By Mark Preston
When you spend long enough in motorsport, you develop a second sense for whether a championship is moving forward or just treading water. Formula E has never suffered from the latter. It’s been restless from day one — a kind of experimental lab disguised as a racing series — and that’s precisely why I was drawn to it.
The conversation on the Everything Electric podcast was a chance to look back at where Formula E began, how it’s evolved, and why its story still feels unfinished.
From Blank Sheet to Global Stage
In the early years, the defining characteristic of Formula E wasn’t technology, competition, or even sustainability. It was uncertainty. No one knew if it would work. The cars were under‑powered, the batteries needed swapping mid‑race, and we were operating with rules and systems written almost as experiments.
That fragility created a culture of invention. If something didn’t exist, you built it. If there was no precedent, you improvised one. As a team principal, that environment felt oddly familiar — like the early days of Super Aguri, when half the technical solutions were created on whiteboards at midnight.
But Formula E matured quickly. Manufacturers arrived. The technology caught up. Cities embraced the championship, and suddenly what began as a niche sustainability experiment had the attention of the global motorsport industry.
The Human Core of an Electric Championship
Despite all the talk of software updates, inverters, and kilowatt‑hours, the thing that kept striking me during the early seasons was how human the whole project was.
Drivers had to completely rewire their instincts. Engineers had to unlearn assumptions carried over from decades of combustion racing. Strategists discovered that energy management wasn’t a side‑quest — it was the race.
This is the part of Formula E people still underestimate. The driver becomes a systems manager. Every lap is a negotiation between pace and conservation. And teams who understand the psychology of this balancing act often outperform those with the biggest budgets.
An Arms Race in Efficiency
What makes Formula E fascinating as an engineering challenge is that there is no hiding place. Marginal gains are amplified. Efficiency is visible. Every watt counts.
The evolution from Gen1 to Gen2 — and now to Gen3 — represents a fundamental shift in how we think about performance. We moved from basic electric powertrains to highly optimised energy systems and regeneration models that now recover more than 40% of the energy used in a race.
That’s an extraordinary figure when viewed through a road‑car lens. It’s also a reminder that motorsport has always been a technology accelerator when you give engineers permission to explore the edges.
Lessons for the Next Generation of Innovators
When people ask what Formula E has taught me, I always return to the idea that innovation thrives at the boundary between known and unknown. Inside the envelope, processes matter: quality systems, repeatability, procedure. Outside the envelope — where Formula E spent much of its youth — everything depends on creativity, resilience, and a willingness to rethink fundamentals.
Formula E succeeded because it embraced that boundary. It allowed experimentation to play a central role. And in doing so, it built a platform where sustainability, high‑performance engineering, and global entertainment can genuinely coexist.
Why the Story Isn’t Finished
Even now, the championship feels like it’s in the middle of its adolescence. There are growing pains — governance, technology freezes, commercial pressures — but there’s also an ambition that you don’t find anywhere else.
Electrification isn’t the future. It’s the baseline. The next frontier is autonomy, connectivity, and integrated mobility systems. Formula E, if it chooses to, could become the experimental playground for all of it.
For me, being part of those foundational years was a privilege. They were chaotic, frustrating, exhilarating — exactly what motorsport should be when it’s reinventing itself.
And that’s the point: Formula E’s greatest contribution may not be the racing at all, but the mindset it’s helped normalise. A mindset where change isn’t feared, but invited.
As the championship keeps evolving, so does its potential. And I’m still convinced the most interesting chapters haven’t been written yet.
