Formula E has spent the past 12 years pushing electric vehicle technology to its limits on the racetrack.
But the championship’s influence doesn’t have to stop at the chequered flag. As global EV sales continue to uptick across the globe with energy efficiency and performance grounding the sector, the principles that define motorsport are have become very relevant to the road.
“It’s not just track to road, it’s also road to track,” FIA Head of Championship for Formula E Pablo Martino tells Zag Daily.
As Formula E enters a new era defined by Gen4-driven performance, Zag sits down with Pablo at the 2026 London E-Prix to explore what lessons the EV industry can take from motorsport and where the two worlds are already converging.
Zag Daily: How do you think the mobility industry views Formula E? Is Formula E an R&D testbed for electric vehicles or solely a motorsport showcase?
Pablo: “It’s a little bit of both. Across the whole motorsport portfolio, Formula E is the one with the most remarkable direct transfer between what happens on the track and what happens in mobility. It’s not just track to road, it’s also road to track. EV technology is relatively new and it’s constantly evolving. The constant technical evolution is providing new opportunities for motorsport with investment going into both the track and the mobility industry. Transfer is happening in both directions and it’s important that that’s well understood.”
Zag Daily: Can you give an example of a track-to-road technology transfer that has been driven by Formula E?
Pablo: “One of the biggest evolutions in electric vehicles is the efficiency of the engine. In ICE vehicles, efficiency is around 50% – that’s the amount of energy or power that is transformed into movement. You lose a lot in heat. In electric vehicles, energy efficiency has evolved from around 80% to 91% today. In Formula E, we have to be super efficient and we’re now achieving 97% efficiency in our engines. Going beyond that frontier is almost physically impossible because there’s always going to be a loss of energy from somewhere.
“It’s very interesting to see how the EV market has evolved towards something that has grounded Formula E from the start. We’re a young championship of just 12 years, but we really believe Formula E has driven the performance-seeking evolution in the road EV market. The more efficient you are, the better. You maximise the energy stored in the battery and therefore you can travel for a longer time at a specific pace. It’s a performance advantage on the track but the strive in performance is happening in parallel in the wider industry. Although, it’s important to remember that construction costs and raw materials bring additional limitations to keeping road cars efficient which we don’t have as much in motorsport. If manufacturers aim for 97% efficiency in their cars, they’ll be practically unsellable because the price will be through the sky.”
Zag Daily: Is there anything EV manufacturers can only get from Formula E that they can’t get from their own R&D?
Pablo: Of course – market positioning. It’s the idea of trying to be the first against others and pushing your boundaries to the maximum. If a manufacturer has a Formula E team that pushes those boundaries, that public exposure trickles down onto their road vehicles. The exposure is much less than in the championship but it’s there. That happens in all sports. By pushing the boundaries of competition, you position your brand in front of your direct competitors on the market.
“This can be really interesting for brands that are trying to make a name for themselves and aren’t hugely known or, for instance, the increasing number of Chinese brands entering US and European markets. It’s a unique credibility that sometimes only modern sports can bring. An electric vehicle manufacturer, I think, has no better platform than Formula E to showcase the capacity of the brand to outperform another EV on the market. I don’t think there’s another industry that has that massive direct consumer reach and impression like motorsport does.”
Zag Daily: Over the next five years, what do you think EV manufacturers should be paying the greatest attention to in motorsport?
Pablo: “The path to performance. We’re a competition and our roadmap is performance-driven. The Gen 4 vehicle is just the first step of that. If we take a brief look at the competition’s history, the first four years were about showing that EVs can belong in a competition. Nothing was more important than just showing that – even if the cars had to stop mid-range to swap batteries or cars or the batteries weren’t big enough – that this show was possible. By the Gen 3, we’d pushed the boundaries of efficiency with cars that had smaller batteries and higher densities. Now with the Gen 4, everything is about performance. We’re going to ask the cars to perform better within a racing environment and it’s going to put Formula E on a similar level to other racing categories. Over the next five years, Formula E is heading towards a much more performance-driven evolution which EV manufacturers should take note of.”
Zag Daily: What technologies will drive this shift?
Pablo: “Batteries. There’s still a performance cap because of batteries. You can’t increase power if the battery technology doesn’t improve. Performance gain comes from improved battery cell construction and there will be new technologies that aren’t even on the market right now. The aim will be keeping the batteries the same weight but letting them store more energy. That energy will make the Formula E championship grow in terms of performance.”
Zag Daily: Autonomy and software-defined technologies are changing mobility in the real world. Will Formula E have a part to play?
Pablo: “We are a sport and we are a sport of athletes. We will continue being a sport of athletes. Even though we’ve imagined ways of incorporating autonomous driving into the championship, this is not something that will happen any time soon.
“AI capabilities have, more generally, played a role in the championship for the last two to three years and that is increasing. Our cars are intelligent because they have AI applications that know how to manage energy better than the drivers themselves. The integration is there and we foresee that it will increase on the race control side of things. But for the race itself, the driver will continue being the difference that makes the competition.”
