Faraday Future partners with a Formula E team
Despite only being on many people’s radar for just over six months, electric car company Faraday Future has managed to keep itself firmly in the spotlight. It’s already unveiled a prototype of its FFZero 1 supercar, struck up a deal with Aston Martin and announced plans for two EV factories. Oh, and it’s working on self-driving technology as well. Some of those projects are still a way off, but today the company confirmed it’ll soon jump into the world of Formula E, by way of a sponsorship and technical partnership with the Dragon Racing team.
Under the new agreement, announced today at a Formula E London ePrix event, the team name will become Faraday Future Dragon Racing Formula E (quite the mouthful) and will commence at the start of Formula E’s third season in October. In the first year, both teams will work on developing “key technology software solutions to maximize performance capabilities within the powertrain,” with Faraday engineers giving special consideration to the overall drivetrain performance, data acquisition and analytics. The idea is to “improve vehicle simulation models,” which can better predict vehicle performance and boost efficiency.
The season after that, the team will seek to implement technology developed by Faraday Future, which includes the company’s power controller. By the 2018/19 season, all of those improvements will be combined inside a new chassis, which may also feature Faraday Future motors, gearbox and its “FF Echelon Inverter,” which the company says is the same inverter that will be installed inside every Faraday Future production vehicle.
While Faraday continues to work on a supercar and a range of more affordable options, the company will use its new alliance to conduct real-world tests and see how its components and software fair in harsher environments. “Partnering with Dragon Racing allows us to further showcase our electric vehicle leadership and technical capabilities in one of the most exciting Formulas in the world,” says Nick Sampson, SVP of Global R&D and Engineering at Faraday Future. “I clearly see Formula E as the right venue to challenge our engineers and technologies in the most extreme performance conditions.”
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