Tag: Jeff Dodds

Amid all the recent talk of “peloton-style” races in Formula E, the championship’s CEO Jeff Dodds offered an explanation of why those races happen, why flat-out sprints are unlikely to happen any time soon, and why he thinks that’s a good thing.

In Formula E, drivers start with less than half the energy required to make it through the race, leading to an abundance of energy saving, which leads to an abundance of overtaking as drivers lift, coast, and brake early to recuperate energy. It’s something that’s drawn mixed reactions, with Jean-Eric Vergne, Formula E’s only two-time champion, slamming the races as “horrible” at the Berlin E-Prix. Dodds, though says feedback from fans has been more positive, praising the increased number of passes that such tactics produce compared to other categories.

“I know we get some driver feedback that they find it more challenging to drive in that style,” Dodds told RACER. “A lot of them have grown up in an environment where they can literally qualify up front and that’s it — then they’re out front, everyone chasing them around — which is, for me, not a particularly interesting spectacle for bringing new fans to the sport.

“We get a load of feedback that, at the moment, the fans find this really compelling — we’re 30 percent growth in media year-on-year because people are tuning in to see this kind of racing.”

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Dodds also pointed out that Formula E — which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this season — has never been about flat-out racing, and that the strategy and saving element has always been a part of the championship’s make-up.

“Formula E is not just about the racing element, it’s also about demonstrating the technology of the car,” he said. “Quite simply, our cars start the race with roughly half of the energy they need to finish the race; the rest is delivered by regeneration in the race. So do the math: if we didn’t do that, it would be a 20-minute race, something like that. Probably over 15-ish laps.

“45 minutes feels like a good payoff for a new motorsports audience. 20 minutes doesn’t. Saying that, this corrects itself over time, because by the time we get into GEN4, with the battery capacity building, within two and a half years we’ll have the ability to do flat-out, 30- to 35-minute races, and a full hour, an hour-and-five, hour-and-10 minute race with recharge capability.”

When asked about potential for an additional sprint race being added to a Formula E race weekend, a la Formula 1, Dodds said, “I’m not writing it off as an idea,” but again suggested that a potential Formula E sprint would still be too short. He feels the series’ Duels qualifying format does enough to satisfy those wanting to see drivers go flat out.

“In Formula 1, even the sprint race is 40-odd minutes, 50 minutes, so it’s roughly half the time of their full race,” he said. “My honest view is, I think 20 minutes will be too short.

“And the qualifying process, you do get that through the quarters, through the semis and in the finals, so you get a big chunk of watching quality, where all is person versus person, 300 or 350 kilowatts, and it’s flat out, go for your life.”

Formula E holds a unique position in motorsports as an electric world championship, one that new CEO Jeff Dodds believes to be a favorable space for explosive growth.

Having joined Formula E as CEO just a month and a half ago, the veteran of Ford, Honda, Callaway Golf and Virgin Media is looking to fully harness the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship’s assets in a way that builds on his own deep passion for motorsports.

“I am very much focused on turning the volume up,” he said ahead of London’s final doubleheader round of the series’ ninth season. “There’s a hardcore motorsport fan that loves racing — I consider myself one of those. I love Formula 1. I love MotoGP, World Superbikes, British Superbikes. If it’s got a drive train or an engine, then I’ll watch it. When I was at Honda, we even raced lawnmowers, so I will watch anything racing.”

Dodds’ vision for Formula E’s future isn’t talking about the noise level, though, but rather the cultural force electric racing can — and needs — to be, bringing compelling technology and competition to markets that both crave and benefit from it.

“I love cars and motorbikes — I love the technology,” he explained. “I love it more for what it can do as opposed to how it does it, so I don’t particularly want to take cars apart and put them back together, although I did do that with my dad when I was a small boy.

“The two things I love about technology are the ability to go faster and further, but also the ability to do that with placing less of a burden on the environment, less of a burden on the planet.

“When you’re in elite motorsports, everyone wants to see performance improvements. We’re on Gen 3 of the car; we’ll go to Gen 3 EVO within two seasons and then we have Gen 4 coming after that. Each of those steps, I’m looking for improvements in efficiency in the car — its sustainability credentials, but also performance. I want it to be able to go faster, not just from the acceleration point of view, but also top speed. That’s one area we’re focused on.

