Jaguar TCS won its first Formula E Teams title on Sunday at London’s unique indoor/outdoor ExCel Centre track, marking the culmination of more than eight years of work since the carmaker first bet on electric racing.
It was a bittersweet victory for the Coventry-based luxury carmaker. Its two New Zealander drivers, Nick Cassidy and Mitch Evans, scuppered their chances to lift the coveted driver’s championship, leading to scenes of devastation in the team’s VIP area.
The team recovered their emotions to celebrate the win. And for the bigwigs at Jaguar HQ, the victory was a reminder of the soon-to-be all-electric brand’s hopes for the future.
The EVs of tomorrow
The appeal to a manufacturer of owning a racing team is apparent. It can reinvigorate an old brand, particularly one marketing itself on speed and innovation. Race day is an excellent opportunity to wine and dine clients, too.
They can also show off their mass-market cars, the big money spinner behind the glamor of a racing team.
Speaking at the Financial Times Future of the Car conference last year, Aston Martin boss Lawrence Stroll boasted of how his company had sold between 300 and 400 of its Vantage F1 edition cars because a replica had featured as F1’s safety car.
That would have been equivalent to around $80 million in revenue.
Perhaps most importantly, though, racing is a test bed for cars that will one day scorch up Europe’s motorways.
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which has pledged to build only electric cars from next year, has naturally chosen Formula E as its test bed.
When JLR recruited James Barclay to become its electric racing team’s first principal in 2015, he says he and his team literally started with a blank piece of paper.
“We wanted to use it as a real-world testbed for EV technology,” Barclay told Fortune at a roundtable on Friday.
“And doing so is likely to be slightly ahead of the curve of on-road technologies on production vehicles.”
After eight years of working at the paddock, the carmaker has begun to reap the rewards of those innovations in a fast-moving sector.
Last year at the Monaco E-Prix, the team trialed a “re-refined” transmission fluid developed by Castrol.
Silicon carbide semiconductor technology, first developed in Jaguar’s 2017 Formula E car, was rolled out to its commercial models in 2021.
“It pushes you to do things that normal development wouldn’t because you have to innovate to beat the competition,” Barclay told Fortune.
Future innovations
Barclay puts the lag time between discoveries on the Formula E track making it into a commercial car at about four years, as was the case with its carbide technology.
Part of that comes from its partnership with team sponsors Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), whose parent company also owns JLR.
Like JLR, TCS had a presence in F1 through a tie-up with Ferrari but left it behind to focus on endurance running through its sponsorship of marathons like London and New York.
It has since partnered with Jaguar in Formula E.
The manufacturer has used a “digital twin” developed by TCS, which helps the JLR run simulations with digital copies of the group’s cars and drivers.
“The technology in the car is super important,” says Abhinav Kumar, TCS’s global chief marketing officer.
All of Jaguar’s and TCS’s innovations, Barclay says, will lead to a quicker-charging, more efficient, and faster cars.
Last Sunday was the last time the Jaguar TCS team would wheel its Jaguar I Type 6 Formula E car into the garage, making way for the carmaker’s next, more advanced iteration.
But before long, the power train, re-refined oil, and innovative software used on the race track will have its fingerprints across the globe in Jaguars on the roads.
