was pretty ominous. Is consistency and exerting the maximum pressure on your competitors in qualifying your best approach to staying in the championship hunt?
We must keep pressure everywhere. Not just in qualifying – which is critically important – but through every session. I think that’s one of the defining factors and exciting things about Formula E. Everything happens in one day and you have to be at 110% for every single session; whether that’s free practice, qualifying, super-pole or the race.
We will keep applying pressure throughout the entire day - and off racing days – and hope that our competitors – whether Renault or Audi – will make mistakes. If we make less mistakes and keep that pressure applied, we will get the results.
Will you look to be extracting hidden performance? Will the remaining track configurations suit the strengths of the car?
We’ve been searching pretty hard for performance, so I don’t know if there’s much performance hiding anywhere (laughs). But we’re still keeping our engineers on it and I think we’re relying on the talents of our two exceptional drivers to give us the performance that we want.
There are some tracks that we’re approaching that do suit us and there are others that don’t suit us as well. I don’t want to give away too much as we approach the remaining half of the season but certainly there opportunities for us.
Williams Advanced Engineering’s Gary Ekerold has been fairly pragmatic in saying the 2016 regulations have stretched the design brief intended for their batteries. After issues in Putrajaya, your thermal and energy management has been exemplary. What solutions were found?
It’s a case of applying the time and understanding the equipment that you have and how to get the best from it, plus also how to protect from some of the areas where there are very few limits or margins left.
The battery we run right at its limit, so understanding where those limits are and how you approach it; e.g. how the battery’s thermal energy will relay in certain areas and managing that. So yes, I think (along with other teams) we’re managing our energy and our temperatures very well.
Remember this gets down to interpretation of how the driver applies. You can tell a driver to be cautious, but really he must be able to relay all these various parts of information on the track. So as much as we engineer it, it’s also down to the interpretation of the driver at the same time to deliver the battery efficiency we’re looking for.
Do you think there’s some truth in the idea that that some teams may have found a way to store supplementary energy via larger capacitors?
There’s lots of different way that you can cheat, but I wouldn’t want to think that our competitors are cheating. I think there’s truth in the ability to do this. Are people doing this? I really hope they’re not.