Not many outside of hardcore Formula E followers are truly understanding of the commitment teams have in the world’s only all-electric motorsport world championship.
While the overall resources and budgets are nowhere near the levels of Formula One, the attention to detail that the teams work to is very comparable.
One vivid example of this is the fact that all teams have a remote operational room fully functioning and active over race weekends. This has pretty much been the case since the second season of Formula E. Then, at least Renault e.dams and ABT Audi had teams working back at base and others soon followed suit.
By the fourth season (2017-18) ‘remote ops’ were rife with the advent of the full manufacturer team as Jaguar and BMW (Andretti) came on board, more and more resources were poured in to extra engineering brains during race weekends.
One famous inside-paddock story is now an urban legend in Formula E, after a remote team was found to be fully functional at a track (Hong Kong) in 2017 with at least eight people working cheek-by-jowl with the race team from an adjacent hotel room that had a bird’s eye view of the circuit!
These remote set-ups began to be controlled somewhat by the end of the Gen2 period when the FIA implemented a regulation that controlled and managed the use of such ‘extra’ methods.
According to Art. 27.6 of the Sporting Regulations, the CCTV equipment must be installed and ready to work from ‘the first competition of Season 12’ meaning that teams will have to prove to the governing body that a viewable system is recording activities by the first free practice session this Friday afternoon.
The regulation, which comes under Article 27.6 states that ‘each Competitor is only allowed to have one remote garage (operational room) outside the confines of the circuit. This remote garage is the only external source for assistance with data analysis and strategy development allowed for competitors.
‘Any other assistance related to those matters provided by an external source or a third party by any means is forbidden. To limit operational costs, a Competitor may ask the FIA to assign its manufacturer’s support staff to an alternative location selected by the manufacturer.’
Six persons are limited to assisting the racing team, in its remote facility from 60-minutes before the start of the first practice session (or shakedown if scheduled) of ‘each competition and until 3 hours after the start of the race (last race in case of double- headers competitions).
The regulations goes on to detail that ‘additional personnel can be allocated to the remote garage/s, in addition to the 6 persons, with a corresponding reduction in the same amount of operational staff of the same category working at the circuit.
‘Each competitor must ensure the monitoring system provided by the FIA is correctly installed and in working order at all times during the time period defined above,” continues the regulation.
‘Within the time limitations mentioned above, curfew periods published in Appendix 1 of each competition must be respected by the personnel in the remote garage. During the curfew period time, no personnel are allowed to work for the racing team from the remote garage.
Each team has to have a legal representative sign a special document that has to be returned to the FIA as part of the compliance procedure for the remote opps criteria.
Teams also have to follow accordance with European GDPR laws by displaying a ‘recording warning sign’ in the room where the CCTV camera is installed. This is in order to ensure that all persons entering the room are aware of the recordings.
