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Why Jaguar is betting on electricvehicle racing rather than Formula 1

Competing in the world’s top electric vehicle racing championship is about ten times cheaper than running a petrol-powered team in the glitz and glamour of Formula 1, but thrift was not the business rationale that drove Jaguar Land Rover to join “Formula E”.

“We have always chosen our racing categories based on whatallows us to transfer technology to our road cars, and for us, the modernequivalent of that is clearly Formula E,” says Jaguar’s motorsport managingdirector, James Barclay, of the company’s plan for cease making petrol-poweredcars

The famous British car brand last competed at the pinnacle ofworld motorsport Formula 1 in 2004 when Australian driver Mark Webber was behind the wheel.

The team struggled, and a cost-benefit analysis triggered thesale of the team to Austrian billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz, who renamed itafter his soft drink company, Red Bull.

It was 2016 before Jaguar was ready to wade back into elitemotorsport, but Barclay says the return had a clear connection to corporatestrategy; the company wanted to sell more electric cars, and rapidly improvethe cars it was selling.

“When we started and came back tothe sport in 2016 it was because we were about to launch the Jaguar I-Pace [thecompany’s first electric vehicle] and it was the perfect time to come back anddemonstrate to the world that we have fantastic capability to make electricvehicles,” says Barclay.

The strategy was turbocharged in February 2021, when the companyannounced plans to cease making petrol-powered Jaguar cars in 2025 in favour of“all electric” models. The company has pledged that 60 per cent of Land Roversales will be electric by 2030.

“That ethos becomes even more true as we go forward; we havelaunched our ‘reimagine’ strategy and that means that Jaguar becomes anall-electric, modern luxury car company from 2025. We only make electric carsfrom January 2025,” says Barclay.

“It is a seismic shift for the company, so our race program isat the spearhead of that strategy and because we are racing, we are developing,we are innovating, we are learning and evolving this incredible technology tobring it to our future of all electric cars beyond 2025.”

To put some context around Jaguar’s plan to stop makingpetrol-powered cars in 2025, the most aggressive policies for decarbonisationof the Australian car fleet exist in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), where the government will cease to register cars that are not “zero emissions vehicles” in 2035.

Other Australian states have mere “targets” for adoption of zeroemissions vehicles (an umbrella term for electric vehicles and hydrogen-poweredcars) and no hard deadline for registration of petrol-powered cars.

Another important piece of context surrounding the plan to goall-electric by 2025 is the fact that Jaguar Land Rover – which is owned byIndian giant Tata – has been losing money for several years now.

The pandemic has been hard on all car makers amid a globalshortage of semiconductors, but Jaguar has been particularly affected, withsome reports suggesting the issue was a factor behind the exit of chiefexecutive Thierry Bollore this week.

Australian data published by the Federal Chamber of AutomotiveIndustries reveals sales of all Jaguar models – electric and traditional – inthe first 10 months of 2022 were almost 42 per cent lower than the same periodof last year, with a lack of semiconductors hampering sales volumes.

Market share has also been lost in the United Kingdom this year,according to data published by the UK Society of Motor Manufacturers andTraders (SMMT).

That challenging backdrop makes the switch to electric a bigroll of the dice for Jaguar, and it puts extra responsibility on Barclay’smotorsport team to deliver success on the track and make the Jaguar brandsynonymous with electric vehicle excellence.

Jaguar driver Mitch Evans did a credible job of that in lastyear’s Formula E championship by winning four of the 16 races and finishingsecond in the drivers’ championship.

The Jaguar team finished fourth in the team contest, whichfeatures other well-known brands like Nissan and Porsche.

Linking brands to cutting-edge technology and decarbonisation isa huge part of Formula E’s business model; the sport got 57 per cent of itsrevenue from sponsorship in 2021.

For comparison, Formula 1 only got 16 per cent of its revenuefrom sponsorship; it got far more of its revenue from selling tickets andmerchandise to its much bigger audiences.

The new Formula E season kicks off in Mexico on January 14 andall teams will bring new “generation 3” cars.

Barclay says the new cars will be up to 50 kilometres per hourfaster than those that competed last season.

“We go from a car with a peak power output of 250 kilowatts[last year] to a car with 350 kilowatts and a weight that is now 826 kilogramsdown from 903 kilograms, which is roughly about 100 kilograms lighter than aFormula 1 car fully fuelled,” he says.

Australian miner Fortescue Metals becamethe exclusive supplier of batteries to Formula E cars earlierthis year when it acquired Williams Advanced Engineering, and the new breed ofcars will have more ability to recharge those batteries when braking.

The new generation of Formula E cars can virtually match Formula1 cars for initial acceleration off the start line, but they are still sloweraround a full lap of most circuits, even those like Monaco where the large number of low speed corners gives Formula E cars a chance to narrow the gap to those in Formula 1.

British driver Lando Norris set the fastest Formula 1 lap atMonaco this year when he circled the principality’s waterfront in one minuteand 14.693 seconds.

The fastest lap in the Formula E race around the same circuitwas 18 seconds slower.

Part of Formula’s E’s speed deficit is caused by the sport’sfocus on sustainability and efficiency.

The cars are not lavished with the large wings that give Formula1 cars the aerodynamic downforce that allows them to grip to the road whencornering at high speed.

Those wings on Formula 1 cars create drag; a force that slows acar and effectively wastes some of the energy that was spent propelling the carforward.

Formula E cars have less drag, meaning a greater proportion ofthe energy spent is actually used to propel the car forward.

That sort of energy “efficiency” is seen as a virtue in modernmotorsport.

“We don’t design the car to have a lot of downforce on purpose,the car is designed to be more efficient on drag,” says Barclay.