The lights in London’s Excel centre are low as 22 electric cars line up for the final race of Formula E’s 11th season. Seconds later, the drivers shoot into the bright daylight, whistling around – and it is a whistle, not a roar – the indoor-outdoor track at speeds pushing 200mph. The racing is hard, the leaderboard constantly changing as drivers vie for position.
The series has a similar dynamism off the track. In just over a decade, Formula E has accumulated 422 million fans around the world (about half the size of Formula 1’s fanbase). They are younger and more diverse than typical motorsports enthusiasts (2024 saw it pass more than 1mn followers on TikTok). And, in terms of acceleration, the cars are sharper than in F1 – 0-60mph in 1.82 seconds against 2.5 seconds (though they can’t reach F1’s top speeds of around 220mph). Quieter cars and more accessible locations, a number of them city-street circuits, have made the sport more family-friendly. And it’s more eco-friendly: the championship’s annual carbon footprint is 33,000tCO2eq against F1’s 170,000tCO2eq.
In 2022-23 its international fanbase took it past Nascar to become the fourth-largest motorsport worldwide, and last season saw Formula E’s global TV audience grow 17 per cent to 561 million. A record 46 million viewers worldwide watched the Mexico City E-prix earlier this year. The figure was not so far off the 60 million who watched F1’s latest Australian Grand Prix.
The focus of Formula E’s CEO Jeff Dodds isn’t on top speeds or viewership figures, however. Instead, he wants to talk about the electric-vehicle industry. “I would say we’ve helped accelerate the transition in EV purchasing,” he says. “When we started 11 years ago, there were only 300,000 electric vehicles sold in the world that year. Now somewhere in the region of 15 to 20 million electric vehicles will be sold in 2025,” he says.
The Formula E championship, which enters its 12th season next week, was conceived in 2011 by Spanish businessmen Alejandro Agag and Alberto Longo (along with former FIA president Jean Todt), who owned teams in Formula 2 and 3. As they sought sponsors for these series, they found, says Longo, that “money was going into their CSR (corporate social responsibility) departments rather than the sponsorship department. That’s when we decided to give a green angle to the sport that we loved.”
At the first event in Beijing in 2014, the cars’ batteries couldn’t even last a whole race (drivers had to jump into a new car halfway through). The range increased with the introduction of the Gen2 racecar in 2018, and the current Gen3 Evo model surpassed the maximum power of the Gen2 model by 100kW. How drivers manage energy conservation has become an integral part of the spectacle – fans can follow their battery percentage on screen. Last season, the series introduced fast-charging pit stops for drivers to restore 10 per cent of their battery’s capacity in just 34 seconds. “It’s super-stressful,” says Taylor Barnard, a 21-year-old driver whose explosive debut for McLaren last season made him the youngest podium finisher in the sport’s 11-year history. “It’s quite difficult for fans to try to understand the whole concept of it,” he says, “but when you’re into it, it’s super-interesting.”
The rapid technological innovation behind Formula E is what makes it so appealing to manufacturers of consumer EVs, says Dodds. The Nissan Leaf, for example, saw its battery capacity and range increase by 181 per cent in the Japanese carmaker’s first five years in the championship. “We are the laboratory,” says Florian Modlinger, director of Formula E at last year’s winning manufacturer Porsche. “We test under extreme conditions and the road cars are following very, very quickly.” Through regenerative braking, the German marque’s new all-electric Cayenne has the same maximum power recuperation as Formula E’s Gen3 Evo car.
Not all brands see the benefit. Renault departed after season four, shifting its focus to F1 where its results had been improving. BMW claimed the potential for technology transfer had been exhausted by season seven. Audi also bowed out. Mercedes called time after season eight, and Formula E’s 12th grid spot has been empty since. This year saw the surprise exit of McLaren. The official line is that the brand wanted to focus on the World Endurance Championship. “McLaren doesn’t make an electric vehicle,” says Dodds. “Whereas Porsche has a pipeline of electric-vehicle rollout, as do Nissan, Mahindra and Stellantis.”
Despite being backed by Liberty Global, a sister company of F1’s Liberty Media, Formula E has taken its share of criticism from F1. Former F1 CEO Chase Carey described it as “a business-to-business proposition, as opposed to a sport” – implying it was a great marketing opportunity but not very exciting. Nevertheless, viewing figures continue to rise and the racing promises to be exciting – or in world champion and Nissan driver Oliver Rowland’s words, “chaotic”. The numbers speak for themselves. At 2023’s Monaco race, on the same course as the F1 Grand Prix, there were 116 overtakes to Formula E’s 22, aided by a quirk of the E-racing format called Attack Mode. If a driver detours through a designated zone on the track – “like picking up a mushroom in Mario Kart”, says Dodds – they unlock all-wheel drive and an extra 50kW of power for a short period. It’s part of Formula E’s strategy for attracting a younger audience, along with futuristic LEDs on its cars and influencer marketing, but it also helps avoid F1’s “Max Verstappen problem”: “No one’s ever gone back to back as world champion,” says Dodds.
So far, however, the drivers have also failed to achieve Max Verstappen’s name recognition. “We’re very good at keeping the fans that we get in because the racing’s entertaining, but perhaps we don’t attract the new fans as well as we could,” says Barnard. While F1 has benefited from the Netflix hit documentary Drive to Survive, the Amazon Prime equivalent Formula E: Driver failed to take off. “We have to create more noise, be more vocal and show what our technology can do,” says Porsche’s Modlinger. “We should not be happy where we are.”
Could the two disciplines ever be merged into one? Not, it seems, any time soon. The manufacturers in F1 are banking on hybridisation as the near-to-mid-term future for both racing and the automotive industry. F1 fans also aren’t queueing up for electric. When asked by the FT at the Belgian Grand Prix earlier this year whether F1 would ever fully electrify, former F1 champion Jacques Villeneuve answered: “No. Why would you do that? The cars would overheat. It’s not possible. And [as to sustainability] you’re still using energy plugging them in and charging.”
Things could get interesting when Formula E cars’ performance really matches that of F1. Dodds has suggested that Formula E could close the performance gap within the next eight years, which would make the sport very attractive. And teams are now preparing the fourth generation of cars, with permanent all-wheel drive and top speeds of over 200mph, which will hit the track in season 13 in 2026-27.
It’s the next step in the growth plan that has cost Formula E hundreds of millions in losses. “If we said, ‘Look, we just want to make money today,’ we could make money today,” says Dodds. But he still sees opportunity in the electric-vehicle industry: “Electric vehicles are seeing a huge boom, so for us not to invest to allow ourselves to take advantage of the potential growth in the future would seem a bit strange.” And he believes that Formula E could one day surpass its greatest rival. “We’re a scale-up challenger business. If you’re a challenger you always get compared to the champion… Until you’re the champion.”
“As a driver, [the fourth-gen car] really excites me,” says Rowland, who has worked as a test driver for F1. “It is probably going to be the fastest car that I’ve ever driven in terms of overall lap time.” He continues: “I genuinely believe that it’s going to put Formula E way more on the map with motorsport lovers, because it’s going to be a proper race car.”