“We knew the difficulties of this year, and I think we've proved that steadily we've been improving during the season. We didn't expect to be coming here and beat all these big sharks,” Cupra motorsport director Xavi Serra told Autocar at the season finale in London last week.
“For me, the good thing is that we’re working a lot with recuperation,” he said. “This is what we have to transfer to the road cars. You might ask why we put drum brakes on [electric] road cars; it’s because most of the brake energy goes into recuperation. In Formula E races, [friction brakes] aren’t used [in search of maximum efficiency]. Recuperating all the brake energy is the future, and this is what we’re learning.
Serra concurred: “It’s astonishing what we’re learning from here, because the [new Gen3 Formula E] car has 600kW of power in terms of recuperation. And we’re really feeling the battery and using this energy for racing. So it's a real game-changer.”