Lucas di Grassi pulled off an ingenius manoeuvre in last year's round of the Formula E championship in Mexico; was it race craft or witchcraft?
Audi was a founding player in Formula E, through partner ABT, before jumping in, boots and all, for the 2017 season.
Driver Lucas di Grassi won the very first event in 2012. An F3 champ and a former F1 driver, di Grassi also won the Formula E driver’s championship in 2016 and 2017. So he’s been around the traps a while, and seems to know what he’s doing.
Tapping into the energy efficiency of the new Audi FE07, di Grassi will employ a mix of tactics and strategy on race day, as he did to win last year’s round in Mexico, when he overtook competitor Pascal Wehrlein between the final corner and the finish to cross the line just 0.21 seconds ahead of the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team driver.
To hear di Grassi explain it – as he did during an online presentation to international media this week – getting the exit from a corner wrong or blocking a competitor will cost you breathing space and speed in an F1 race, but in Formula E it could cost you energy – and a place on the top step of the podium.
“I prepared for the full race, for those last 50 metres, so I was saving more energy than Pascal; I had a little more efficiency, so I could manage to squeeze him, so make him use more energy. After the last corner… he had run out of energy two metres from the line and I managed to overtake in the last minute. It was fantastic…”
While di Grassi admits to “a lot of andrenaline” during those final moments of the race, the move was a preconceived tactic that paid off, but also sat comfortably within the team’s broader strategy.
“[The win] was due to a long time of preparation, a long time in the simulator, a long time of all the team making the effort – the hardware, the software, everything – combined with the very small details that made the difference between winning and losing the race.”
Explaining how the driver maps out his race in advance – the strategy – and then reacts to changing circumstances during the race – the tactics – di Grassi stressed that use of the car’s energy was of paramount importance.
“Everybody has 52kWh [battery]; you spread that around the whole race, so you try to use very segment… one piece of energy per lap in an equal way during the whole race, and the most efficient way of driving is to accelerate with 100 per cent of the power, so you’re always using flat-out, full power, and then, basically you time your ‘lift’ [off the accelerator] and you time your regeneration to match the energy requirements for that specific race.”
Sounds simple … not. Judging precisely how much energy to keep in reserve – particularly in changing circumstances – to win a race when every other driver is plotting a similar triumphant outcome for themselves almost certainly requires remarkable acuity and more than a little luck.
“So for example, if it rains, you can stay a longer period flat-out, because you’re using less energy,” di Grassi continues.
“If you are on a track that has a very long straight like Mexico or Valencia, you tend to lift for a longer period, so this is how you set up the energy [expenditure], but 100 per cent of the time you’re using the maximum power available, which in the race is 200kW.”
There appears to be a much finer tolerance for energy use in Formula E than in F1. In the latter racing category it probably matter less how much fuel is left in the tank as you pass across the finish line ahead of the other competitors, but the difference of half a kilowatt-hour at the end of the race can make all the difference to winning or losing in Formula E.
“If you finish with an extra half kilowatt-hour, that’s one per cent, you’re wasting energy,” di Grassi explains.
“You could have used that in any moment of the race. So year by year, people are getting better at finishing with zero. We actually program and train very hard to have zero [kilowatt-hours of energy remaining] a few metres before the line, so you can extract the most amount of energy.
“Regardless of increasing this energy or reducing it, people will have the same strategy because it’s the best one; you need to use all the energy evenly through the race to arrive with the best average lap time, which will give you the best position at the end of the race.”
Keyword: Audi driver explains how to win an electric race