Evo Sessions opens new eyes to Formula E

Formula E’s Evo Sessions track days in Miami gave a unique opportunity to get media personalities behind the wheel of the series’ GEN3 Evo racing cars so that they could experience what it’s like to be a professional racing driver – and take fans along for the ride, too. (That’s Alexandra Mary Hirschi, an Australian social media celebrity, presenter and vlogger known online as Supercar Blondie, pictured above in Nissan’s car ahead of her Evo Sessions run.)

But in the Lola Yamaha Abt garage, there was someone who fit in both camps. Scott Mansell has a well-established online presence, with his Driver61 YouTube channel having 1.34 million subscribers, but has also enjoyed a career as a professional driver across a plethora of series.

“I got a call from Formula E, and they said to me, ‘Would you like to come to Miami to drive a Formula E car?’ and I said, ‘Yes, absolutely!’” Mansell tells RACER of how his Evo Sessions opportunity came about. “Then they put me together with Lola Yamaha Abt, and all went from there.

“It’s a crazy idea, right? Putting some celebrities or creators in proper racing cars sounds absolutely crazy, and I think Formula E probably did a great job to convince the teams to actually do it in the first place. But then as we went through the couple of days, you could feel that it was a fantastic success.”

All involved didn’t just jump into the car and go. Each went through a lengthy preparation process with their assigned teams, but for Mansell, it was as if he was going racing once again.

“Every creator that I spoke to approached it in a very systematic and fairly careful way. I think it was a great success for all of the teams,” he says.

Entrepreneur Brooklyn Peltz Beckham gets some pointers from the Jaguar TCS Racing crew prior to his Evo Sessions run.

“I think some of the other drivers did have some racing or track experience, but obviously not as deep and as long as mine. I approached it like I was going racing, to be honest with you. I spent a couple of days in the simulator, I did as many laps as I could, I spoke to the engineers as much as I possibly could. I wanted to understand these cars as much as possible, and I had the same approach when I went to the racetrack.”

Despite having an outsider in their car for the first time, Mansell describes Lola Yamaha Abt as “an open book” at the event, and with his prior experience in a wide range of race cars, he was able to make the experience mutually beneficial.

“It was incredible, working with Zane Maloney, the driver, and all of the engineers — they shared everything with me,” he says. “And because I do have my experience, I was trying to give some proper feedback. Lola Yamaha’s a new team, they’re looking to develop the car, and so I was trying to help them as much as I possibly could.”

But while going into Evo Sessions as something of a racing veteran might seem like having a head start over the others, it actually meant that Mansell had to break some old habits – driving techniques that don’t quite work in an electric car.

“My main goal while I was there in the simulator was to understand primarily how to brake. The braking shape is very different to a traditional car,” he explains. “The first session, I didn’t do what I was doing in the simulator on the brakes. When you’re in a quick single seater, which the Formula E car is, my brain switched on to kind of like the F2 cars that I’ve driven in the past, and so I was getting on the brake with way too much pressure. And when you do that, because most of the braking is from the motors in the (Formula E) car, it triggered a fail.

“So in my first session, I had to come into the pits two or three times to reset the system because I kept on braking too hard — which wasn’t great from my side of things, because when you jump into a new car on a new track, you want to be doing consecutive laps so you can understand as much as possible about the car. So it was kind of truncated, a bit fragmented in that session. Then on the following day, I corrected all of the problems that I had and managed to pull a good lap together.”

“Driver61” was happy with how much he was able to extract from the Lola Yamaha ABT Formula E car, once he’d learned to break some old habits.

At Evo Sessions, all 11 participants only got two 20-minute sessions on track. That doesn’t seem like a lot, given the hype around the event, and while Mansell tells me “I’d still be there now if I could be,” he admits that it was probably the perfect amount of time for the class of mostly non-racers.

“Of course, if you do more laps, you’re gonna go quicker, right?” he says. “I think it was probably the right amount of time, to be honest with you. In the past, I ran events like this where we would put non-drivers in racing cars, and there’s a sweet spot where they have enough time to start getting quickly but not get too confident. If you give them actually too much time, they’ll get overly confident, they get a bit too comfortable, and that’s when all the mistakes happen.

