Formula E GenBeta review: forget Gen3, this rule-breaking prototype is the future

Remind me what a Formula E car does…

It competes in the Formula E championship, of course. Fully electric single seaters battling largely on city-based street circuits. There are eleven teams each featuring two drivers. Porsche, Maserati, McLaren and Jaguar are among the manufacturers supporting teams.

Don’t the drivers have to swap cars halfway through each race?

Not since 2018, when the Gen2 cars came along. Those boasted enough battery range to make it through an event without the drivers needing to pit for a new, fully-charged car, which was a pretty inelegant spectacle during the early years of Formula E. Power also went up to around 335bhp.

The current Formula E racer is the Gen3. This develops up to 470bhp, looks like a cross between an X-Wing, a fighter plane and a Christmas tree, and has a top speed of 200mph. Though it’s quite tricky to do the double-tonne in a city, unless you’re happy to be in a Vin Diesel movie.

So what’s a GenBeta?

There’s nothing quite like a racing car that’s allowed to break the rules which govern it. Enter the GenBeta – a potential test bed for where Formula E goes next. Four-wheel drive, for starters. The front motor-generator which is usually only on power-harvesting duty is allowed to contribute some grunt here, so thanks to an uprated battery this €1.5m one-off generates over 530bhp and gets off the line rapidly on its softer, stickier tyres.

Is it just a show pony?

Nope, it works. And it’s a world record holder. Formula E driver Jake Hughes recently guided this very machine to 135.9mph on a 346 metre track within the walls of an exhibition centre in London’s Docklands, shattering the indoor land speed record (and not the ExCel’s skirting boards).

How difficult is it to drive?

We’ll get to that. The first obstacle is getting inside. Step onto the tub, jump through the halo and do a clumsy chest dip while threading your legs down the nose. It’s not comfy. My hips wedge in the carbon seat before my backside touches the bottom, and my knees rest hard up against the underside of the nose while the steering wheel bumps into my thighs beyond a quarter-turn of lock. It’s a relief to realise the reason I’m not a successful racing driver owes little to my talent vacuum and can be entirely blamed on the shape of my skeleton.

How do you turn it on?

The engineers do that, reaching around my nether regions flicking on switches and consulting laptops. The car whirrs and buzzes menacingly. The steering wheel is alive with baffling algebra. The only bits I need to worry about are the battery temperature and the gear selector.

Gearbox? I thought it was electric?

No need to worry, the paddles work like a gear selector in an automatic car. Click both paddles for Neutral, then pull left for Reverse or right for Drive. No DRS, no charge modes. Just stop, go and steer. In theory…

Like all racing cars, the GenBeta doesn’t like going slowly. As we set up the cameras, the poor mollycoddled thing’s getting chilly. Its French handler gestures to a readout on the steering wheel: 37.5 degrees and falling. Battery temperature. Any colder and the car will lose performance and shut down. It’s imperative I generate some heat. The best way to do that? A couple of brisk laps.

What could go wrong?

The fact I half-spin it on my first lap isn’t a shock to anyone. The fact I make it six corners before spinning it is a surprise to me. What have we learned? The unassisted steering is heavy and I simply can’t get much leverage on it before thunderthighs cost me an apex. The brakes are stupendous despite barely being there, and the throttle travel is very long indeed.

That was my downfall. I forgot that bit in the briefing where they warned me how it’s calibrated. The further you press the right pedal, the more the rear motor takes over from the front one, as the car presumes you’ve got plenty of tyre temperature and confidence. I had neither, so it looped around, and knocked one of the bespoke 3D-printed endplates off into the gravel.

You should’ve gone faster to get some downforce…

Actually, FE cars don’t work the air anything like as hard as an F1 car. That allows for closer racing and means teams focus more on the powertrains and strategy than cloning Adrian Newey and locking him in a basement with a laptop. Plus, the GenBeta is trimmed out to be as slippery as possible. Because you don’t need downforce to break a speed record indoors.

That’s enough non-racing driver excuses. What’s it like?

Part Scalextric car, part post-apocalyptic Caterham. It’s swear-word fast. It whines and whooshes and buzzes with energy. The brake pedal is near-solid but stupendously powerful. It’s incredibly calibrated, when you see the car has tiny front brake discs and none at all at the back, because it uses 600kW of regen to slow down when you’re in a last-of-the-late-brakers shootout into turn one.

It certainly sounds angry enough to be a proper racecar when you’re strapped tight into its core, peering around the halo which your brain quickly learns to see ‘through’. I spend about half an hour down there, feeling the car out, trying to absorb and process the messages it’s constantly feeding back.

No more spins, happily. But Formula E hasn't called back so I can’t imagine my data was looking too tasty. Build me a wider chassis, in time for the Gen4 cars?