Jaguar’s Formula E Team Doesn’t Expect to Win Early

By Adam Pockross - October 21, 2016

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With Jaguar’s vaunted motorsports history — their latest F1 foray not included — we’ve all got very high expectations for the marque’s initial season of the Formula E series. But Jaguar doesn’t want us to get too far ahead of ourselves here.

Earlier this month, Jaguar ended a 12-year motorsports absence when Adam Carroll and company drove the Panasonic Jaguar Racing electric racecar to a 12th place finish in Hong Kong. But while that may seem like a ways back, considering what the team has been up against, it feel like a win.

That’s because Jaguar is getting a late start to this electric racing game. This is the third season of the series, and Jaguar didn’t compete in the first two. So there’s a whole two seasons worth of data points and general knowledge that other teams have already collected.

Also, team Jaguar didn’t know until December they’d even be fielding a car. That only gave the team four months to start testing their powertrain, being built in partnership with JLR-Williams Advanced Engineering. And the FIA needed that homologated just six months later.

But that doesn’t appear to be stressing the brass out.

“If we’re winning straight away, having never done it before, something is wrong with the formula,” Jaguar race director Craig Wilson recently told Autosport.”The formula is very competitive. We know we’ve got our work cut out to get to the stage, to be in that ballpark.”

So basically, curb your expectations. Which is fine, really, since the point of the whole experiment is to learn what it takes to be in that ballpark, and then apply it to the road-going cars.

How ’bout we give you till the series’ next race, November 11 in Marakech, to figure it out?