Is there a pressure, or at least a sensitivity, to the Pit Boost energy procedures that will be conducted at the Tokyo EPrix on Saturday afternoon?
It really depends on who you talk to.
Certainly, the Andretti team will have doubts in their minds after a previously unseen problem with their spec kit at Monaco manifested itself at just the wrong time. And, it just so happened that by a weird quirk of fate, Nico Mueller probably lost a win because of it.
The issue that was suffered by Andretti involved the non-transference of the energy to RESS. When this occurs, the FIA is able to manually update the car with the energy.
Yet, what they’re not able to do is to increase the state-of-charge (SOC). Rather counterintuitively, with the energy in the car, the actual state of charge in the car is affected meaning that ultimately a situation where derating on SOC can occur limits the pace of the car.
This is what happened to Mueller. A regrettable problem , one which was addressed by the supplier – Fortescue Zero and is believed to be highly unlikely to happen again. But what if something does happen again, something else? What then?
Another race affected would bedifficult to spin, not that anyone is doing that right now. But at the same time, the equipment and methodology being used by the boosting system is also new and innovative. Does some slack need to be give here? Or has that time come and passed via the three-year gestation of the idea, which was initially lobbied for and supported by the majority of the manufacturers in the all-electric world championship.
Asked of his opinion on Pit Boosting after the Monaco issue that afflicted Mueller, Porsche vice president of motorsport Thomas Laudenbach told Formula E Notebook that he was “somewhere in between right (opinion) right now” because “our position has always been ‘yes we clearly support the pit boost but only when we are 100% sure it’s working properly.’
“I think everybody’s done their homework, it took longer than we all thought, we did test a lot and we came to a situation where everybody thought ‘yeah it’s okay now we can use it now’ so we also confirmed yes I think we can do it,” continued Laundenbach.
“Now, seeing this yesterday (Mueller issue) yes it is of course the worst thing that if a race is influenced by a spec part but I’m not at the state where I say ‘hey we got to stop it’ because whatever we have to investigate what happened yesterday then no question about that but let’s be honest too, we also had races influenced by other spec parts in the past.
“I’m not saying it was good what happened yesterday but let’s be honest we had influences on other components in the past, so to me I would carry on now
“I sometimes am not sure, and I don’t think that’s good for the fans because it just confuses sometimes and, of course, if this carries on we now we have to stick our heads together, but I think for the moment let’s try and figure out what happened, and I wouldn’t change the system at least from what we know now.”
There aren’t ringing endorsements of the Pit Boost, so far then. But it’s still early days, and its days when Formula E can ill afford further problems that see drivers’ races affected by a system that so far hasn’t actually brought a whole lot of key strategy and dynamic influence on a race in its two appearances so far.
Main image thanks to Emma Ridgway/EKR Photos
