From Pit Lane to the Grid: Why Fortescue’s Formula E Entry Matters

Australia is about to have something it has never had before in Formula E: an Australian-owned team on the grid.

Fortescue Zero Racing is preparing to enter the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship for the 2026/27 season, with its first race currently planned for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on 18 December 2026, subject to the final approvals required by Formula E Operations and the FIA.

For anyone who has followed Fortescue only as a mining company, that might sound like an unexpected move.

It makes considerably more sense when you look at what sits behind the name.

Fortescue Zero has been developing electric motorsport technology for years. Its engineering lineage includes Williams Advanced Engineering, and more recently it has been supplying one of Formula E's most interesting pieces of technology, the PIT BOOST system.

Now it is moving from the pit lane onto the starting grid. That is the part of the story I find particularly interesting.

This isn't simply a large Australian company deciding that electric racing might make a good sponsorship exercise. Fortescue has acquired the Penske Formula E operation and is establishing its own racing and innovation team, using Jaguar's new GEN4 powertrain.

That means it will be competing in what is about to become the most powerful generation of Formula E cars yet.

Racing as an Engineering Laboratory

I've always been interested in motorsport for much the same reason I've been interested in modifying and converting vehicles.

When you push machinery hard enough, weaknesses become very obvious.

Something that works perfectly well during normal driving might behave very differently after repeated full-power acceleration, aggressive regeneration, high battery discharge, rapidly changing loads and sustained temperatures.

Racing compresses years of ordinary use into an extraordinarily demanding environment. That is why it has always been such a useful engineering laboratory.

Fortescue itself is making much the same argument. The company says it intends to use motorsport to develop and test technology that can ultimately move beyond racing into commercial vehicles and heavy industry.

That is worth watching because the relationship between racing and road technology has always worked this way.

Motorsport doesn't necessarily hand us a finished road-car component. What it does is expose engineering limits very quickly and force people to solve them.

Electric racing is now doing that with motors, batteries, inverters, cooling systems, regenerative braking, software and energy management.

Fortescue Was Already Inside Formula E

The new race team might be getting the headlines, but Fortescue Zero was already working inside Formula E before buying a team.

Its PIT BOOST technology was introduced into the championship during the 2024/25 season.

PIT BOOST allows a Formula E car to receive an additional 3.85kWh of energy during a race through a 600kW charging system, with the actual energy transfer occurring in roughly 30 seconds.

Those numbers are significant.

Charging an EV at 600kW is not simply a matter of plugging in a larger charger.

The battery has to accept the energy safely. Temperature has to be managed. Cell behaviour has to be understood. The charging equipment and vehicle have to communicate correctly, and all of that has to happen repeatedly under race conditions.

Fortescue Zero combines the charging hardware with its Elysia battery intelligence software, which monitors and manages battery behaviour while allowing extremely high charging rates.

According to Formula E, the PIT BOOST system has already delivered hundreds of battery top-ups during races, testing and other sessions.

So Fortescue isn't arriving at Formula E wondering how electric racing works. Its engineers have already been part of it.

Now they will have the additional experience of operating an entire racing team.

Then Comes GEN4

The timing also matters. Fortescue isn't entering at the end of one generation of Formula E technology. It is entering at the beginning of GEN4. And GEN4 represents a very substantial jump.

The current GEN3 Evo cars operate with 300kW of normal race power and up to 350kW when additional performance is available.

GEN4 increases maximum power to as much as 600kW. That is roughly 800 horsepower. Formula E says the cars will be capable of more than 335km/h and approximately 0 to 100km/h in 1.8 seconds.

They will also have permanent active all-wheel drive and up to 700kW of regenerative braking capability. That last figure might not produce the same headlines as the acceleration number, but from an engineering perspective it is extremely important.

Putting power into the wheels is only half the equation. Recovering enormous amounts of power back through the motors and into the battery while controlling the vehicle under braking creates another set of engineering problems entirely.

The battery has to accept it. The motors and inverters have to manage it. The control system has to decide where that braking effort is applied. The driver still needs a predictable car underneath them.

That is where modern electric performance becomes much more interesting than simply quoting horsepower.

Jaguar Supplies the Powertrain

Fortescue Zero Racing will use Jaguar's GEN4 powertrain.

