Formula E, is it the future of F1?
Everybody has at least one heard of Formula one, the crazy car racing sport that everybody is obsessed with and that is keeping everyone on the edge of their seats with its incredible technology, which is a glimpse of our future one, that combined with the individual capabilities of each driver and the ideas and economic backgrounds of the different teams gives of practically a perfect sport except one thing…
More and more the cars we drive are going fully electric and theirs are not, cause the majority of the money intake teams get comes from their technology improvements and without them the sport will lose its point. But now the US and Europe are planning to ban gasoline car sales too, just like California already did, so in 2040 it is possible that owning a car with a tail pipe could be just as owning a landline telephone. We just entered a huge existential moment for one of the world's most popular and expensive sports because technology is moving on the one that is supposed to advertise the future of cars for the rest of us. So what does that future look like, and if it will be electric does formula one get there or is somebody else already there?
Here comes formula E, the fully electric car racing series, which can be considered the cool younger sister of F1, which all started at a dinner in Paris 13 years ago where Alejandro Agag, former member of the european parliament and founder of FE, Antonio Tajani, Vice President of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic and Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and Jean Todt, president of FIA, wrote together all their ideas on a napkin which is now exposed and where they deliberated that F1 couldn't become electric because they should have changed the sport itself in order to match with the electric racing car performing capabilities, and don't get fans mad.
So since they didn't want to risk threatening the great product they already had, they invented another one where they could push over technology as far as it could ever be in order to create the future also of our own cars. But how does it work, and what makes it entertaining and worth watching it? Basically they kept the basics of formula one but implemented them as if it was a video game making it much more fun and engaging for the public. In addition the races take place in city center streets to promote the idea that electric cars are cars that will be in our cities one day, making it accessible for everyone. But they also took inspiration from videogames such as mario cart, implementing the boost systems in the race, such as fan boost which can be delivered directly by the audience transforming it into a real life video game. In addition by tracing the evolution of the eclectic cars used in the race you can also trace the evolution of the electric cars that we use, nowadays racing cars are the so called Gen 3, which is the ultimate technological product that is the fastest and most powerful Ecar ever built which solved the majority of the problems faced in previous Ecar generation that forced drivers to swap cars mid race. The secret of these new gen 3 cars is that they are using a new braking system in which kinetic energy is converted into electrical energy used to recharge the batteries, there is now physical brake, all the breaking capacity comes from the electric motors, using the same concept of a power plant, allowing to recover almost 80% of the energy. This type of car racing is an experiment, an experiment that one day will be directly implemented in our car allowing us to drive faster, longer and cleaner. It is the world's most popular group science project that will inevitably bring us into the future.
-Settembre 2025-