When Drayson Racing Technologies committed to Formula E as the championship’s first signed team, we faced an immediate creative and engineering challenge: what should an electric single-seater racing car look like? Not the standardised Spark SRT_01E that all teams would initially use, but the car DRT envisaged competing with as technical regulations opened up — a car that expressed our philosophy of electric performance, sustainability, and British engineering excellence.
The answer came from an unusual collaboration: veteran Formula 1 designer Sergio Rinland and a cohort of postgraduate students at the Royal College of Art. The process, the outcome, and the lessons it generated are the subject of this post.
Why Sergio Rinland?
Sergio Rinland is one of the most experienced racing car designers in the world. His CV spans decades of Formula 1 work, including senior design roles at teams including Brabham and Williams. His engineering approach — rigorous, aerodynamically sophisticated, and deeply informed by the physical realities of what racing cars must do — was exactly what the DRT Formula E concept required as its technical foundation.
Rinland’s willingness to engage with an electric single-seater project at a time when electric racing was not yet mainstream reflected both his engineering curiosity and his recognition that the regulatory and technical constraints of Formula E presented genuinely interesting design challenges — particularly in the areas of aerodynamics, battery packaging, and energy management architecture.
Why the Royal College of Art?
The Royal College of Art brings a dimension to vehicle design that pure engineering firms cannot — the capacity to imagine futures rather than simply optimise existing configurations. RCA vehicle design graduates work at the intersection of technology, culture, and human experience. They ask not just ‘how does this work?’ but ‘how does this feel, and what does it communicate?’
For DRT, the Formula E concept was not just an engineering exercise. It was a statement of belief in electric performance — a visual argument that zero-emission racing could be as exciting and beautiful as any form of motorsport that preceded it. The RCA students brought precisely the combination of formal design skill and conceptual ambition required to make that argument through the car’s appearance.
The design philosophy behind the Formula E concept connects to the broader DRT approach to electric vehicle presentation — the same thinking that shaped the visual identity of the B12/69EV land speed record car. The story of that car, and how its design communicated performance alongside engineering credibility, is told in our post on how the B12/69EV broke the 204 mph electric land speed record.
The Design Constraints: What Formula E Required
The DRT Formula E concept was designed within the early technical framework of the championship, which established key parameters: a single-seater open-wheel configuration, defined overall dimensions, battery pack location requirements, and minimum weight limits. Within these parameters, the design team had significant freedom — particularly in aerodynamics and body surface definition.
Rinland’s engineering brief established the structural and aerodynamic requirements. The battery pack’s position — low and central in the chassis, replacing the fuel tank of a conventional single-seater — drove the car’s fundamental proportions. The requirement to manage aerodynamic cooling for the battery and motor systems without the thermal mass of an internal combustion engine created novel packaging challenges that Rinland and the RCA team addressed as a joint engineering-design problem.
The Aerodynamic Philosophy: Clean Air for Electric Efficiency
A conventional Formula 1 car’s aerodynamics are optimised for maximum downforce — but the complex vortex-generating appendages that achieve this create significant aerodynamic drag, which costs power and therefore fuel consumption. For an electric racing car, where energy is limited and efficiency is a competitive variable, the aerodynamic trade-off between downforce and drag must be managed more carefully.
The DRT Formula E concept’s aerodynamic surfaces were designed for a higher efficiency operating point than contemporary F1 — generating the downforce required for competitive lap times with lower associated drag. This philosophy anticipated the energy management dimension of Formula E competition, where a car that is 5% less efficient aerodynamically might require 5% more energy to complete a race distance — a significant competitive penalty.
The aerodynamic thinking from the Formula E concept informed the approach taken to the B12/69EV’s bodywork, where drag minimisation was the dominant requirement. The engineering of that car’s aerodynamics is discussed in the context of the land speed record achievement.
The Outcome: A Vision for Electric Racing
The DRT Formula E concept, as rendered by the RCA team with Rinland’s technical direction, presented a car that was simultaneously credible as a racing machine and arresting as a designed object. It communicated that electric racing was not a compromise — not a lesser form of the real thing — but a distinctive and exciting category in its own right.
That argument — that electric motorsport is a genuine sporting and technological advance rather than an ecological compromise imposed on reluctant participants — is one that DRT has made consistently across its programmes. It is the argument at the heart of the case for competitive low-carbon racing, and it is the argument that Formula E has, over eleven seasons, progressively proven.
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