There’s no denying that the past season of Formula E was a huge success for Jaguar. A teams’ world championship and the inaugural manufacturers’ crown represented a decent haul for the British brand, but despite having two drivers in contention right up to the final day, the headline prize evaded them.
Nevertheless, Jaguar TCS Racing team principal James Barclay, refuses to let that define the team’s previous campaign.
“I think the first thing is, the team is always kind of open,” he told RACER in Sao Paulo ahead of the Season 11 opener. “The reality is, yes, we were really disappointed we didn’t win the drivers’ world championship. Professionally and personally, for both our drivers, I would have loved to have seen them achieve that. But two out of three world championships is incredible in Formula E.
“The team had an amazing year last year, and that’s something which everyone on the team, including drivers, is really, really happy about and really passionate about. Yes, of course, on the pressure point of London the final day, as that unfolded, that was a really tough moment when you don’t win one of the three world championships. But as a team, we reflected, we celebrated winning our two championships.”
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On the outside, questions were asked of whether the team should’ve thrown its weight behind one driver in a bid to stop eventual champion Pascal Wehrlein of Porsche, rather than letting Mitch Evans and Nick Cassidy both go at it. But Barclay insists the team did the right thing.
“We looked, as we always do every race, to say, ‘What can we do better over a season?’ And honestly, we, as a team, I think we did the right thing. We gave both drivers equal opportunity going to the last race in London. Imagine someone making that decision, taking you out of that opportunity, when you still stand a chance. And both our drivers did stand a chance.
“So I think there may have been some criticism, but quite frankly, unless you’re in this camp, you don’t understand what you should do.”
Barclay said that on reflection, both Evans and Cassidy were happy with the approach, but should the team find itself in a similar spot at the end of this season, it could change how it approaches things.
“The drivers reflected, and I think also agreed that at least we gave them both equal opportunity,” he said. “But of course, we’ll look at these things and say, probably, if it comes down to the last race, if we’re in a fortunate position where we’re fighting for championships coming the last race of this season, we’ll do things differently, yes, because you do think one way, you learn from that, and you evolve. We’re always a work in progress, (and) that’s definitely something we’ll take into account.
“This year we’d love to be in that position, but we don’t take it for granted. It’s a reset of the competitive order and we have to do a job to put ourselves in that ‘first world problem’ position to say, if we have to make a call around one of the drivers having that lead opportunity come the back end of the season, then we’ll make that call. But we firstly have to get ourselves to that point.”
The new season marks the introduction of the GEN3 Evo formula, and with Jaguar ending the outgoing GEN3 era at the top of the tree, it comes into the new campaign with a target firmly on its back. Work on the new car, however, began two years ago, before its predecessor had even run a race. The intention with the I-Type 7 was, naturally, to improve every element of the I-Type 6, but little did they know just how high the expectations would come to be when they began the project.
“There’s a saying in sport, ‘When you’re leading you’re the target, and when you’re not, you can follow that target,’ so you have to change the game. That’s the reality,” Barclay said. “So we took a decision even before we knew that the I-Type 6 would go on to be the most successful Formula E car, pretty much, since the championship started, with race wins and points at the scored between us and Envision. That’s a hard act to follow, but we didn’t know that at the time.
“We’d like to think we have a really competitive package, but I think at the same time, while we probably have found performance, I think so have all those manufacturers who maybe didn’t have the most competitive packages for the last few years.
“I honestly think in the first part of the season, you can see a number of teams and manufacturers being competitive. It’s about how you work through the early part of the season, how you keep evolving and developing the car to make sure you finish the best way possible and keep improving as the year goes on.
“It’s going to be a really exciting season, but I’d like to think we have the core ingredients to have a really competitive package. We just need to see where everyone else is.”
Unlike the last two seasons, which began at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriquez in Mexico City, this campaign starts at the Anhembi Sambadrome in Sao Paulo, which is more of a typical Formula E circuit. Because of that, Barclay thinks it’ll be more representative of how the rest of the year will look.
“Mexico is a bit of an anomaly, and you see the results of Mexico don’t always kind of reflect the full season to some degree,” he pointed out. “This is a more traditional 90-degree style corner location you see in Formula E — medium-speed, low-speed, a little bit of high-speed, but you don’t have that long, long, long final corner (like) in Mexico. It’s quite unusual for what we see in FE so yes, this is definitely more of a normal track and therefore, I think what you’ll see here will be a probably more representative view of the competitive order.”
