As Nelson Piquet Jnr savoured his well-deserved title at the end of the 2014-15 season, Formula E’s momentum started to ramp up significantly.
The second season again began in Beijing but this time there was little doubt of the result as the newly named Renault-edams operation trounced the opposition and allowed Sebastien Buemi to waltz to a third E-Prix win.
The significant evolutionary change to the series for 2015-16 was the opening up of the powertrain rules to allow teams a move away from the spec McLaren motor and inverter package.
While the Spark chassis remained, teams could design, build and run their own or customer sourced powertrains.
More race power was introduced for season two with a 170kW maximum, as was a Super Pole session which saw a one-by-one single lap crack at pole for the fastest five drivers from the still lottery derived qualifying sessions.
A majority of eight teams became ‘manufacturers’ of their own powertrains but there were varying degrees of success.
The Trulli Formula E team effort, which partnered with an obscure Italian tech manufacturer called Motomatica, was disastrous and struggled to get going in pre-season testing. When it did, it proceeded to give one of the teams’ drivers Tonio Liuzzi small electric shocks!
Trulli soon folded and its slot on the grid was announced as going to a factory Jaguar effort which was formerly launched in December 2015 in London.
The deal was brokered by Formula E after Jaguar’s James Barclay had first visited a race at Long Beach earlier in the year and let it be known that the Big Cat was looking for a new and relevant motorsport programme for its ambitious EV road car plans.
While the Renault package showed itself to be by far the quickest and most efficient, DS Performance opted for a dual-motor solution which was competitive but heavy.
Sam Bird scored perhaps the most impressive win of the season with a mighty defensive display at Buenos Aires, while Lucas di Grassi claimed the first ever Paris EPrix which was held beside the magnificence of the Hotel des Invalides which houses Napoléon Bonaparte’s tomb.
There were other struggles as Formula E’s technical freedom kicked in, notably and somewhat surprisingly for the Andretti squad as it attempted to build its own highly ambitious powertrain from scratch. They simply ran out of time and its ATEC-01 was mothballed and its season two pairing of Robin Frijns and Simona de Silvestro made do with the McLaren-Hewland season one package.
‘It really hurt because we put our life and soul in to that project with a full carbon gearbox and lots of other innovations,’ remembers Andretti’s Roger Griffiths.
‘But it got to a point where we just couldn’t meet the deadlines. What it did do though was give us some very relevant and detailed appreciation of electric powertrain design and application which I believe really helped us and BMW in the future.’
Dragon Racing was the only true customer team as it did a deal with Venturi to run the Monegasque outfits new VM200-FE-01 kit. It proved a decent move as Jerome d’Ambrosio took a win at the first ever Mexico City EPrix in almost identical circumstances to his first in Berlin the season before after Lucas di Grassi was penalised.
The Formula E calendar matured well in its second season with the addition of the prestigious Paris event, Mexico City and albeit for one year only a shift from the Tempelhof airport to a true street race in the heart of Berlin at the famed Alexanderplatz area.
This race and indeed in some respects the Battersea Park event highlighted the difficulties and dangers of holding street events. Both had distinct issues with the Alexanderplatz race a relatively last minute replacement for the Tempelhof fixture when the airfield facility was used to house refugees over the winter of 2015/16.
The move to downtown Berlin proved unpopular with local businesses and the populace at large. The event reverted back to Tempelhof for 2017 where it remains to this day.
Battersea Park meanwhile saw Formula E having to give-in to a minority of local opposition who did not take kindly to a few days of disruption in putting the largely popular race on. Political pressure saw the original five-year agreement come to an early end three years short of completion.
This disappointment was soon overcome when Formula E announced that the third season would start with perhaps the highest profile EPrix yet in Hong Kong. What was more, New York City and Montreal would also close out the calendar which was looking healthier and glitzier by the race.
Despite Sebastien Buemi’s early domination, the 2015-16 season became a nip-and-tuck battle between two drivers that became the benchmark performers in Buemi and ABT Schaeffler Audi Sport’s Lucas di Grassi.
As they entered the last double-header round at Battersea Park in early July 2016, Di Grassi held a single point advantage. But with Buemi still in the much quicker car, something had to give among the bandstands and ice-cream stalls by the River Thames.
