Jaguar's Formula E team is a good example of how racing is improving on-road electric vehicles

Enlarge / Jaguar's latest factory race car is the I Type 6, its latest challenger in Formula E. Jonathan Gitlin

LONDON—On Wednesday, Jaguar Racing became the latest Formula E team to unveil its race car for the upcoming season. The sport has radical new technical rules for its third-generation race car, which is smaller, lighter, more powerful and more efficient. This will be the British automaker's sixth season competing in the series, and its involvement isn't just limited to marketing; Jaguar Land Rover's electrified road cars have benefited in tangible ways, according to the team's technical director, Phil Charles.

"If you go back to 2017, that's the first time [we used] our internal inverter for the race team," Charles told Ars. "We put in a silicon carbide switching device, Wolfspeed's actually...which gave us the ability to switch very quickly. That was the push from our side - we want to switch faster and see if that can give us efficiency, which is what we've said over and over again in these inverter development cycles, switching faster and faster and faster,” he said.

At the time, few manufacturers were interested in silicon carbide power electronics for on-road electric vehicles. "Now everyone wants silicon carbide, and the reason they want it is the same as us," Charles said. "So the technology that we pushed back then has really caught up - the road race is really clear. If I kind of map our switching speed increase, we've done five evolutions with different topologies of the internal inverter. Now the road cars are coming and the benefit is range, at the end of the day; that means smaller batteries."

One complaint that has been leveled at Formula E in the past is that technical rules limit the amount of research and development possible due to a high number of specific components like the chassis and battery. Indeed, it was cited as a reason by Audi and BMW to retire from the sport. But Charles sees it differently.

Enlarge / The inverter (left) and MGU (right) of the Jaguar I Type 5 racing car. Jonathan Gitlin

"It's so crazy the technical freedom we have. On the software side, completely free. On the motor and inverter side, completely free, just a power limit. So we could become crazy, and that's the result you get now. I talk to my colleagues at Jaguar Land Rover all the time because they look at us and say, "Wow, you did that. That's really cool. How did you fix it? What was the problem?" And it sounds silly, but all of these lessons that we've learned, all of the mistakes that we've made, are shortcuts for these guys," he said.

An example of one of these lessons was the need to protect electronic components. “As you change gears, the EMI emitted by these switching devices increases more and more, and you start turning off your other systems on the race car,” Charles explained. “So we did a lot of technical coatings in the first unit, very simple mechanical things to start with, where we tried to stop these components, EMI coming out of the inverter,” he continued. p>

Other lessons focused on maneuverability. "You have such an ability to deliver torque so quickly, and the handling that drivers feel is very closely related to how you control now, so you can deliver [torque] instantly. It's not like if you were to rev the engine to deliver faster, we already deliver fast, but we have a very precise or very strong and fast ability to move the target,” Charles said.