In just the second season of its technical partnership with Citroen's DS brand, Richard Branson's Virgin Racing team has established itself as regular front runners in the all-electric series.
With an experienced technical team and an exciting driver lineup now in place, DS Virgin Racing are positioning themselves to become serious title challengers in the years to come.
Our reporter, Rob Watts, caught up with some key figures from the team during the Monaco ePrix weekend to find out their thoughts on the team's progress and on the growth of Formula E as a series.
ALEX TAI - TEAM PRINCIPAL
Rob Watts: Alex, what's been your main goal this season, with regards to positioning the team for future success?
Alex Tai: We need to focus on many facets. Not just to maximise our chances of success now tactically, but also strategically for the years to come. We’ve been working on the season five car, let alone the season four car, for some time so we’ve got more than half an eye on a number of things for the future.
We’ve got to try and stay ahead. Our purpose as a team is to power innovation, and that has to happen consistently. We might have a really quick car now, but we have to keep moving forwards to stay ahead of the likes of Renault and Audi.
It’s not just me, there’s a big team of guys, and I rate my team. One of my key jobs is to pull together a great team - not just the drivers, but that’s a team of engineers, mechanics, development specialists, so
that’s really my job, pulling the team together and keeping them moving in the right direction.
RW: With the growth of the championship, are you now finding it easier to recruit tech and engineering expertise from other series?
AT: It’s really straightforward, just pay them more money! No, that’s actually not the case. What the real racers want to do is to win. The best way for me to recruit people is to give them a chance to win. I pay well, not any more than anyone else and less than some people that are not as successful, but what I do is give them a chance for success. The drivers really don’t care how much they get paid to a large extent; they want a team and kit that is going to give them a chance to stand on the top step of the podium. Those are the only drivers I'm interested in, drivers who are interested in and capable of winning. If they’re only in it for the money, then that’s the wrong motivation.
RW: There are some big tech changes coming in for season five, but what do you think Formula E needs to focus on to continue growing as a series?
AT: I think one of the fundamental things we need to do is stabilise the calendar. I think we need to have a race every three weeks to keep the momentum going; it’s not acceptable to have six to eight weeks in between races because people forget they’re even in a season.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult for some cities to close down their streets for racing, so it’s inherently difficult to get these things going. When the series is getting more attention, and the locals don’t mind us closing down the streets, we’ll have that stability in the race programme, so we don’t lose races. There have been some locations that we’ve said that we’re going to that haven’t happened for one reason or another, and we’ve lost some races - London for example because some people didn’t want us racing in their back garden.
Once we some predictability as to when
races are going to happen, we’re going to build a following, and I think there’s a big future for this series.
SYLVAIN FILIPPI - DEPUTY TEAM PRINCIPAL
Rob Watts: With the resources that DS have at its disposal, how much do the season five regulations offer an opportunity to move further up the grid?
Sylvain Filippi: It’s a huge opportunity. To be fair, us at Virgin Racing we joined at the very beginning. Now all the car manufacturers are coming in, and that’s fantastic news because that’s what we want. We want to stimulate development as fast as possible, and we want this technology to go to road cars as much as we love racing. We would not be here if it were just for the sake of it. If this technology just stayed on race cars, then there isn’t much point. The whole point is for this technology to go into road cars.
It’s good that we are with car manufacturers and pretty much all the teams are doing something. In terms of opportunity, it’s huge because it’s a brand new car. At the moment, everything we’re doing is an evolution now of what we’ve been doing before. So, teams who did a good job, you tend to improve rather than start again, but season five we all start from scratch.
The roadmap is extremely challenging because the battery is almost twice as big (54kwh compared 28kwh), but we have to do the same race distance, and we have to do it with more power. Normally out of this triangle of criteria, one has to give, but somehow we have to. So the challenge is to develop a more powerful powertrain but much lighter than what we’re doing at the moment. The battery will be a little bit heavier because it has so much more capacity, so it’s an extremely challenging engineering design.
We will all start from scratch. The only thing that will not change radically is the architecture of the car so that the battery will be in roughly in the same place.