Go to any Formula E race weekend and it won’t take you long to see branding that states the delusion, the myth, the fib that the cars do 200mph.
Don’t tell Trading Standards but Formula E Gen3Evo cars don’t do 200mph and they never will. The highest recorded speed has so far in a race has been 177mph. That’s not 200mph, so what Formula E purport is a falsehood.
Theoretically they could possibly just do 200mph with significant modifications and a tailwind stronger than a Dan Ticktum rant. But one has never got close to it in the wild and nor will they.
But don’t let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. Formula E has been massaging facts and figures, spinning the big numbers and creatively conjuring numbers since day one. But do all the smoke and mirrors really matter that much?
Feed the monkeys at the media zoo and most will scoff it down. Supposedly serious media have gulped down the Kool-Aid and burped out the non-facts or the propaganda noisily and consistently for a long time now. But the real facts are that Formula E isn’t quite fast enough and perhaps more importantly it doesn’t make money yet. That’s the real driver behind the behaviour.
It should all be different in Gen4 when F2 speeds are nudged at. That’s when it starts getting credible in and around the 200mph bracket and when the Kool-Aid starts to get naturally diluted.
At present Gen3Evo is doing a decent job of bridging the generations of cars. It started terribly with the Gen3 mess but then smoothed out a bit, while now the drivers at least have some enthusiasm to drive the cars.
Yet, undeniably Formula E, through it all, creates a great spectacle and terrific racing. Ultimately that is what it should be judged on, for now.
Formula E’s new Chief Marketing Officer Ellie Norman has come from Manchester United and Formula One, two entities that don’t need to flagrantly embellish. Her perspective on the overblown was interesting when Formula E Notebook the 200mph falsehoods to her.
“From my perspective, when I think about behavioral science, as humans, we are hard-wired to shortcut all forms of decision-making,” she said last month in Jeddah.
“Absolutely you want to understand that this is a credible and viable motorsport. I think you have absolutely the benchmark set with Formula One as open wheel racing, like we are. I think what has happened over the last 11 seasons of Formula E is huge progress.
“I think there is a shortcut that an audience want to understand that our fast, competitive, and that the acceleration is there. I was pretty surprised from the first race I went to, which was season two in Battersea, there’s a massive move-on in such a small time.
“To your point I think we can spend more time really being thoughtful about, well what are the drivers? Once we’ve done the shortcuts of these are fast, powerful, great acceleration, then I think we need to be more thoughtful about what are the right messages we want to land?”
Asked specifically about the 200mph claims Norman was considered, stating that “what I do 100% agree with you is we are not Formula One.
“We will not succeed if we continue to compare ourselves to Formula One,” added Norman.
“What we have is a fantastic product, a growing audience and the product will only continue to get better and absolutely more aligned from a performance point of view on F1, but it’s a different fan base, it is a different style of racing, and actually we should celebrate that versus always having the comparison.
“I think what people generally do want in any quick decision making is what are my shortcuts to identifying as a motorsport, and I suspect that is where the importance of acceleration figures top speed has come. To really highlight, for a lot of people that this is a very different product than it was in 2014 or 2015.”
That’s a soothing antidote to the some of the more bizarre moments in the last year or so that have seen the Dodds/Verstappen bet saga and the colorful TV figures that included ‘record-breaking cumulative audience of 10.5 million on CBS, surpassing all but one F1 race for a US broadcast audience in the last two seasons.’
So, could it be that Formula E’s enforced journey into new territory with this week’s Evo Sessions is part and parcel of a genuine breakthrough, rather than a creatively cultivated one?
That remains to be seen but at least it is trying to achieve something rather than sitting and waiting for Homestead in six weeks’ time.
Although let us hope that any success is this time completely credible and genuinely enough to nudge an equivalent 200mph mark purely on merit, and not bluster, this time.
