until Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League
More and more racing categories now have a Formula 1 ‘Drive to Survive’-esque TV series examining the trials and tribulations of its cast and what makes each of them tick. Formula E is no different.
The series started its documentary series, Unplugged, by recounting the 2021 season but frankly, despite occasional points of interest such as Sebastien Buemi giving errant cameras absolute daggers, it was all a bit tedious.
The second series, detailing the final Gen2 season in 2022, is thankfully much better and saints be praised it will actually be distributed to actual broadcasters.
This year’s offering has a much more structured emphasis on the stories that mattered and perhaps that was a legacy of the sporting rules changes that made it a campaign far easier to understand and predict.
Yet still there remains a slightly formulaic approach with too much emphasis on pointless narration. The ones that work, work well, including Dario Franchitti. His experience of digging deep into how championships are won and lost provides vital illustration throughout.
There are 12 episodes exploring the season but the most rewarding parts of it are getting to know the drivers away from the hot-house race weekends.
Jean-Eric Vergne, Antonio Felix da Costa and Dan Ticktum are especially interesting and poignant case studies in these segments.
Vergne’s presence is quite touching as he spends some rare time with his younger sister, Lea.
He relates how he feels slightly guilty that he probably sucked a lot of time out of her childhood when their parents attended his kart races. Now he feels obliged to make those lost weeks and months up to her in a moving portmanteau of sibling love and professional ambition.
Similarly, da Costa pontificates on life in general from his hometown of Cascais, where he philosophises on life by offering up meaningful topics such as “perspective”, which he considers to be “one of the most important words to me”.
It’s here you see the real identities of the stars rather than automatons often seen at the events, although Formula E doesn’t suffer this fate as much as F1 in particular.
Probably the best episode is the one that dwells on DS Techeetah, then in its last season before the unlikely switch of DS to Penske occurred. This centres on Vergne and da Costa, who have had a (sometimes) simmering and (sometimes) respectful relationship as stablemates.
The one big revelation from a sporting point of view happens between the black and gold cars when it’s revealed that da Costa allowed Vergne to take a crucial pole position at Jakarta when in the midst of what was then his own title challenge.
Da Costa gets a message loud and clear from his side of the garage that he would “not fight [Vergne]” in the final qualifying duel. A deal had been done. The team and especially da Costa did well to hide it from the world. (And, of course, it was the only race of the season The Race didn’t attend!)
As Vergne’s title push crumbles in subsequent races, it comes to a messy head with an unseemly cluster in London when the two hit each other repeatedly.
That tetchiness is brought out well in an edgy episode in which da Costa’s move to Porsche is also touched on, albeit in a somewhat contrived fashion, as the scene is scripted with his brother about what he ‘might’ be doing in 2023. It was well known at the start of 2022 and possibly even late 2021 that he would be joining Pascal Wehrlein in Stuttgart for Gen3.
The last episode, which looks at the title finale, is actually a bit flat and for the first part feels like a review within a review.
This kind of mimics the lameness of the final race when mistakes from Mitch Evans, fighting the set-up of his Jaguar, diluted the hope of a genuine title showdown against eventual champion Stoffel Vandoorne that his win in Seoul a day before had built.
Evans has an episode mostly to himself and it’s a delight as his father and mother, Owen and Tracy, take a bow.
Owen’s story of how he came back from the brink of death in 1996 during a speed record attempt in New Zealand is gripping, as is his son being reunited with his homeland after essentially being locked out of his country for two years due to pandemic restrictions.
Of course, the cameras can’t capture everything but there are some glaring omissions. Notably the Mercedes team-orders debacle in London, which left the team red faced and Nyck de Vries fuming about an order that was never really on.
From that same weekend, there are no eyes on the Buemi and Wehrlein square-up and subsequent kerfuffle, which threatened to spill over before an intrepid Jim Wright got his Henry Kissinger head on.
Although the Buemi anger is missing this season, he is on the receiving end of a thorough tongue-lashing from a particularly irate Sam Bird in Rome after a baulking incident in qualifying in Rome.
Yet there’s plenty of spice to still savour, especially the intra-team misfortune that befell Venturi on home ground in Monaco. That was when contact between Lucas di Grassi and Edoardo Mortara provided The Race with headline gold when the latter described his team-mate as ‘the butcher of Formula E’.
Bird’s dreadful season is chronicled in some detail but many answers to questions are simply missing on why it was so abject. Instead, it is just put down multiple times to a driver ‘not being able to catch a break’.
Fellow Brit Ticktum, a driver who describes himself as “quite a fragile character”, comes across as one of the more ‘what you see isn’t always what you get’ characters in his rookie season.
He also confesses that “this sport does my f***ing head in sometimes’, which is one of several amusing analytical contemplations from the forthright NIO 333 driver.
Fellow rookies Antonio Giovinazzi and Oliver Askew are also profiled. Former F1 driver Giovinazzi just underlines his insipid season with several banal contributions that peak with a genuinely jaw-dropping: “I was lucky to find a seat with Dragon!”
But there is genuine sympathy for the likeable Askew, who has to contend with significant pressure at his and the Andretti team’s home race in New York.
If that were not enough, he is ribbed mercilessly by team-mate Jake Dennis while on a helicopter trip above the ‘Big Apple’ which clearly took place way too soon after his lunch.
There is a nice capture of an altercation between Askew and Nissan’s Maximilian Guenther in Rome, when Guenther, clearly frustrated but as ever polite, is overtaken by Askew before the safety car line.
“It’s not IndyCar here,” says a smiling and slightly sinister Guenther. A meek Askew replies “I know” and it’s all a bit awkward.
There are tropes, there are cliches. But over the series it emerges as an entertaining watch that will offer curiosity to those who don’t know the series and an added interest to those that do.
Produced by Formula E’s senior broadcast and content director, Tim Glass, and Lloyd Purnell, the series will be properly distributed to Eurosport, Channel 4/All4, CBS and other global broadcasters.
Find out where you can watch it here.
