EMOTION was where the “VIP” experience became literal. The exclusive club — picture an airplane hangar retrofitted with upscale amenities — offered a haven of indoor comforts at an outdoor event on a hot July day: complimentary food, refreshments and swag, its own bathrooms, and a constant stream of both live and digital entertainment. Formula E’s emphasis on cutting-edge technology made the digital entertainments particularly memorable. At one end of the club, Usain Bolt appeared as a recorded hologram, moving around and striking poses so that people could step up into the hologram booth and have a photo taken with him even though he wasn’t actually there. At another, people used virtual reality headsets and gloves to manipulate objects and move around within spaces that didn’t physically exist. For all that very cool innovation, however, the EMOTION amenities we would come to appreciate over the course of the two-day event were among the simplest: air conditioning, comfortable chairs, and abundant cold drinking water.
The Cars
After about an hour of exploring the club, Ariel and I headed out to get our first exposure to the actual motorsports. The first stop was for track rides in a BMW i8. I still wonder how the company determined the protocols for the ride — my driver threw the car around the track with just enough exuberance to convey something of what the car could really do, but not so much that it would scare me. (You can see the effects of the lap here). It was still sufficient to leave a lingering impression. Having never ridden in a hybrid more sophisticated then a Toyota Prius, but liking the concept, getting to experience firsthand what a six-figure hybrid could do was a singular experience. I can’t remember feeling that kind of fresh-eyed appreciation for the potential of a car since I was teenager and I got to drive a late model sedan after years of borrowing my mother’s minivan.
Qualifying began soon after that, around noon. We sat in the EMOTION (VIP) grandstands in a spot that offered an extremely good view of one corner of the track we’d just ridden in the BMW. It gave us the chance to see how smoothly and quickly a Formula E car could execute the turn under ideal conditions, clipping the rumble strip on the inside edge at the beginning of the turn and just barely missing a rub against the outside wall at the end of it. It was interesting to watch in its own right — watching a true expert do almost anything usually is — but it also gave me a useful frame of reference for later, when all the cars would be on the course at once and fiercely jockeying for position. Meanwhile, in the lulls between cars hitting the turn, Ariel and I discussed the virtues of German watches under $2,000.
After qualifying, we had a brief lunch at the EMOTION club and headed over for a walk of the pit lane and a garage tour, easily among the most special of the special accesses I enjoyed on that trip. Formula E vehicles don’t have sufficient range to make it all the way through the race, and it’s not practical to change the batteries while the race is running (rumor has it that will change in future years), so instead of drivers needing to pit to change tires, they needed to pit once per race to change cars. That meant that all over the pit garages, racing teams were scrambling to prepare two identical vehicles for each driver, and we got to go behind the ropes and be mere feet away from them while they did it.
Up close, the cars appear small, but are all the more striking for it. That something with that much performance should come without a size to match is jarring, and the fact that the cars had to be frequently hooked up to blowers full of dry ice to keep their batteries cool emphasized the impression that there was a serious force being kept at bay inside those small packages.
By current rules, all the cars share the same body shape, but they still managed to have their own character, largely because of their branding. Formula E sponsors feature the familiar mix of auto companies and race teams, so names like Virgin, Jaguar, Audi, and Mahindra took the most prominence. But Formula E is a technology event as well as an automotive one. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Samsung, and Panasonic all sponsored cars; God only knows what Qualcomm paid for the title rights to the event. These are companies that specialize in building up their brands with products that are difficult for the naked eye to discern — most people can’t spot the structural differences between a Samsung or a Qualcomm microchip — and similar skills were in play in the cars that bore their names. The bright contrasting colors and the designs they made up kept one mindful of the differences in drivers and powertrains that it might otherwise be possible to forget.
We would see the cars again soon after, when we walked over to the starting grid, another VIP perk. The cars were all entirely assembled by this point, one for each driver positioned according to their qualifying times and seemingly ready to go. But still the crews made frantic checks, and still we gawked. Perhaps, for the gawkers, it was mainly about the anticipation building up. With every step — from watching the individual laps of the qualifiers, to seeing the cars being tested, assembled and prepped in the garages, to now seeing them on the actual track just minutes away from launching — the prospect of actually watching those things haul off in competition against each other got more real and more immediate.
The cumulative effect was apparently showing on Ariel and me, as a woman passing by with a camera crew — having no idea who we were — asked if we could provide a sound bite on our race experience for her. We agreed. It was only hours later that we would discover we had been on the jumbotron, literally serving as exemplars of race fans to thousands of attendees while we all waited for the big event. The wait ended a few minutes later. Race officials cleared the track, and we headed over to watch the race.