⚡🇲🇽 Formula E S11E02: Insert Coin

We’ve had a small amount of Formula E in a previous Motorsport Manager Mobile game, but it lacked the depth it needed to truly immerse people.

The Mexico City E-Prix turned on a safety car period and one driver taking advantage of attack mode to take a lead he never lost.

In fact, you can watch the highlights of Oliver Rowland’s win here.

With a few laps to go, the Safety Car came out and hung around while a car was cleared. Rowland had just taken his attack mode, only to have it neutralised. When racing resumed, Rowland had 85 seconds of the mode left.

Most racing drivers are confident. But there’s a reason why they rate themselves highly. And Rowland was about to be given a test of that.

This was a proper video game scenario for the Nissan driver. You are in 4th, with five laps to go. You have just over a minute of attack mode, and three former Formula E champions are ahead of you. Pass all three, hold on to the lead and claim victory.

You could feel the loading screen pass through Rowland’s head as he streamed past Jake Dennis into turn 1, the Season 9 champion helpless. A few corners later, the purple Porsches were the target as Rowland rounded reigning world champion Pascal Wehrlein.

He got a great drive out of that corner, banging the back of Antonio Felix da Costa’s car before overtaking the COVID season champion. None of the experience da Costa got from the Berlin Airport thunderdome races could help him here and in just under a minute, Rowland - who also won a race there -  had done it.

And almost as soon as he got through, another safety car neutralised the race again, but it didn’t matter by then, Oliver Rowland’s golden lap secured his fourth win in Formula E, and although early in the season, put himself second in the standings to da Costa, as the series moves on to Saudi Arabia for a Valentines’ weekend double-header.

It will be the first time that Formula E has raced in Jeddah, on a shorter circuit than F1 fans will be used to seeing. However, it won’t be the only new thing that the weekend in Saudi will have.

Welcome to Pit Boost, formerly known as Attack Charge. During weekends with a double-header, one race will have this feature. So, at Jeddah, Monaco, Shanghai, Berlin and London, at one race, the drivers will have to stop for around 30 seconds. It will add some charge to their battery to allow them to go flat out for longer.

This is exactly what the series should be doing. One reason why famous marques choose to go racing is because they can develop technologies in a competitive environment. These technologies can be refined and adapted to road cars, meaning that something that saw its introduction under high pressure be adapted to the vehicle in your driveway. 

Don’t get me wrong, no-one is saying that you should put your BMW into attack mode while you’re going to the shops (although it feels like a few drivers have thought otherwise), but some of the innovations you’ve seen started on a racetrack.

Fast charging technology will be exciting, but for teams and drivers, it will be another thing for them to consider and strategise around. As only one driver per team can pit for the boost at one time, and at 30 seconds, double stacking would be exceptionally impressive to do well.

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Combine this boost with the need to accommodate attack mode and Formula E becomes even more strategic. Some of the strategy is written for the teams - you have to take periods of attack mode, we’ll give you the Pit Boost window - but where the series loses out on pure speed or sound, it makes up for it in strategy.

But how do you sell that to people? Well, I’ve played Formula E on at least one video game and the experience was disappointing. Project Cars 3 was a shallow imitation of its predecessor but one of the plus points was that they’d licensed the Formula E cars. Unfortunately, every car seemed to handle the same and it didn’t feel any different to a Bugatti, other than the speed. Nor were there any tracks that were part of the series other than the Monaco F1 layout. 

Formula E does feature in Trackmania, but there’s nothing particularly mainstream where it does have a role, and this is where the gap is. EA Sports’ slick marketing and widespread reach through F1 means it has cornered the market on simcade, while the likes of Forza and Gran Turismo have the casual and sim market covered.

We do know there won’t be an F1 Manager game this year as the agreement between F1 and Frontier was terminated a year early. Despite looking nice, the first instalment was clunky and simply not fun. It damned the franchise as a whole and meant that people (including me) switched off from later instalments. 2024 is on my Steam wishlist, but I probably won’t buy it until it’s £5 or something.

Motorsport Manager was released in late 2026 and is available for £2.99 on Steam at the moment, and then there are novelties like Golden Lap. But what there isn’t is an overarching management simulation with multiple series covering the world of motorsport. The longevity comes from being able to lead an IndyCar team, or maybe NASCAR, or Formula E etc, picking up drivers from BTCC, or IMSA, or ELMS or WRC or from all manner of different disciplines and series. It’s creating your own story of finding a rookie in GB4 and bringing them all the way through to the top of motorsport.

A Football Manager for motorsport is desperately needed to bring these other series into the mainstream, and all their fancy rules.

Videogames are an easy way for a racing series to make money AND attract new viewers, or translate complex rules changes to people. For example, when the Swiss League format was adopted by UEFA, they licensed their European competitions to Football Manager so fans could use them officially, acting as a reference point to use.

Motorsport needs that visibility, beyond a half-hearted attempt at putting Formula E into Motorsport Manager Online. Beyond the world of F1 and last year’s F2 season in its official game. Formula E is a strategic sport, and being able to give fans a chance to replicate that with names they already know can only help the series gain visibility.