Part 1..
While the crucial constituent parts started to come together throughout 2013 for Formula E, two fundamental elements also had to be quickly addressed.
While the theatre and props were being collated at a decent pace, the actors and talent had to be sourced. That meant teams and drivers, and FE needed them quickly.
Formula E devised its own drivers club, a pool for talent that were to be considered for drives through the initial attention and confidence they showed in the championship. This was I fact the idea of Lucas di Grassi, a Formula E Operations employee and a key consultant throughout 2012 and 2013 even before a wheel had turned.
From a teams’ perspective the interest came quickly. The very first one to stake a claim for a slot on the 10-team grid was Lord Paul Drayson’s Drayson Racing entity which was looking for a new project following their electric speed record run with its adapted Lola LMP1 car it raced at Le Mans in 2009.
A few days in to 2013 Drayson officially committed to the series. Fate though would intervene mere weeks before the start of the season the following year as Drayson lost interest after clashes with Formula E Holdings upon the direction of the championship.
Eventually Jarno Trulli, who out of nothing other than sheer curiosity tested the Spark-Renault SRT_01E at the La Ferte Gaucher, took over the Drayson entry just prior to the start of the first campaign and used the operational and engineering services of multiple single-seater champion team Super Nova who brought their then Auto GP driver Michela Cerruti in as a surprise partner to Trulli himself.
The second team to commit was China Racing under the management of Yu Liu and Steven Lu, who were involved in A1GP, Superleague Formula and GT1 World Championship projects, and also promoted motorsport events in China.
The Campos Racing operated team, which metamorphosed in to NEXTEV TCR in deference to the Chinese EV start-up company, would start the inaugural campaign with Nelson Piquet Jnr and Ho-Pin Tung.
After the mysterious and bizarre Bluebird Racing unsurprisingly failed to materialise, the third team to register was sometime Indycar entrant Dragon Racing. The brainchild of media mogul Jay Penske, the team was essentially formed from a practical point of view by the experienced ex-Penske Racing engineer Nigel Beresford, who went on to be team manager up until the fourth season of the championship.
While the first teams showed some much needed confidence in the project for Agag and his team, which had now grown to incorporate former Rangers Football Club executive Ali Russell, it wasn’t until July of 2013 that some established racing names came forth.
The first of these was Andretti Autosport who formed an alliance with motorsport industry technical providers Wirth Research to ensure it had a plethora of engineering talent including ex-Honda Performance Development chief Roger Griffiths, former F1 engineers Andy Miller and Robin Gearing and also the experienced former DAMS team manager Rob Arnott.
Andretti would enter French firebrand Frack Montagny and then F1 refugee Charles Pic but became the carousel team of the first season as they used six additional drivers over the course of a revolving door of a campaign.
In the autumn of 2013 came a very significant gain for Formula E in the shape of one of single-seater motorsports grandee entities, DAMS. Jean-Paul Driot, a dedicated sage-like team boss who had won pretty much everything outside of F1 and had set up edams to continue this success.
The headlines were grabbed though by Alain Prost, as the four-time F1 World Champion became a partner in the new enterprise which signed ‘Le Professor’s’ son Nicolas and former Toro Rosso F1 ace Sebastien Buemi.
Tomorrow, FEN will deep dive in a second part of the teams and drivers that readied for the first season of Formula E in 2014-15.
