Jaguar enters electric racing to learn

Jaguar turned heads at the Paris motor show with the Jaguar I-type, which is competing in the new season of Formula E.

Team director James Barclay says the battery-powered championship, whose third season started in Hong Kong on October 9, is moving into a “sweet spot” where manufacturers like Jaguar need to be.

“The timing for this programme couldn’t be better because we do have an electric future, we will have electric cars with Jaguar Land Rover in the near future and that’s where we’re at,” he told Reuters.

“I think fairly soon you will start to see the relevance of the race programme to our road programme coming through as well.”

He added that Formula E is a real world laboratory, a test bed for electrification technology. “It has a real benefit if you talk about taking learnings from the racetrack and applying to our road cars.”

This reinforces the connection between motorport and road-car technology that has always informed Jaguar.

Media reports indicate that Jaguar Land Rover is preparing to launch a compact electric SUV, with photographs emerging of camouflaged and silent cars in testing.

Electric car prototypes and plans dominated the Paris auto show. Jaguar Land Rover chief executive Ralf Speth told Reuters separately that the firm, which built a third of Britain’s 1.6 million cars last year, could invest in a new electric battery and car plant in Britain if conditions were right.

Currently the I-type features a rechargeable energy storage system that propels an electric motor to produce the maximum output of 200kW, which equates to about 270bhp.

Barclay says Formula E would help Jaguar learn about battery performance and heat management in the most demanding conditions.

“There’s some really exciting areas and our engineering team, and our head of engineering, Nick Rogers, is incredibly excited about the learnings we will be able to take away from this programme to apply to our future road cars,” he said.

He pointed out that most major automotive manufacturers now have battery electric vehicles in their future plans and in the near future as well, “so it’s kind of moving into the bullseye from our perspective”.

Jaguar, now owned by India’s Tata Motors, joins the likes of Renault, Citroen’s DS brand, Audi and BMW in the city centre-based championship that visits five continents and includes races in New York for the first time.

Barclay says Jaguar, who left Formula One in failure at the end of 2004, was realistic about what the team could achieve.

“Ultimately we are here to be successful,” he said. “We are very measured in our expectations for this year, and then after this year we start building up our expectations.”

Formula E chief executive Alejandro Agag told Reuters that his series offered more opportunities for technology transfer than others.

“There are lessons you can learn on temperature management of the battery, which is a key element when you are driving an electric car, and in regeneration and recuperation of energy through braking,” he says.

“Those are lessons that can be immediately be used in the road cars. And then of course there are the hardware lessons, the motors, the transmission. Things are evolving incredibly fast in those technologies.”