“We actually saw on the second day there that there were much more mistakes on the brakes and coming to the corners. We only had one spin on the first day, and then we saw three or four spins on the second day. So you give them another day, and actually those spins might be a bit bigger.”

Having the track time supported by a current FIA world championship team, plus all of the preparation time in the lead-up to the event, afforded Mansell something he didn’t always get to enjoy in his own career. That gave him high expectations of himself, expectations he managed to live up to.

“During my racing career, we never really had enough money to do it properly, and so I always struggled,” he admits. “I did Indy Pro, for example, but I’d just jump in on the Friday before race weekend, didn’t do any testing, and it was always difficult to compare myself against the other drivers.

“For me personally, this was brilliant, because all the pro drivers went and did some time out on the track, and I managed to get within a tenth of Zane . Zane is a very, very quick driver and so for me, maybe from an ego perspective, it was good to see that I had the kind of skill to get somewhere close to the pace. That was really my target, to extract the most from the car.”

If they could just get past the soundtrack, Mansell reckons traditional motorsports fans would find a lot to like in Formula E races.

Evo Sessions was aimed at attracting new fans to Formula E, particularly those that might not like motorsport, but Mansell feels that the series offers something to motorsport’s more traditional fan base as well. The cars might not make a noise, but there’s a lot for the naysayers to enjoy.

“That kind of annoys me, and if they’re saying they’re pure fans, then I don’t really know what they’re talking about, to be honest with you,” Mansell says of Formula E’s detractors. “Yes, they don’t make noise like a V10. I do love the noise, but that’s gone in every motorsport category.

“For me, for a great race series, first of all, you want to have some unpredictability to it. We don’t want to know that the same person is going to win every single weekend. That’s one thing in Formula E — you don’t know who’s going to win. It’s definitely interesting on that front.

“The second thing is, you want loads of wheel-to-wheel action — for me that’s the best bit, seeing the moves take place. Formula E does that very well.

“And the third thing is actually seeing the drivers work hard in the car. You can see the cars moving around. You can see the drivers fighting it. They’re on circuits that aren’t always perfect, so they’re bumpy, the walls are very close — you can see the skill of the drivers there.

“If you look at how the cars behave on track, the body language and the attitude, that’s also pretty old school. You can actually slide the cars around, which is what we all love to watch. The drivers in Formula E really look like they’re fighting the thing and getting the most out of it.”

The modern technology is also a plus point, says Mansell, and it’s something the series could lean into more, having experienced just how much goes into a Formula E car and team at Evo Sessions.

“That’s something that I definitely learned, the detail that the engineers are going into on the tech side of things,: he says. “So I think it’s probably a need to get these kind of old school fans over the noise of it and then give it a chance. It’s fantastic racing.”

Mansell (middle) benefited from working closely with the Lola Yamaha ABT team and its regular driver, Zane Maloney.

As for Evo Sessions as an event, Mansell was impressed.

“I think they nailed it straight at the gates,” he says. “I think the whole point of it is to shine a spotlight on Formula E. I think that has been happening very well and is only going to continue.

“All of the creators that I spoke to were very thankful for the coaching that they got from the professional drivers; me working with Zane and the engineers on my team. I thought that was brilliant. So I don’t really know that there’s any way that it could kind of improve, to be honest with you — maybe like having an actual race, but that seems a bit much.”

It worked perfectly in the context of Formula E, but could it be a format that other series embrace? As good as that could be to boost their profiles, Mansell isn’t convinced it would work as well, if at all.

“That’s hard to see just looking at the positioning of each of the championships,” he says. “Formula E has a great mentality across the series in terms of trying new things and pushing the limit. They have the saying that they’re always in beta mode – they’re always testing and trying new stuff – and I think that shows here. This is an extremely interesting event. I couldn’t see Formula 1 doing it. Maybe NASCAR, I’m not sure. But I think Formula E are probably the only ones brave enough to take the risk and go ahead and do this.”