Jaguar's development responsibility extends well beyond the electric motor itself. It includes the inverter, gearbox, active rear differential, cooling system, driveshafts, electrical systems, brake-by-wire components, software and controls.

That is a good illustration of how misleading the phrase "electric motor" can be when people talk about EV performance.

The motor is only one component. A genuinely high-performance electric vehicle is a system. The battery has to deliver sufficient power without overheating or excessive voltage drop.

The inverter has to control that energy accurately. The motors have to convert it efficiently. The cooling system has to keep everything within its operating range.

The software has to manage traction, torque delivery, regeneration and protection. And all of those components have to communicate with each other.

When they don't, it doesn't matter how impressive any individual component looks on paper. The car doesn't work properly.

That is something anybody who has spent enough time building electric vehicles eventually learns.

What Makes GEN4 Particularly Interesting

Formula E's move to permanent active all-wheel drive opens another area that I think will become increasingly important in high-performance road EVs.

With electric motors and sophisticated electronic control, power distribution no longer has to depend entirely on mechanical systems. Torque can be altered extremely quickly. The vehicle can respond to grip, steering input and load.

Regeneration can become part of the handling strategy as well as an energy recovery system. This is the same broader engineering direction we looked at recently through Monster Tajima's electric Pikes Peak development.

Once electric propulsion is properly integrated with vehicle dynamics, motors stop being merely a replacement for an engine. They become part of the way the car steers, brakes and behaves.

Formula E is now pushing deeper into that territory.

Why an Australian Team Matters

There is another part of the Fortescue story that I think is worth recognising.

Australia has become predominantly a market for imported electric vehicles. We buy the finished product. But there is a much bigger electric vehicle industry than selling imported cars. 

There is battery engineering. Motor control. Power electronics. Software. Charging systems. Vehicle integration. Thermal management. Conversion. Repair. Energy storage. Heavy vehicle electrification. Motorsport engineering.

When an Australian-owned organisation enters something as technically demanding as Formula E, it puts some of that engineering capability on an international stage.

Fortescue Zero Racing is expected to become the first Australian-owned team to compete in the championship.

That doesn't suddenly create an Australian EV manufacturing industry, but it does demonstrate that Australian involvement in electric transport does not have to stop at the showroom door.

There is still room to engineer things.

The Road Car Lessons Will Be Worth Watching

It would be easy for us simply to report Fortescue's race results once the season starts. There are plenty of motorsport websites capable of doing that.

What interests me more is what happens underneath the cars. How does the Jaguar GEN4 system manage 600kW? How much heat does repeated high-power operation create? How is 700kW regeneration controlled?

What happens to battery temperature through a race? How aggressively can power be delivered before tyre grip becomes the limiting factor? How do the different control systems interact? What fails?

What gets redesigned? And which of those lessons eventually appear somewhere outside Formula E?

Those are the questions Oz Electric Vehicles will be watching.

Fortescue has already said that it sees racing as a place to develop technology that can eventually be applied to heavy industry and commercial electric vehicles.

That makes sense.

A mine haul truck and a Formula E car could hardly look more different, but underneath them are many of the same fundamental engineering questions.

How do you store energy? How quickly can you deliver it?

How do you recover it? How do you keep the system cool?

How do you make batteries last? How do you move enormous electrical loads efficiently and reliably?

The scale changes. The physics doesn't.

From Supplying the Charger to Racing the Car

Perhaps that is what makes Fortescue Zero's entry especially interesting.

They have already been standing beside the track helping Formula E push charging technology harder.

Now they are going racing themselves.

The first Australian-owned Formula E team will enter at exactly the same time the championship takes its biggest technological step yet.

That gives Australian EV people something worth following.

Not simply because there will be an Australian name on the grid.

Because somewhere inside those race cars, engineers will be solving problems that could eventually change what electric vehicles outside the racetrack are capable of doing.

And that is the part I will be watching.

Graeme.

Graeme Manietta, Founder, Oz Electric Vehicles
EV Builder • Battery Specialist • Conversion Engineer • EV Troubleshooter
Over two decades working hands-on with electric vehicle technology.
Battery Upgrades • Diagnostics • BMS/BCU Integration • EV Conversions • Specialist EV Engineering

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