Irish racer Carroll prefers adventures in electric cars

"I've never heard of Formula One, what are you talking about?" For most racing drivers, ever since 1950 at any rate, Formula One has been the pinnacle of global motor sport. Which should mean that Portadown-born racer Adam Carroll should be just itching to get out there and knock Lewis Hamilton off his diamond-studded perch. But not for the first time, the Irish driver is bucking tradition and prefers the hot-metal scent of new electric toys.

"Formula is what it is, there's only a couple of people able to win and even they're not happy, and the guys earning € 20 million to €30 million a year aren't happy, so F1 is its own animal," Carroll tells The Irish Times. "I wouldn't be a fan of how it's gone in the last 10 years, to be honest, and that's what I think left room for championships like Formula E, where you can take a technology from the race track and apply it to your road cars. And everything else, the environmental effects, they are real, and it's about time we all did something about it.

"I've always expressed an interest in Formula E from the start and was part of the list of original recommended drivers. I've always been a Jaguar fan, genuinely, and I thought it would be mega to get a drive with them, but I thought that's got to be my least likely team to get a seat with. But that's where I've ended up, which is incredible."

It hasn’t been a direct route, although Carroll shrugs off any Mansell-esque moaning with a cheery “it was easy, it only took 23 years . . .”

Growing up in a rural area, Carroll was a motoring prodigy of sorts, riding motorbikes at the age of three, driving a car at eight and getting into racing go-karts from the age of nine. Always flat out, even on a bicycle, the 34-year-old ascribes his success to sheer determination.

“I was fortunate, and I guess unfortunate, because it has been a pretty painful road at times, but that’s just life . . . I should never have made it, and I should never have got here, but somehow I did. Some day I’ll be able to tell it all, I hope.

"Thankfully what kept me going is, I've always been able to win in every category. Once everything else is equal, I've been able to win against anybody, and that's what kept me going during the dark hours. You know, I'd sit there and read my CV, and remind myself that I'd done all that, and raced and won at those levels. Not many others have. That's what carried me through, from single seaters into sports cars. Plus I had a young family and I had to pay the mortgage which is a great motivator. And now I've ended up in Formula E, with Panasonic Jaguar, so you'd never have expected that."

Dark days

Those dark days were darker than ever in 2010 when he was announced to be in the running for a seat in Formula One, with either of the new back-market teams, Manor or HRT. In the event, neither team took him on, and it’s memories of this that bring him the closest to outright bitterness. “The processes afterwards and the people who are involved – who promise you what’s going to happen – that’s the most disappointing part. That was hard, but it was like anything, you just decide that you’re going to do it for yourself, and remember you’re always learning.

“Ultimately, I just had to make it happen for myself, and that’s what I did. No managers, no nothing. In 2012, I really didn’t know what was going to happen, I was struggling, but I got the bit between my teeth, sent my CV out to about 150 teams and got a McLaren works drive off the back of it, and into a world of earning money properly and somewhere you can grow, professionally as a driver.”

He is certainly short of neither experience nor growth. Finding success in sports cars, he has raced at Le Mans (finishing a respectable fifth in class) and is one of Ireland's few international motor sport champions – he won the A1GP title (a single-seater championship in which the teams were divided by nationality) for Ireland in 2009, with five wins against some tough competition.

If the A1GP cars were relatively simple – almost-single-make racers designed to be affordable for small teams to run – his move to Formula E with the newly formed Panasonic Jaguar Racing squad has moved him rather closer to the bleeding edge of technology.

“The car reacts as a normal car. It’s very responsive, it gives you a lot of feel and feedback, and it allows you to achieve your lap time in the same way. You push as hard as you can, brake as late as you can, and carry as much speed as you can. It’s the technology that makes it different. The regenerative braking, which can make things feel like you’ve a lot of rear brake bias, and the changes that happen to the battery whether it’s full or whether it’s near empty, but when it’s consistent and everything is as it should be, then you drive the way you normally drive, there’s nothing different there.

"We have a lot going on, and I have to say the circuits we race on are just perfect. We've just been to Hong Kong and that was my first experience. All I could say after was that it was brilliant, just mega. Everything is right, the walls are right there, and it feels very fast. And not just feels, the cars really are very fast. We're getting up to 220km/h on street tracks, so you wouldn't want to hit a wall at that speed . . . But a street circuit is just so much more challenging for a driver, and we're right in the heart of the cities, we're bringing the racing to the people, and we're massively challenged by the tracks.

“That’s one of the perks that comes with it. As a driver you love street circuits because of the challenge that comes with them. The backdrop for Hong Kong was fantastic – you’re literally down town, and what a place it is to kick off our first ever race.

“In season five we’ll be able to do a full race without swapping cars [currently the batteries will not last a full race distance so drivers must pit not for fuel but for a new car]. So, first season was basically a one-make championship and everyone had the same equipment. But season two and into season three, the rules have changed. Now you can produce your own powertrain, inverter and software. So the technology is very complicated and advanced, and even though the cars all look the same, there’s a lot of room to get it right, wrong or to learn from experience. That side of it is super tough but we’re learning at every race and you can transfer what you learn from the extremes of the race track to your road car, which is the whole point.”

Jaguar i-Pace

The point indeed. Jaguar has confirmed plans to launch the i-Pace, an all-electric SUV with a 500km range. The car is slated to go on sale in just 18-months’ time and is set to be a serious rival to the likes of Tesla and Audi’s e-Tron range. Carroll’s hope is that experience on the track with a battery-powered car will lead directly to a better final product on the road. “That’s what we’re already doing and what we’re already learning, every time we race the cars. So the batteries in season five will have to last the full race distance, and that’s a massive jump in the technology. So the i-Pace comes out the year after next, and you can buy that car with a 500km range, which is way up on the best at the minute. So in Formula E, all that technology is pushed to the limit, in the racing environment.”

For now though, Carroll is concentrating on turning this brand new team into electric winners, using old-fashioned racing techniques to help the boffins make a better, faster race car. “Formula E is a great mix. It ranges from a traditional race chassis engineer to people who are more like physicists. Guys who’ve written codes and numbers. So I’m not going to sit down with a laptop and start putting in numbers because I’ll just make the thing bad. But our feedback has to be correct because that’s where you help – where we drive the car, make changes, feel it, don’t feel it and that’s where your feedback as a driver makes a huge difference to the engineers so that they can build a faster package. It’s so open now. It’s not just a set system that everyone runs from, you can make your own software now so it’s huge.

“So I’ve done two races, and we knew it was going to be tough at the start, but from the powertrains to the pit garages, people have just moved the level of the championship up dramatically, and we’re two years behind that in experience. But we have our package and we have our car but we need some time to bring all the elements together. But already, from Hong Kong to Marrakesh, it was fantastic to see how the team operated, to see how everyone came on. We know where we need to improve, and now we need to go and do that, to get the most out of it and to learn for next year.

“The guys are already working hard on next year’s car. Hopefully we can get into the points, treat it as a learning year, but keep pushing. Motorsport’s one of the hardest things, it all has to come together, everyone has to play their part and it takes a lot of effort to get to the top. I understand that, so we’ll give it everything. I can’t tell you when it will be, but I know, and I can tell you we will win.”