Stellantis, Jaguar and Lola have all been pounding around the former home of the Portuguese Grand Prix, Estoril, this week. Some leaked footage of the cars barrelling in to T1 give plenty of evidence about just how much quicker than their Gen3Evo counterparts they are.
So, just how much of a spectacle will Gen4 Formula E racing be next season?
It’s a questions that can easily get a bit white-washed by some stakeholders. It initially it won’t be perfect and will have to be honed, as everything in sport, especially one as complex as motorsport.
So, maybe one of the best people to ask is one that has been very close to the cars from the very start of the design and development phase of it.
Stellantis simulation and modelling engineer, Teena Gade, such a person. She’s been deep in to the Gen4 programme at Stellantis as Citroen and Opel drivers have lapped hot and dusty European test venues for the last four months or so. There are a lot more of those days coming in the next eight week before the Gen4 homologation phase kicks in at the end of September.
Gade, speaking to Formula E Notebook from a test at the Guadix circuit in southern Spain last month, is pure in her unequivocal appraisal for the Gen4 cars when she says that “I’d like to convey just how exciting a car this is!
“This is like no other track car and there is no other series like this that’s this level of performance, this level of power, all-wheel drive, fully active diffs, total software.
“There’s nothing else like this, and so I hope that we can get people in with get the hook with them for good racing, but keep them there by just how crazy these car are, just how good they are.”
Stellantis has started the initial Gen4 phase extremely strongly. It has utilised its knowledge of rallying in particular to gain a springboard in some software systems and in particular front differential technology and how it will be used on the Gen4 car.
When asked at the test what Gade thought the nature of Gen4 racing would look like, she was upfront in not answering directly.
“I’m not going to tell you that because, of course, that is part of our simulation work, so that’s part of what we’re going to do,” she said.
“And part of what we’re going to do is take all of the information. For example, we’re here testing today, and we take all of the information we learn from here, and build that into our models, and say actually what is the most likely type of race we’re going to see in Gen4.
“We will then go to different circuits and see what the sensitivities are. And of course, the team that reads that or forecasts that information the best are going to have the advantage.
“So, I’m not going to tell you what I think it is, but Gen4 is going to be exciting. It is going to be good racing, and it is going to be really exciting.”
Formula E v WRC: Same but different
“There’s lots of similarities and there’s lots of differences.”
That’s a nice juxtaposition via Gade. Nice to dig down in to when it comes to the question of Formula E and World Rallying development, something which is uniquely inherent within the Stellantis Motorsport way of looking at the two very different motor sporting disciplines.
“The best way to explain it is with track racing, the driver arrives at a corner, and they pretty much can drive that corner at the limit of the car and their ability, because it’s the same corner he drove the lap before, more or less, in terms of his perception,” she adds.
“If you think of like where the limit is, the best driver you want will drive it at the limit around that corner on any given day. With rallying, you arrive at the corner, and you actually have no idea what the car is going to be like, so you can’t drive it at the peak of grip or what you think.
“If there isn’t the peak rip, now you’re in the trees, and so what you have to do is leave yourself some margin, and when you see the drivers sideways, that’s them leaving some margin.
In Gen4 Formula E it will be the ultimate vehicle dynamics that will dictate the performance of the car but it will be controlled by software, including what is traditional known as a traction control.
That car is going to arrive, and at any point in the corner, our software, if we’ve done it well, is going to say, ‘this is what I believe the grip level to be. This is what the driver is asking for in terms of cornering performance, let me maintain the car within the peak performance window,’ says Gade.
“So, we can get it round the corner, and the driver is going to make the request and the car is going to do its thing,” she adds.
Gade then reminiscences about a well-known WRC driver with who she had a fascinating discourse with while looking at their data.
“This person used to do something super interesting, and I asked him about it, and I swear to God, his brain nearly exploded! She says.
“I said ‘when you arrive at a corner, like literally just 50 metres before it, you brake, why do you touch the brakes?”
“And he looked at me and said, “I don’t do that”. I’m like, well ‘I’m looking at the data. You do!”
“What he was doing was testing the grip. He’s making an assessment of the grip just before the corner starts to say ‘okay, this is this is what I need to turn in it, and that allows me to drive.’
“And he has no idea he does it. He has absolutely no idea. And so, what rally drivers are doing is they’re arriving in the corner, and let’s say there was more grip than they expected, they can now put some gas in, and then they use the steering and the throttle to adjust the attitude of the car to bring up the mid corner speed.
“Because they arrive at the corner, with a bit less, they then need to have enough margin to reduce the mid-corner speed to make sure they make it out the other side.
“And so, in WRC at the moment, that’s very much the work of the driver because they haven’t got like the software freedom that we (Formula E) have.”