“Also, we want to take our product to more places around the world. We announced Tokyo for season 10, which I’m properly excited about. But there are other big venues in North America we like the look of… We’ve been to New York before. We’ve been to L.A. before. Both are great venues. We need to be back in mainland China at some point. So, ‘faster cars in more destinations’ would be one view.

“We’ve had the most incredibly compelling racing this season — loads of overtaking. We turn up at an event and I’ll ask the experts and nobody can tell me who’s going to win and, even within a team, which of the drivers is likely to win it.

“I just don’t think enough people know about it. Think about it — we’ve got Porsche, Maserati, McLaren, Jaguar… We’ve got great racing in great cities with brilliant cars. We haven’t turned the volume up enough around what we’re doing. One of my great opportunities is to bring this product to more and more people — bigger media deals around the world, broader reach, more social interaction; bring new fans into the sport.”

And where are these new fans to be found?

“First of all, there’s a hardcore motorsport fan that loves racing. I consider myself one of those,” Dodds said, “If you love motorsport, you’ll know what Formula E is; you’ll have watched it. Hopefully you enjoy it…

“[But] we’re not a combustion engine. We don’t make a very loud noise. We don’t smell like grease or gasoline. Some people are never going to watch us. They’re just not, and it’s not a good use of our time to try and convince a small group of people who are never really going to get excited about what we do, to try and convince them to watch us. We’ve got the broader motorsport audience who I absolutely would love to love our products, and many of them do already.

“We’ve also got an audience which is quite unique, and we call them the ‘electric generation.’ This is a younger, more socially aware, environmentally aware group of people that love what we do. There’s more of those people out there, more potential fans for us. But I also saw what happened during lockdown with (Formula 1’s docuseries) ‘Drive to Survive’ — bringing a different audience to Formula 1. They loved the competitive jeopardy, the theater, the drama, so they bought into the sport as well. You went from one person in the household watching it, to both people in the household watching it for quite different reasons. One loved motorsport, one loved the personalities and the drama and the theater of motorsport.

“We have a much broader audience that we can go after. I think the electric generation is more uniquely our audience than, say, MotoGP or Formula 1. If there’s a billion motorsport fans around the world, we have around 200 million of them that love our product today. My job is to get that from 200 to 300 to 400 to 500 by going after those different segments.”

A significant element to bringing in this new generation of fan, Dodds says, is being active in courting them, rather than allowing things to develop organically over time.

“If we rely on organic growth in that audience, it will take too long,” he admitted. “We have to push our product out more assertively, and that means bigger media deals around the world.”

In June, not long after Dodds took the helm, Formula E inked a deal to become Roku’s first live sports package as part of an expansion of the U.S. media rights held by CBS Sports. The goal for Formula E is “to replicate those kind of deals around all big markets in the world,” according to Dodds.

“We need to expose our product to more people, but also we have to leverage the ecosystem. If we just use the little old Formula E voice to tell people about what we’re doing, we’re only ever going to grow incrementally. If we use our voice and the voices of Porsche, Nissan, Jaguar, McLaren, and the driver’s voices, and the different venues that we’re racing, and our partners ABB, Julius Bär, Heineken and all these lovely people we work with… If we all talk about it, this multiplicative effect of getting news out there and telling our story to more people, then we can grow exponentially, and that’s what I’d love to see.”

That messaging hasn’t always been the modus operandi, according to Lucas di Grassi, the elder statesman of Formula E drivers. Over the electric series’ nine seasons, di Grassi says the organizers “could have been more aggressive…and smarter with some of the technical rules to create a faster and better car, to create a faster and better product that is easier for the marketing guys to sell and to promote. I think that’s more or less how Gen 3 is, and Gen 4 is going to be even more.”

When the Brazilian met Dodds for the first time, ideas began meshing almost immediately.

“He seems like a very straightforward guy,” di Grassi said of the new guy in town. “He was asking the right questions and he was listening. It doesn’t matter if he’s going to follow (suggestions) or not, but he was at least listening to everybody that was giving him input.”

One of the ideas di Grassi shared was utilizing the technology to suit Formula E’s geographic expansion to existing circuits — as they did at Portland International Raceway this season — but with an added layer of modularity to suit.

