How good is the team that was ERT and is now CUPRA KIRO? We’re about to find out.
Realistically it will take half a season to make any judgement on those questions but one thing is for certain. There aren’t any more excuses for the team that has concurrently both occasionally punched above its commercial weight yet also sometimes flattered to deceive when it had at least some opportunity to humble bigger tams more consistently.
The reality is that the new-look team, which Formula E Notebook understands will have a revised livery for Mexico City onwards, now at least has a chance to shine on a more consistent basis.
It’s a moment now that its deputy team principal Russell O’Hagan describes to FEN as a time
“we’ve been waiting for because I think it’s super easy to presume the team is A and B and C, particularly when you’re performing the way that we had done.
“Generally, operationally and engineering-wise, I always feel like we’ve done a pretty good job. I would say, particularly from the start of Gen3, in that first season, our car probably had the best braking performance of most of the grid, certainly in the first half of the first year,” added O’Hagan.
“Ultimately, the race results come down to efficiency. It’s largely as simple as that, and we were just always sort of handcuffed to that. We’re actually seeing the opportunity for people to understand where we are. I’ve no concerns on that side.
So, what is CUPRA KIRO targeting for its first foray with a manufacturer, and a title winning one at that, in Porsche?
“I think short-term, the reality is just everything came together quite late,” explains O’Hagan.
“All the other teams are in mature relationships of knowledge of everything they’re running, so it’s just trying to do that right. We ran the cars, two small shakedowns, four days in Jarama, which was good, but Jarama’s also a bit of an outlier of a circuit, so it’s just how do we catch up with everyone else having had two years of experience and making sure that we do that.
“It’s just foundations and then building blocks, and then diminishing returns thereafter of the performance. We’re trying to take here (Sao Paulo) and Mexico as learnings, I would say, in the two different circuits, then probably extending that a little bit into Saudi.”
At least one team is happy with the generally unpopular two month gap between Jeddah and Homestead as it will enable CUPRA KIRO to better understand its new surroundings. This time will be important to both crunch some initial data and to properly analyse where Dan Ticktum and David Beckmann can gain more confidence in the Porsche 99X Electric in relation to the new attack mode potency and just all-round understanding of the package.
“We’ve got, thankfully for us, this natural gap, and then we’ll use that time to go back to the start almost, and then fill in some of the gaps of the things that we haven’t had the time to do from September to now,” adds O’Hagan.
It will likely only be after Mexico City that the CUPRA KIRO squad is able to effectively form its aims and ambitions for the 2024-25 season properly. The hope is that it can start to dream big, but a lot of that will come down to how it can exploit the sporting framework, especially when the pit boosting pit stops kick-in, possibly at Jeddah next month.
“After the first couple of races, we need to decide what our target is,” says O’Hagan.
“Then we need to figure out mathematically, how do you achieve that? Because if you go for consistency and you’re looking at ninths and tenths (positions), you probably end up ninth or tenth in the championship, even though you’d be, if you’re finishing ninth and tenth, you’d be the fifth highest team, let’s say, in that race.
“Then it will come down to us to kind of decide. Do we strategize to bias higher performance finishes? And then that will work differently with the drivers, or do you grind out those results?
“I would say most likely we’ll have a strategy where we try and gamble a little bit on a few podiums. Then how you would judge that on a driver level of did they deliver across the season will be difficult because it’s going to be an up and down approach to scoring points, but internally we’ll be able to kind of manage that.”
Formula E is up and down by nature. But all of a sudden the team that looked at times last season to be knocking on deaths door, might all of a sudden be kicking down something all-together more positive over the course of the coming season and beyond.
