Driver DNA, Inter-Team Politics, and Environmental Accreditation: What's Driving NIO 333 in Formula E
(copyright FIA Formula E)
In Formula E, there are two kinds of team lead at trackside. There is the former driver, brought on board as much as a figurehead as for their proven skill in getting the best out of their staff. There is also the career engineer, required to use their technical nous to get the most out of the time on-track at the short race weekends.
Russell O’Hagan, enjoying his first season in charge at Formula E team NIO 333, is one of the latter. Starting out as a teenager, fixing up touring cars as a technician, O’Hagan now finds himself steering a manufacturer team through to the Gen3 era, on the latest stop of a varied career in racing. The Shropshire man is COO and Deputy Team Principal, with his immediate boss, Alex Hui, currently in China and unable to travel easily due to the country’s COVID-19-related regulations.
“It's not too dissimilar from any other industry really;” O’Hagan explained, talking through his working day, “I spend my time doing financial planning, business strategies. I'm really focusing on the company, trying to make it a really inspiring place to work, making sure people’s efforts end up getting through to the car. Racing is a massively competitive industry and it requires a huge amount of sacrifice and a massive input from the guys.”
From humble beginnings
Russell O’Hagan (photo: NIO 333 Formula E Team)
NIO 333 began from the ashes of the first iteration of the NIO manufacturer operation, which itself was the successor to the inaugural Formula E champion, Team China / NextEV. After a season in 2019-20 running a version of the Penske powertrain, NIO 333 produced a new ground-up unit for the following season. With homologation locked for the past two seasons, it has allowed Oliver Turvey, Tom Blomqvist, and latterly Dan Ticktum to put in some strong performances with what is, if not the most advanced machinery in Formula E, still a strong, driveable base.
Another part of O’Hagan’s skillset is dealing with Formula E team politics, although he indicated this was something he was familiar with. “Being a team principal, it’s quite similar to what I’ve done before in terms of you're representing the team in the public, but in FE it's just a bigger scale.”
“We have a very strong team and manufacturers’ group, which is basically teams within the championship having a place to discuss things together to represent our own opinions, and that goes from a team, such as ours, of limited size, all the way up to a Mercedes or Porsche with a big factory program. Then, collectively as a group, we represent the team of stakeholders to the FIA and to Formula E itself. It is a really good group of people, genuinely made up of people who care about motorsport. That side has been really good.”
It’s still a long way from O’Hagan’s origins as a junior mechanic, though. “I was really lucky. I kind of started in quite a small team. We were based just outside Telford; there were four of us running about six cars. It was us putting the fuel in, doing the tyres. Then there was a few years race engineering at European Touring Car level, and from then I had a really good spell doing engine calibrations with a really good company and that across [all series]. I was doing rally, I was doing touring cars, GTs, I did Le Mans four or five times. We were the ECU supplier for Judd, so I was doing the precursor to WEC, things like the European Le Mans Series.”
Gareth Howell was one of the first drivers O’Hagan worked with as a professional, a driver who once attempted to enter a self-built car into the British Touring Car Championship, and went on to have a more than respectable career in tin-tops. There seemed to be a link between the knowledge shown by Howell, a driver who knew all about engineering, and Oliver Turvey, famous in Formula E for his technical knowledge.
“Very much, yes, in terms of the kind of driver DNA, and the type of people that they are. To begin with [at GR Motorsport, O’Hagan’s first team], we had Gareth, and Gordon Shedden, and they both had just come from Fiestas, which at that time was super-competitive.”
“Both of those guys at that point were very good at knowing what they wanted from the car, particularly in low-powered front-wheel-drive. It’s always a gamble in touring cars not over-using your tyres and struggling for the rest of the race. I guess compared to Oliver theirs was a crude skillset, Oliver has been at the top line of motorsport for ten to fifteen years; he's been exposed to a huge multitude of engineering resource.”
“At an academic level Oliver is quite unique too. The academic phase of an engineering degree in itself is quite a difficult process; you become a different person. He’s also at a very different age and place in his career to when I met Gareth and Gordon.”
Very different teammates
Dan Ticktum in Diriyah (copyright FIA Formula E)
Turvey is also at a different phase of his career to Dan Ticktum, the young British driver who has joined NIO 333 this season. Ticktum might be known as a firebrand, and in the past as someone occasionally troublesome out of the cockpit, but O’Hagan stressed he had been a positive influence on his team since joining.
“Dan and Oliver are very different teammates, but we’re getting a good mix of what we want from them separately and combined. Oliver has a really good engineering brain and knows how the control systems operate and how they affect each other. Dan’s come in with a fresh perspective. He’s able to critique the car from a few steps back; for example, a lot of the feedback he gives is mechanical, he’ll relate things to what he did in F2, and what worked for him there. The engineers are then able to tune the car as a consequence of that.”
The need for every individual to work smartly and efficiently at NIO 333 necessitates the kind of knowledge-sharing and open communication that O’Hagan encourages. “Not just with Oliver but with all other staff, you’re a little bit more reliant on them for their knowledge, to predict and take things in kind of less iterative steps. A lot of people come back to him having an engineering mind, but he’s a bloody quick driver too!”
Turvey and his engineer often take the lead when it comes to car development, the experienced driver’s feedback proving invaluable. “Our chief race engineer Michael Henderson is Oliver’s race engineer, and so he and Oliver make a lot of the initial decisions - the control side of what gets tested, what’s fed back. Some things in the control we're now able to do in simulation, to reduce what we need to do on track, but it’ll always be a fundamental part of motorsport that the driver is the key element at the end!”
