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Formula E returns to the US this weekend with the inaugural Qualcomm New York City ePrix. This is a landmark event for the all-electric racing series, managing to stage a race in one of the five boroughs of New York, something that eluded the best efforts of Formula 1 and Indycar over the years.
While this is an important event for all the teams, it’s especially significant for Andretti Formula E, one of the two American teams in the series, and one of the country’s most successful racing outfits, which includes a dramatic win in this year’s Indianapolis 500, where it also ran Fernando Alonso.
Ahead of the race, we caught up with JF Thormann, the Executive Vice President of Andretti Autosport, to get his views on the event and his team’s performance so far this season.
How important is this race?
It’s huge for us. First of all, on the commercial side we have been completely swamped with credential requests, and they are coming from some of our Indycar sponsors and prospective partners who want to have a look and of course all our friends/business associates. We are way overbooked and we’ll be lucky to supply half of them. It’s big. Our brand – even though it’s world recognised – it’s really well known in the US and after winning the Indy 500 we are at the front of people’s minds right now, so I think that will draw some attention.
This is a massive coup for Formula E…
We told Alejandro [Agag] and Alberto [Longo] that there is no way you are going to get a race in New York, we’ve had Mario and Michael trying for years. But they did it, they pulled it off. It’s really impressive. We were there at the launch reception and it was right there, opposite the Statue of Liberty with the Manhattan skyline in the background – it’s perfect.
How do you think the New Yorkers will embrace it?
I think the true New Yorker will be intrigued. They’ll think ‘what is this?’ and ‘how can a race be taking place in our city?’. We believe that there will be some who are very intrigued by it and if we get a nice day they’ll go over the Brooklyn Bridge and come down to the water and have a look.
Can New York put Formula E on the global motorsport map?
I think it can. Formula E has to do a really good job with this one in terms of promoting and driving the awareness into the city. It’s so eclectic anyway and I think you’re going to see that there are so many pockets of fans that are there. There’s a large Asian community who will want to watch the race because they are really big on car racing and especially electric cars, the Hispanics too. It’s a great mix and I think there are a lot of fans In New York City itself.
How do you feel Formula E has done in terms of growing a fan base in the US?
It’s slowly but surely. It starts with the core fans, the knowledgeable ones, the ones who know about Formula 1 and NASCAR and NHRA or dune buggies on the moon! So they are the obvious ones, but I can see in some of my travels that people are getting awareness through the Andretti brand, they hear we are involved in it and ask ‘what’s that?’ and once they look at it they think it’s really cool because it has all the modern day buzzwords and it is sustainable and so on.
I guess the missing piece of the puzzle is a hometown driver…
Yep there is. We’ve had a couple in our cars, we had Marco Andretti and we had Scott Speed for a while. It’s funny, it’s something that’s also lacking in Formula 1, so potentially we have to look a little more carefully, but there are some guys but there involved in different forms of racing. It’ll come I think, it’s just a matter of time before there’s a young American driver.
How do you feel it has gone this year?
Our success at the 500 has resulted in a message from the boss saying we’d better start winning here real soon! For a variety of reasons – typically there’s been some bad luck – and there’s been some mistakes made from all sides of the team and you put that together and it’s made for a difficult season. We’re looking forward to some of the upgrades we’ve got coming on the car and we think we should have turned a corner. We can see bits of it internally, it may not have showed up on the results yet, but we can see it in the sim work and we should be stronger now.
How are your Season 4 plans progressing or are you keeping your powder dry for Season 5?
The obvious goal is Season 5 with the new cars etc, but our objective is that we have to win and we’ve done a lot of development for Season 4 and we are hoping that will come. In a sense we are a bit behind because we used the Season 1 car in Season 2, so when we went into Season 3 maybe it was something that should have been there for Season 2, so we’re working hard to catch that up and when the field gets levelled again in Season 5, I think we’ll be ready.
What’s your personal opinion on whether there should be pitstops in Season 5?
I appreciate the fact that Formula E is trying to make something be different and unique and sometimes you have to be careful that it doesn’t cheapen the show, but I appalled the way that they are thinking out of the box, they are asking all of the team principals for their input as well. I think the consensus is that they will find something that will be interesting and will be unique to Formula E and help drive interest in the series.
With Season 5 being a clean sheet of paper, does that raise the impetus for you to get on the pace?
Big time, we’ve lived it a few times in Indycar going through various generations of bodykits – and we are actually going through that for next year – and we know what that does and what we can do with a clean sheet and it gives a team like ours that has some resources the opportunity to get back to where it should be.