of challenges that had to be met and overcome over the Christmas and New Year period of 2022, just weeks before the Gen3’s competitive debut in Mexico City.

The most imminent and serious of which was the implementation of a secondary brake system to simply stop the cars should they hit technical issues.

The philosophy of the car having been designed without rear hydraulic brakes sounded amazing on paper, but the truth was that the decision contributed to several accidents, at least two of which were serious in private testing.

A much-needed additional safety brake could not be delivered prior to the season opener in Mexico City in January of 2023, so the concern ranged from relaxed via some manufacturers to reasonably twitchy at some.

But motorsport has an uncanny knack of mostly keeping calm and carrying on in times of adversity, and so again it proved for Formula E, which dug deep.

Everyone raced on, and even flourished, or rather the competition did. On a team and human level, it was a brutally tough few months with seven races crammed in across four continents during the first three months of the season.

A lack of available RESS (Rechargeable Energy Storage System) units meant manufacturers could not test for a period, much to their frustrations. A spec cell change within the units had challenged the FIA and its supplier WAE (formerly Williams Advanced Engineering) to the limit, but they came up trumps with a solution just in the nick of time. Additionally, supply issues of lighting infrastructure meant the illumination of the HALO didn’t work for most of the season, and the hair-raising and sometimes unexplained accidents didn’t just stop.

Pascal Wehrlein ended up in hospital in Hyderabad, while Kelvin van der Linde, Oliver Rowland, Mitch Evans and several others experienced scary incidents where they were unable to slow their cars and turn into corners.

Ultimately Gen3 will be judged by what it delivered on the circuits, and nobody can claim that it wasn’t a strong racing package.

Even a new form of racing was born, with Formula E cars running in a sort of cycling-esque peloton style race full of slipstreaming and overtaking, with cars running up to five abreast. It that went from the energetic (São Paulo and Monaco) to the borderline extreme (Berlin and Portland).

It got a lot of people talking, and no doubt it attracted new fans. The TV figures were still tailing off compared to pre-pandemic peaks though, and by mid-season the majority owner of Formula E, Liberty Global, replaced its CEO Jamie Reigle with Jeff Dodds. As a result a clarity started to seep through as to where Formula E wanted to go.

The good news for Dodds is that Liberty Global is getting much more active regarding its electric asset. It has a vault to spring off with a solid first Gen3 season and now a shiny new race, considered to be a kind of Holy Grail for the world championship, with the inaugural Tokyo ePrix in March 2024.

From a regulatory standpoint there will be changes ahead with the long-awaited introduction of ‘attack charge’ pit-stops. But before that arrives, both Formula E and the FIA will have ruminated on what Gen3 delivered during its maiden campaign so the rule makers at the FIA, can fine-tune it and the championship and event promoters can sing about it and expand it properly.

“What is the most important for us, and the main target, is to have all the cars being part of all the races in the most fair situation in terms of sporting equity,” said the FIA’s director of sport, Marek Nawarecki. “This target has been achieved, even if it was not easy to do, especially in the beginning of the season. I think that in terms of the quality of the show, of the competition and of the way the championship evolved during the year the overall results are quite positive.”

One of the key areas that the FIA started to look at as the 2023 season developed was the relative ineffectualness of the Attack Mode system. Drivers were unable to utilise it as they had previously. This appeared to be a slightly ironic culmination of the extra power (350kw) being unable to be effectively put down because of the limitations of the new Hankook tyres presenting a difficult traction challenge. This often made the Attack Mode become a ‘defence mode’ as drivers struggled to then bring the tyre temperature down as they went back to the ‘normal’ 300kW mode.

“I think it is fair to say that the name Attack Mode itself is not as relevant, and for different reasons,” agreed Nawarecki. “But I think in terms of the spirit of the additional strategy element that it provides, somehow it met the expectation that we have.”

“I think that in terms of the quality of the show, of the competition, and of the way the championship evolved during the year, the overall results are quite positive”

Testing of the WAE-supplied booster chargers was compromised at the traditional pre-season test at Valencia in Spain in October 2023 because of a electrical fire in the pits. This meant that extra testing took place at Mallorca in November with the hope that it can be introduced early on in the season, possibly in Saudi Arabia at the end of January.

The FIA and Formula E had written some flexibility into the sporting regulations whereby it didn’t have to be part and parcel of every race. The likelihood is that it will be used in double-header rounds in Diriyah, Misano, Portland, Berlin, Shanghai and London amid an expanded 17-race 2024 schedule.

On a competitive level few are betting beyond a battle between the pre-eminent manufacturers of last season, Porsche and Jaguar, as well as their customer provided teams Andretti and Envision respectively.

From a rules perspective the hierarchy of 2023 shouldn’t be shaken around too much for the coming season,  mainly due to the two-year homologation freeze for the first of the two segments of the Gen3 rules set.

The motors, inverters and gearboxes (yes, there still is one, despite the cars actually only having one gear) are untouchable, meaning that the black art of software and control systems comes into its own for teams to try and reduce any gaps they may have on pace and improve the efficiency of their cars over race distances.

