“The way people look at us on track and in the paddock has definitely changed,” says Frederic Bertrand, team principal and Mahindra Racing CEO

Mahindra Racing’s journey in Formula E started from the inception of the all-electric racing championship, and the Indian racing team was one of the first teams to join the grid in 2014. Recently, the racing team unveiled a new livery for its race car, the M12 Electro, ahead of the upcoming Formula E season, while launching a new Scream Electric campaign to increase the popularity of Formula E and their racing team in India. We recently had the opportunity to interact with Frederic Bertrand, Mahindra Racing CEO and team principal, as well as Edoardo Mortara and Nyck de Vries, the team’s driver duo, talking about the team’s performance in the previous season and also gaining insights into what we can expect from them in Season 12 of Formula E which will commence on December 6.

Mahindra Racing’s performance in the Season 11 of Formula E was one of its most dominant yet. At the end of the season, the Mahindra Racing team stood fourth in the championship standings with a total of 186 points, and a big part of that success was the constant development of its race car. Frederic Bertrand, Mahindra Racing CEO and team principal said, “A big part of the success which is currently happening is that we accepted a big challenge which was to develop a new car. The new car we are currently and permanently developing, which means that we have developed the car all along Season 11 already.” Bertrand also explained that there is also a mindset change in the team as well, which is now striving to better its own performance. “A lot of the job has been done on software, and then we are testing. We’ve had several sessions of testing so that we can find some additional performance in the car, coming either from what we develop, software, but also from the inputs of Nyck and Edoardo on what they would like for the car to be better for the way we want to exploit it and to push. If you have looked at the last season, there are areas where we have not been able to be good enough.”

Bertrand spoke about qualifying as one of the areas where the team needed to work on. Formula E has a unique qualifying format which starts with the Groups stage. Here the entire grid is split into two groups of 11 based on the position in the Drivers' World Championship. In the Groups stage, the drivers battle it out and set lap times in a 10-minute session using a maximum 300kW of power. The fastest four from each group progress into the Duels stage, where these eight drivers compete against each other in the quarter-finals, with the power cap now upped to 350kW, which is later followed by the quarter-final, the semi-final and the final, all of which help determine the grid order. Bertrand explains, “The second (350kW Duel stage) phase we were not so good at managing to go through. That's definitely one of the areas we have worked on to make sure that we can start closer from P1 to 5 instead of starting from P5 to 10, and that's one step which was important in the development program. The second is that we have been able to quickly secure good points, good reliability with the car, then podiums, but we still missed the top step on the podium. So winning races is definitely the goal.”

The team principal also spoke about the setup of the race car and how it has been honed over to perform better on multiple types of tracks. “One thing which was very interesting in Season 11 is that before we had a car which was sometimes good on street circuits and not good on permanent tracks. We probably have created a car which is now able to be good on any type of track layout.” Edoardo Mortara added, “In Season 10, we seemed to be lacking a little bit of pace on normal racetracks. But I must say that we improved quite a bit like in Season 11. And we seem to have a car now that is actually performing quite well everywhere. Obviously, there are still things that we try to improve to be even more competitive. But we seem to have a car that is generally speaking quite competitive on every racetrack.” Nyck de Vries weighed in and added to the topic, saying, “Scoring points and securing good results is not necessarily just linked to the performance of the car. I think we have a car that let’s say, has been within the top 7 pretty much consistently along the season. But I think as a team, we've been lacking sometimes a little bit on permanent circuits where the energy sensitivity was very high. Nyck explains “And that's why maybe you would say statistically we've performed a little bit better on the street tracks. But I personally don't necessarily think that's related to performance matters, but more related to race understanding and execution matters."

When asked about the competitor to watch out for, the Mahindra Racing team principal said, “Because Formula E is so competitive, the gap between number one and number last is very close. It's what you can see in qualifying and you can see also in races. I think it's quite difficult to predict race winners in Formula E. It's probably one of the most difficult sports to predict a winner race. Nevertheless, right now I think the good thing is that we have no fear from anyone. We don't fear anyone. If we do our job properly, if we execute well, we can be the one that everybody is afraid of. That's definitely what we would love to do. It's something that has changed a lot. If you look at the way people look at us on track and in the paddock, it's definitely one part which has changed in the last months.” Bertrand says with a hint of pride, “For a period of time we were not considered as a great competitor for the win. And now every time we get on track, even from FP1, you can see that a lot of drivers, a lot of engineers, and a lot of other team principals are looking very differently at Mahindra Racing. And that's what is more important than anything else. The others will always be there. What we are focused on is our own job, to make sure that we deliver properly the racing we have to deliver, get as prepared as we can for the races, so that we start from the very beginning of the weekend to be competitive. And from there, we have the two guys driving those cars and the right engineers behind studying data to make sure that we improve in each session and we can deliver a good race each time. That's the real goal. It's that the others are afraid of us and not so much afraid of anyone else.”

Learnings from the Formula E team are also finding their way to Mahindra’s roadgoing EVs. The race cars wear the same Infinite Peaks logo that the BE 6 and the XEV 9e get and there are other technical collaborations too. “We have some engineers from MRV (Mahindra Research Valley) integrated in the team and we have some exchange programmes so that they can be trained with us and then go back to the MRV with the experience of racing, motorsport and the stress around short-term development and high-performance development. In the same way we are learning a lot from the car, on software, on how to improve efficiency and this type of technical background is now being transferred slowly to MRV to make sure that the next cars are influenced or at least they have some knowledge about the extreme conditions that motorsport is helping to create and it's kind of an accelerator for development for the future.”

The Mahindra Racing Formula E team clearly seems to be primed and ready for the upcoming season of racing, and Season 12 of the championship will be kicking off in Sao Paulo, Brazil on December 6. Stay tuned to the motorsport section of our website for more Formula E updates!