When a start-up boutique manufacturer signalled it would bow out of Formula E last month it did so as the championship’s most successful technical force – and in addition perhaps has a claim to having achieved it all with the fewest resources among its direct big-manufacturer opposition.
DS Automobiles, through its sporting arm, DS Performance, has been winning big in Formula E for almost a dozen years. Its history can be told in statistics of four championship titles, 18 wins, 55 podiums and 26 pole positions, but much more fascinating is its culture and zero-to-hero status in the all-electric series’ history.
In 2014, DS as a brand was relaunched and became detached from Citroen – ironically now its sister brand in Formula E, 12 years on. An avant-garde disruptor that was given a sporting platform by then owner, PSA, remarkably the first DS-inspired car was actually the Formula E car of 2015, long before any DS road cars were made available to the public.
Clearly the programme of choice had to be Formula E, which had been launched in the autumn of 2014. The plan for DS was to enter in the second season of 2015-16 when more freedom to the powertrain was purposed to attract manufacturers. The idea worked as Renault and Audi also committed early, while BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar and Porsche soon followed suit.
Then, still at the PSA headquarters in Satory, just south of Paris, a small band of engineers began to get creative as the deal with Virgin Racing for the season neared.
There were short lead times, but under the management of now FIA technical chief, Xavier Mestelan-Pinon, and with a technical team that included then Citroen World Touring Car Championship race and test team manager, Thomas Chevaucher, the pace of design, manufacture and development soon ramped up.
“I’ve never seen a brand that was so much involved in the motor programme,” Chevaucher, who became the Formula E project manager in 2015, tells The Race. “We had a really a very close link with the board of the brand, and it was really part of the strategy.”
For that first season, Sam Bird and Jean-Eric Vergne campaigned a twin-motor designed powertrain which has positive and negative attributes that brought joy and challenge in equal measure.
“The dual-motor set-up was mighty on torque and deployment but it was also heavy,” explains Chevaucher.
It all meant some creative solutions for the technical team and drivers, especially in the races where its weight was often exploited by its single-motor, and thus lighter-spec, opponents.
“One of the big challenges of that first season was to put the tyres in the window during qualifying and that twin motor was clearly overweight, but also super, super high-torque potential,” adds Chevaucher.
“That gave us, at the time, a nice advantage in terms of putting the tyres in the window. It was performing very well in quali, not very efficient during the races, but we often were starting in the front.”
Indeed, it was. DS Virgin Racing bagged four pole positions across the season and the first of those 18 wins came at Buenos Aires through Bird. But it was the following season when the real success began, and it came after the first technical phase of DS’s programme was complete.
The dual-motor design, which was essentially a draft solution, was changed to a single-motor, well-engineered set-up for 2016-17 and that was where things took off for DS. While Vergne departed to the new Renault-powered Techeetah team, it was Bird who started to show how serious DS was in its Formula E programme with a memorable double win at the inaugural New York City E-Prix.
The following season, Bird was a genuine title contender but fell just short as former team-mate Vergne took the first of his two titles. At that stage, it was known that DS would switch to Techeetah for the Gen2 era, one in which the French manufacturer grew significantly in both resources and ambition.
“DS Performance was going into a new dimension at that time,” says Chevaucher.
“They invested a lot of resources, a lot of effort, and worked tirelessly to develop that [Gen2] car. It was all paying off, which is an incredible feeling for the team, and it was a great reward for the brand too. We were launching the [road] cars at the time so the timing was just perfect.”
Vergne’s second title came in the summer of 2019 after wins in Monaco, Sanya and Bern. DS Techeetah also swept the teams’ championship, making it four titles across two seasons.
But there was more as Antonio Felix da Costa’s 2019-20 triumph was added to a third consecutive teams’ title which, despite Mercedes EQ’s best efforts a few seasons later, meant that DS Techeetah is still the most successful outfit in Formula E history.
The building blocks for that success came with the realisation that DS had to grow and add resources to its make-up.
Later down the line, Stellantis Motorsport (Stellantis is the group that contains multiple car manufacturers including DS, Citroen, Maserati) was born and more cohesion was implemented, with highly rated technical mastermind Leo Thomas coming on board in a senior position at the end of 2022.
“We started to structure the motorsport group a bit more seriously in preparation for Porsche and Mercedes [joining Formula E] because it was a huge opportunity for the brand to compete on track with these names, as well as in the streets,” summarises Chevacuher.
Those streets are meant as the city streets with the unveiling of several electric DS models, but those words were backed up by da Costa on-track again with final Gen2 wins in Monaco in 2021 and New York in 2022.
But it was all change for the Gen3 period a year later when da Costa moved to Porsche, Techeetah folded, and the majority of the staff went to Penske, where DS landed next.
Gen3 has been largely a disappointment though with just three victories in three and a half seasons, one for Vergne at Hyderabad and two for Maximilian Guenther at Shanghai and Jeddah.
“Gen3, the car was becoming more and more the ultimate race cars, I would say,” says Chevaucher.
“More and more, all the manufacturers were reaching a super-high level of efficiency, and the management of the energy started to be better controlled. The level was more and more professional across the grid too, so it was more and more going into the details of everything.”
Some of those details were clearly missed by DS in Gen3 but it was more often than not a factor at the front, even if its winning record has not been as potent as it was in Gen1 and Gen2.
But off the track there was success of a different kind as DS linked its automotive and racing departments together with the DS E-Tense Performance, a high-performance electric concept car acting as a ‘laboratory’ for DS Automobiles. It used Formula E technology to achieve 804bhp and 0-100 km/h in two seconds.
“That was also kind of the link that was existing with the brand,” recalls Chevaucher. “It was all a very interesting part of it because we wanted to have that four-wheel-drive electric car going through the Gen3 period.
“There was kind of a fit to it all, I think between DS and Formula E. Just that the story started together and we definitely felt we were part of the family. There was a super-strong energy between DS and the championship.”
DS’s three best wins
Buenos Aires 2016
In a heavy and generally non-compliant DS Virgin Gen1 car, Bird held off a charging Sebastien Buemi in his e.dams Renault-run car in a thrilling encounter that had echoes of Gilles Villeneuve’s 1981 Spanish Grand Prix heroics.
“We knew that he [Buemi] had a clear performance advantage, and he started at the back,” says Chevaucher.
“We said, ‘Maybe we have a small chance’ but we were definitely thinking that he would get us. We just hoped that Sam would do his magic. And he did.”
Punta del Este 2018
As intense a battle as Formula E ever had, as Vergne held off Abt Audi driver Lucas di Grassi lap after lap amid the sun and surf of one of the more memorable tracks in Formula E history.
It laid down a clear marker to Vergne’s opposition that he was in the title fight for the long haul and he duly underlined it with further wins at Paris and New York to take the first of his two crowns.
Monaco 2021
One of, if not the best ever E-Prix, as da Costa’s DS Techeetah went hammer-and-tongs against a fired up Mitch Evans (Jaguar) and Robin Frijns (Envision Audi) in the first Formula E race on the proper Monaco circuit.
Da Costa’s hair-raising – and ultimately winning – last-lap move on Evans at the harbour chicane defied various laws of physics.