While both Porsche and Jaguar should be in a strong position to fight it out for the championship once more across the course of Season 10, Formula E has a funny habit of unfurling a few surprises just when you think the pecking order is established.

“Honestly, I think some teams will make a bit of a jump,” reckons Jaguar TCS Racing’s Mitch Evans who, for many people, is the favourite to win his first title in 2024.

“There is still a lot of performance to be made through the engineering, the vehicle dynamics, the software, and that can have a future influence on performance and also race strategy”

“There is still a lot of performance to be made through the mechanical engineering, the vehicle dynamics, the software, and that can have a future influence on both performance and race strategy.

“There’s a lot that teams can improve on for this season, but, yes, if you want to take it off the back of last year it would be wrong to not expect either a Jaguar or a Porsche to be at the front come Mexico.”

Evans, one of Formula E’s smartest operators, has been bitten before though. He was in-line to win the 2020-21 crown when a small inverter issue stalled his car on the grid at Berlin and he was hit from behind by Edoardo Mortara’s Venturi Mercedes. He knows the pain of expectation: “In this sport, even though things haven’t massively changed, people can make good jumps. It makes you wary. We’re going in confident but not expecting to be at the front because I think that’s the most naive and stupid thing you can do in our sport because you can just get found out straight away.”

How did the customers beat the manufacturers in 2023?

Keeping it simple, getting the basics right and not trying to over-think the new Gen3 car sounds glib, but it was a fundamental trait of where the titles went in 2023, and it could happen again this season.

Formula E has it written into its constitution that registered manufacturers must supply a customer team with exactly the same powertrain cluster and other components to exactly the same homologated spec. It is this which enables Formula E to credibly claim to be the most balanced series in motorsport.

A prime example of this was how the teams managed their human resources. Jaguar has a much larger team as a whole than Envision due to its fatter departments for procurement and engineering because it is a supplying manufacturer.

Envision often used the same Williams driver-in-the-loop (DiL) simulator as Jaguar, after its own had issues during the season. In fact, Envision won some of its races with Nick Cassidy after he did practically no simulator work at all. An astounding revelation really, considering how key the DiL is seen in Formula E preparation.

Envision operates on a much leaner footing than Jaguar from a personnel viewpoint. And while this is entirely normal for a customer and manufacturer team dynamic, it offers up tantalising questions about the efficiency of the technical and operations arms of the teams at the race tracks.

These factors have not been proven to make a genuine difference in results. In fact, it is more likely that human or company error – whether it be mistakes from drivers (accidents) or engineers, both internal and external (reliability) – really have the biggest say in who takes home the silverware at the end of any given season.

But it is true all the same that manufacturer teams can often take on the appearance of vast, hulking transporters, carrying their more efficient and agile customers toward the end goal before being overtaken as soon as the finish line gets within sight.

That might sound like a harsh analogy, but that’s what it feels like sometimes, and to illustrate it you have to look at very boring aspects of how some, but not all, manufacturers operate.

Some have cumbersome bureaucracy around the way they function, even down to seemingly banal structures as supply chain mechanisms and even over-elaborate purchase order systems. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but more than one person within the Porsche and Andretti alliance grumbled last season about the length of time it took for some updates to be implemented.

The inference was that getting software updates on stream took too much time on some occasions. This in-turn meant that the customer team was left to adapt and refine other operational areas to try and find an advantage. So, perhaps there is an element of manufacturers concentrating too much on processes and not being able or willing to adapt at short notice to take into account a changing environment.

Smaller, close-knit teams often gel better than larger factory operations too – Andretti sans BMW being a great example – and while that can be masked in other categories, in Formula E where the margins are so small and details so important, it can on occasion make a very telling difference in fostering wins or spins.

What Porsche must improve on in 2024

Porsche will enter its fifth season of Formula E still chasing a title that many believed it would have celebrated by now. Last year brought its best-ever campaign with six wins for the Porsche 99X Electric via the ‘works’ team and Andretti customer entity.

“I think when we sat down and assessed how last season went, we had ups and downs, but what was clear is that qualifying was the weak spot,” says driver António Félix da Costa (pictured below right, with Jean-Éric Vergne).

“We’ve started to put some plans in action (in testing) to try and produce better qualifying results. That’s been our main focus in the winter, try to improve our one-lap performance.

“We’ve brought in some updates but with everything homologated with the hardware it means we have to be creative. We can still do a lot with software and vehicle dynamics.”

Pascal Wehrlein broadly agrees with his team-mate, saying: “It’s clear that we were stronger in the races than in qualifying.

“Looking at the average position, starting position, it was ninth for me and for the top guys it was sixth. We need to improve; this will also make our lives easier in the race.

“Those results really compromised our season last year, especially in the mid to end stages.

“I think once we qualify within the top six we can fight for race wins and definitely that’s our target for season 10; to cancel out the bad qualifying results and up our game everywhere in general.”