The GEN3 era has been a challenge for Mahindra Racing so far. A single podium – in the first race of the ruleset back in 2022 – is the best the team has had to show for its work with the latest incarnation of Formula E car. With that in mind, the team has pressed the reset button ahead of the upcoming season, where the GEN3 Evo regulations will come into force.
As the name suggests, the new cars will be an evolution of those that came before them. But Mahindra has opted for an entirely fresh approach, instead developing a new drivetrain from scratch to use in the next two seasons rather than developing the one it used in the last two.
“It’s not an easy one, because you cannot say that everything was wrong on the previous one.” team principal Frederic Bertrand tells RACER of the decision to start afresh. “The difficulty is that we are speaking about details. We’re talking about half a percent. You speak about small changes somewhere which potentially creates a big step, but you don’t find the silver bullet where you say, ‘Ah, I changed this, and I go from nowhere to I am the best.’ Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.
“Even if you identify those weaknesses, you need to make sure that you accumulate all those small corrections or improvements. And sometimes the question is, if you touch the limit of the hardware, you need to think of a new one, and that’s probably what has driven the approach.”
Those small changes, corrections and improvements haven’t just come from within the team itself, but with whom the team chooses to work with as well.
“We knew quite easily what was not at the level of the previous car, so it was quite easy to identify the areas where we were not strong enough, or where we were not at the level of the competition,” he says. “So we started by identifying all those areas, and then we started to understand what could be the options for us to make a drastic change. Sometimes it’s more people, sometimes to work on it, sometimes it’s changing the supplier, or working differently with the supplier.
“You need to make sure that everybody is fully aligned on what we are ready to do to achieve what we want, and you need to share the same type of approach. I think the risk sometimes is that you end up with a supplier who is happy with 95 percent of the job done — and unfortunately, 95 percent of the job done in our system is like being nowhere. So you need to find someone who will never be happy, more or less, or happy when you reach 101, 102 percent.
“So that’s what also drives the decision. You need to make sure that you are confident enough in the fact that the one who will work with you shares the same very ambitious strategy. Maybe the right way is to say you need to find someone that will challenge you, for sure; but if, from the beginning, you feel that they are demanding, that will raise the bar.”
A major focus for the team during the development of its GEN3 Evo car has been efficiency. It’s a crucial factor in Formula E, with drivers starting every race with around half the energy they’ll need to finish a race. A fast car is only half of the equation, with a car that can allow a driver to perfectly manage energy just as vital. And while the efficiency element is crucial, improving in other areas can increase that, too.
“We were not efficient enough last year,” Bertrand says. “So efficiency definitely, and then a lot of small elements which are giving confidence to the drivers in the way they can drive the car to the limits.
“So it can be braking, it can be the way they manage the energy themselves, and they can attack more or be more in the fight. Because right now, what we were suffering from is definitely holding on to efficiency, mostly. And because you cannot be confident in the level of efficiency you have at the start, then you start to have a strategy which is influenced by the fact that you know that you are weak. We wanted to deploy a strategy which is maybe more aggressive, maybe more offensive for the future, and not so much on trying to hope that something will happen to the others.”
As well as a fresh drivetrain, another major change for the Mahindra organization this season will be the lack of a customer team. Unlike the likes of reigning manufacturers’ champion Jaguar, Nissan, and Stellantis which will all supply two teams, and Porsche will provide for three, Mahindra’s tech will only be found at the factory team this season, with Abt splitting in favor of a works partnership with Lola and Yamaha.
The move allows Mahindra to focus its efforts, but there is a downside to scaling back, too.
“On one side, you know that you will suffer from that lack of information, because when you are last at one event, if the other team has something good or better, at least, you have a direction to go in,” Bertrand admits. “Now might be something where if we are wrong, we struggle.
“The good thing is that we are in a third phase of using GEN3 more or less, so it’s not exactly the same, but still, most of the tracks are … so that that gives a little bit less of stress on data, because we already have a lot.
“But still, it’s true that it’s a risk. It’s something which we will miss, but definitely the way we were structured in the past was maybe too early for us to have a customer team in some other ways, because we had not enough people, not enough understanding, not enough control of what we were doing ourselves. And then we were challenged by someone else who was expecting a higher level from us — at that moment, it was a bit too much. So that’s why it is a minus and plus on both sides.”
There’s been a lot of change at Mahindra, but one thing that will remain the same will be the driver line-up, with Edoardo Mortara and Nyck de Vries both remaining amid the revolution, being the final pieces of a puzzle that’s been gradually building over several months.
“It’s revolution, but with stability,” Bertrand says. “The revolution, I would say, was in season 9-10, and for the first time, 11, we start with the team fully structured. So all the guys we have hired are in because all the ‘gardening leaves’ are done — we had hired people six months ago [but] we had to wait until last week to get some of them.
“I had a cool summer because my drivers are here, both happy to be here, not even discussing what to do. It was safe for me, but which was not the case last time.”
Nevertheless, the job’s not done. Bertrand says the team now needs to find the last “five percent” but he knows that the team has to keep its expectations in check while competing against major manufacturer behemoths.
The team ended last season with three top-five finishes across the last four races – while former customer Abt managed four straight in the same time, plus a double points finish in the season finale in London – and it will want to build upon that momentum with its new car and refreshed backroom roster.
“It gives a lot of confidence with the fact that now we can start being ambitious, while remaining very humble,” Bertrand says. “We are not the one people expects to perform. We are not the one able to spend crazy money. We have to do it with a very, let’s say, rational budget, and we try to spend the money at the right place.
“But what is true is that, for the first time, there will be less excuses. That’s also one thing for me which is more dangerous in a way. I will not be able to blame the car of last year. That car is not a winning car in the design and in the money we spent.
“We raised the bar everywhere, so we should be in the mix, and we need to be in that mix in the second half of the season. We know that the first half will be kind of a learning curve, and I hope it will be steep, so that we can very quickly get into that area where we can regularly making good points, scoring top 10s, etc.
“I want to manage the enthusiasm right now. I want to manage so people keep that momentum, which has grown slowly at the end of season 10, that if we do things well, even with a car which was not fulfilling all our expectations at that time, we were able to be there on a genuine basis.”