Ticktum’s input is equally perceptive, O’Hagan added, but comes from a different perspective to Turvey’s. “Dan's feedback is extraordinary, actually. What we get from Oliver is lots of feedback on how the controls are working; with Dan it’s very much what he feels, what he can drive around, inconsistencies he feels. Sometimes it’s on a mechanical level, it’s understeer, it’s how we can mitigate it. His feedback is very direct, very global, and like most racing drivers he’s very quick to put his hand up and say, if he’s had a bad session.”
“One of the things about Formula E has been the barrier to rookies, and how they can adapt. Jake Dennis did a great job last year, both one-lap pace and racing. I think Dan’s on the same kind of curve, but that’s thanks to a lot of work with our engineers, sim sessions, time in the boardroom going through control systems. I’m very proud of the work our engineers and Dan have done to get to that point. He’s been really good. What Jake did shows that the barrier to rookies is starting to be removed, and you can get up to pace in the first half of a season.”
Gen3 and its challenges
O’Hagan is NIO 333’s lead at races (photo: NIO 333 Formula E Team)
While NIO 333 isn’t, at present, able to compete for podiums and wins, it is a manufacturer, and is a signatory to the Gen3 era, meaning not only working on keeping the current machinery competitive this season, but also on the 2022-23 challenger, which will feature all-new underpinnings.
This is clearly a harder undertaking when not working for a large car company with a far higher budget. NIO 333 have had to implement clever solutions in order to keep up.
“Within FE there are two sets of entities, essentially. There’s Envision and Venturi who run a manufacturer-supplied car, and the others, like us, who are manufacturers. Relative to the team [at the track, where only 20 personnel are allowed to touch the cars], we’re probably about the same; relative to the other manufacturers we’re pretty small. Let’s say the manufacturer resource comes basically every two-to-four years in terms of developing a new car - we’re doing that at the moment with the Gen3 car.
“So, then, a lot of that is done in-house, but then we have key partners for a lot of critical elements. A lot of teams produce their powertrains in-house, we do it with a partner called IPT, in Milton Keynes. We’re having a cost-cap regulation coming in next year, I’ve been quite involved in that process. The reality is that compared to one of the manufacturers, we’re probably at 35% of their budget. It’s still a big chunk of money, but it’s a big scale in terms of what Mercedes and Porsche can do, and what we can do.”
As for the Gen3 car, at the time of going to press only teams, drivers, and select media had seen it, but mock-up renderings made by amateurs had suggested this might be an uglier car than the angular but much-loved Gen2 shape. “No! I don’t think it’s ugly!” O’Hagan laughed. “I quite like it. The launch is coming up towards the end of April, but I think what everyone needs to remember about Gen3 is that it's a holistic change to Formula E, so the performance of those cars is going to be incredible.”
“It’s raising the performance level, and that’s probably the biggest statement. The looks, with Formula E, have always been different, but the performance is the key differentiator. We’ve got cost caps, we’ve got freight changes; it’s a big old change. If you look at one part of the puzzle, it’s not always easy to judge it correctly, but I think when it hits the track it’s going to be a massive step forward in what Formula E is , so I’m genuinely looking forward to it.”
The question was raised as to whether NIO 333 had been approached to potentially supply the new Formula E team that is thought certain to grow out of the outgoing Mercedes operation at the end of the current season, likely to be a McLaren team. Reporting from Sam Smith on The Race had it that it was likely to be a Nissan powertrain used by the new team, but that NIO 333 had been an outside possibility to be asked.
O’Hagan seemed pleased to entertain the idea of supplying powertrains in the future. “Teams can come to you and you must be able to provide the hardware, the motor inverter, the rear end, and some support for a defined amount of money. it’s something probably historically we’ve not been in the right place to facilitate to the level we would want to and that another team would expect, but so much has changed over the past twelve months, so in the future I would definitely hope it’s something we can go to.”
“In terms of 333 Racing as an engineering company, what we’ve seen with the introduction of the Maserati entry, is that with the same hardware you can have a second make. That opens the opportunity for all the teams that are manufacturing something under one name to produce identical equipment, but, certainly in terms of the hardware, under a different name. It’s a tremendous engineering opportunity because if you’ve got four cars running, it massively helps, you’re able to share R&D costs, and pool resources.”
Pursuing passions
The reason O’Hagan is in his current position at NIO 333 as COO and Deputy Team Principal is because his predecessor Christian Silk, once Michael Schumacher’s engineer at Benetton in Formula One, decided to call time on his motorsport career to pursue environmental causes, and a Master’s degree.
“It’s really interesting. I have a huge fondness for Christian; we gelled really quickly. We had just under six months together to develop the company. Christian has a very rounded engineering skillset. He’s also a very passionate man. Racing requires so much dedication and hard work, fuelled by passion. Christian got to the point when his passion for racing wasn’t exactly diminishing, but he found a new passion, and all credit to anyone who pursues their passion.”
NIO 333, thanks to Silk and O’Hagan’s efforts at the head of the team, were among the first Formula E teams to achieve the FIA’s environmental accreditation, at the highest possible level, something now obligatory for Formula E participants.
“What I’ve seen in the past twelve months of being in Formula E is that the way FE tackles these kinds of issues is incredible. We’re looking at how we can transfer the knowledge from our environmental accreditation to other companies that work across Silverstone Technology Park. A lot of it is basic stuff on energy management, how we’re using water, biodiversity; so we’re trying to push that knowledge out to other teams and companies, so those who have been nudged to take that step can work with people who’ve already done it.”
Formula E is all about both working harder and working smarter, and there are few who will better Russell O’Hagan, or the NIO 333 staff, at either. While it might be a while before the team competes for top honours, the enormous progress it has made in less than three seasons is extraordinary.