“At the moment,” he said, “(the FIA) is thinking about electric the same as combustion. We have one power, one energy we race at every track exactly the same. That’s the wrong approach. We should be modular to different tracks. So if you want to race in Paris again, in the middle (of the city), where we raced many years, you cannot race with Gen 3 — it’s too powerful. So…reduce the power to the same power level as we had in (the previous Gen) when we raced there.

“So at that race, the power limit is this much less, and then you go to Portland and it’s that much more. And then you could do anything you want with this. There are many ways of doing smarter things when the car is fully electric and fully software-controlled.”

Di Grassi cites Macau, a tradition-steeped but notoriously narrow street circuit, as another potential Formula E venue where the cars could be tailored to suit the track.

“We could do short, we could do the full long track that any car does — pretty much every track. Maybe not with this battery, but let’s say with a slightly bigger battery you could do pretty much every track and then you could modulate the car. You could have moveable aerodynamic devices — you say, ‘Look, for this event you can only run five degrees or zero degrees.’ You can do pretty much whatever you want.”

Dodds channels this same premise into an intrinsic part of Formula E’s future with manufacturer partners — really leaning into the “road relevance” that’s often talked about but rarely executed in modern motor racing, with Porsche being the most recent to re-up its commitment to the series and to the development of the Gen 4 car platform.

“One of the key reasons (why Porsche is) investing, and they want to continue working in this series, is because they do develop their technology for their road cars,” he says. “They develop a lot of technology and they learn a lot of things on the racetrack that goes straight back into their vehicles, and not just in hardware. We know there are examples where Jaguar has worked on efficiency through software in these race cars that they’ve been able to put back into production cars. So this was a massive, massive point for us — accelerating the take-up of EVs across the world.

“I know, as an EV driver — and I have been for a number a number of years now — that two of the big worries for people are, ‘What about the performance of an electric vehicle versus a combustion engine vehicle?’ and secondly, this whole anxiety about range and charging in a different way.

“We’re all used to going to a fueling station. We don’t like change very much as human beings and therefore there’s anxiety around, ‘What if I run out of charge? What distance can I get? Will I be able to charge quickly?’

“What the series is doing right now is showing performance is not a problem. These are 200mph racing cars that are only electric and they’re getting 0-60mph or 0-100mph — only using one drive train — in (something like) 2.7s. So imagine what’s possible with (both axles) opened up.

“The second thing is if we can race around a track for 40 minutes and we can start the race with only having 50 percent of the energy we need in the battery, but through regeneration get the other 40 to 50 percent throughout the race, you don’t need to worry about whether you’re going to be able to make it to go and see your mom and dad and back. This technology is developing really quickly.

“The fact that we are influencing production cars and helping reduce anxiety in people so that, when it comes to their next car, they may be considering an EV where previously they wouldn’t have done, then we’re doing a brilliant job. I would just love to do it and influence more people by being a louder voice, as opposed to the number of people we influence today.

“When we talk to the manufacturers about this series, they realize how important having electric credibility is for them as they move their whole range to EVs. Some of them say they want to have one electric variant in every one of their models by 2026; we’ve got others that say they only want to sell an electric car by 2026. We have varying levels of ambition, but they all know in order to make that change, they need to have credibility with electric vehicle production and this race series brings them direct credibility.”

With the state of Formula E going through such a pivotal transition period, former CEO Jamie Reigle has stuck around in an advisory role to help Dodds get acclimated, but the newcomer is finding the transition immensely enjoyable.

“There’s a couple of things that are very different,” Dodds said. “I love motorsport and I love entertainment and theater and all of that drama. The end of the race season has been brilliant for me because I get to see people excited. A large group of people turn up to work for Formula E, or to work for our partners or the race teams, and they just love what they’re doing. They’re not here necessarily just to earn a living; they’re here because they’re passionate about what they do every day, and I get it kind of by osmosis. I get to absorb some of that energy and that excitement from just being around people who love it.

“The second thing, which is maybe a little bit different for me, is I’m used to working in an industry that’s in a very, very mature stage of its life cycle and it has headwinds. There are tailwinds in Formula E around sustainability and around this particular series and sport. It’s nine years old. It feels like a start-up still. It’s come out the other end of COVID and starting to grow again — and grow rapidly.

“To be in an environment where the people are passionate about what they’re doing every day and they love to be here, we’ve got tailwinds. We have got some headwinds as well, but they’re outweighed by the tailwinds. So to be in that environment is super-exciting. I’m loving it.”