When Mahindra boldly confirmed its continuation as a manufacturer for a fourth era of Formula E last month it also set in motion a list of questions simply begging to be asked.
One of the prime ones was if it would, as it did in Gen3 with the ABT Cupra squad, supply cars to a new customer partner for Gen4.
It’s a question that will no doubt be keeping Frederic Bertrand, the team principal of Mahindra, busy in the coming weeks. That’s because if they are approached and a desired marriage is asked for, it must acknowledge and to an extent acquiesce.
The manufacturer/customer model is one of Formula E’s more engaging traits. It brings an element of sporting and technical parity but it is limited in terms of desirability to the manufacturers because financially there is little benefit. Indeed, it’s a burden of sorts.
The model is being scrutinised right now in terms of not only the model itself and how it is displayed, with new parameters recently made public in which costs are details (the manufacturers perimeter in fact coming down in price by €25,000 – although that’s only part of a longer story).
Back to that question:
“It’s kind of a 50/50, feeling for us,” Bertrand told Formula E Notebook.
“On one side, we know how demanding it is to have a customer and how much attention and how much additional effort you need to put to make sure that you deliver good quality.
“So, that is something that we have evaluated in Gen3, and we realised at that time we were not ready for doing this properly. Now, we know better, and we can exactly measure how much the effort should be. We are confident that we can do it, but we know that it will be some additional effort needed and something very specific to put in place.”
But there is another side for Mahindra, one that is definitely of interest and one that in 2023 just didn’t work because its Gen3 project was frankly a bit of a mess, and ABT stood no chance in contributing anything meaningful to the project as it assessed a disaster it could have done without.
“Having a customer is definitely something interesting, because you get more data, you get more capacity of performing on track, because you get the learnings faster, you can get more point of view, more engineers,” adds Bertrand.
“Will we be able to really provide the right level of support? We think yes, but it’s definitely something which will cost us a bit of an effort, not to say, a lot of effort.
“On the other side, we know that it is good to have a customer because of the data management and access to more information. So that’s definitely a question we are evaluating. But at the end, it’s not necessarily our choice as by regulation, if a first customer is asking for being supplied.”
Gen4 is likely to see at least one, if not two manufacturers go it alone and not have a customer at all. Nissan is close to a deal with Andretti, while CUPRA Kiro is all but done at Porsche. Should Penske go it alone, as everyone suspects it will, then it leaves Envision choosing. It will likely have Jaguar, Stellantis or Mahindra to go with. Should it choose one of the former two then Mahindra will concentrate on itself which with its decision being late compared to others will probably be a bit of a relief.
Bertrand acknowledges that “we will have to do that by regulation, so that will be with pleasure, that we will have this type of request and that we will have a deep look on how to positively work with a customer and bring that into a strong advantage for the future.
“And if not, we will manage as we are doing right now with Gen3Evo, we have definitely no problem with any of the two options.”
