Fortescue Zero unveils 2027 Formula E car

Fortescue Zero Racing unveiled its car for the upcoming Formula E season at a lavish event in London on Friday, setting the stall out for its first season in the all-electric series.

Well, it may be its first as a team, but for the company, it's more a case of adding another string to its racing-shaped bow.

Fortescue – an Australian mining and energy company – bought the former Williams Advanced Engineering business back in 2022, and has supplied battery and charging technology to the series. It also worked with Jaguar to produce the British carmaker's drivetrains, but now it's entering in its own right.

And while it took over Jay Penske's longstanding entry, around 40% of the old DS Penske team's staff came from title partner Stellantis, and have since been largely redeployed to the group's other motorsport activities. That meant Fortescue Zero Racing really did have to put together its operation, and it did it remarkably quickly.

“Gary [Ekerold, the general manager of the Jaguar TCS Racing project at Fortescue Zero] gave me a call just before the London race – it was literally days before the London race – and he said, ‘There's something brewing. I'm going to walk to talk to you. Let's meet up after London',” team principal Jim Wright tells RACER. “There was a conversation initially in Tokyo where [Fortescue founder and executive chairman] Andrew Forrest said that he'd like to look at getting a team, and then in London it was apparent that Jay Penske may be looking to exit, and it happened that quickly.

“On September 7, I got to work, so that's what? Eight weeks.”

But why does a mining company want a racing team? Even if there has already been prior involvement behind the proverbial curtain.

“This is a good, healthy, green, clean environment. It's not war,” says Forrest. “The most competitive environment is, of course, war, which is a terrible environment and a breakdown of political leadership. So this is something good which can come out of it. Outside of war the most competitive field, and that is what drives technology.

“I want to be deeply embedded in the hardest competitions in the world so we, the green energy world – which is the future of our planet, if we're going to have a future – that's where we learn from each other and fastest.”

“Our ambition is very, very high,” says team principal Jim Wright. Fortescue Zero Racing

And the technology transfer is very real, too. Fortescue might not be a carmaker like other Formula E outfits, or even a pure racing company like the Williams team it can trace its roots back to, but its racing program will have a very real impact on the wider business, from understanding the propulsion technology itself to developing operations.

“Only last week I was in Perth [and] on the first floor in Perth there is an operations room, which is not dissimilar to a Formula E remote garage operation, only a lot bigger, and bigger obviously than a Formula One remote operations room, Wright explains. “That is controlling, fully electric, autonomous mining vehicles thousands of miles away.

“If you think about it in our terms, that technology has been derived from this over the last 12 years. Electrification, electric motors bigger than these, gearboxes, inverters, everything that we've got here, scaled up and obviously more durable for the job that we're doing. That's for technology, and when you see that in action, it's mind blowing.”

Wright's resume has the likes of Williams F1, Scuderia Toro Rosso, and Virgin Racing as well as Mahindra, Venturi, and Andretti in Formula E, but in Fortescue Zero, he's found an ideal setup.

“If I was to sit down now and say in a dream, who would I want to own a Formula E team that you would team principal of? I honestly would be thinking $17 billion corporation. Profitable, totally committed to decarbonization, electrification, growing global presence, proven technology through the purchase of Williams Advance Engineering and everything they've done over the last 12 years in Formula E,” he says. “You couldn't find a better fit. So when Gary said, ‘if you want to be a part of this," it was such an easy, easy decision.

“And from my point of view, I've been in Formula E for 12 years, since day zero. The experience I've gained in all of those years, I think has stood me in good stead. I feel ready, and the opportunity came, so I took it.”

The team is serious. Wright says the team isn't “setting any limits here because Fortus Unit Zero never sets limits,” but it's in it to win, not just participate, and has set its sights on long-term success.

“Our ambition is very, very high,” he says. "How fast, how long it takes us to get to where we want to be will be determined.

“But we are ready to be super competitive from day one, Andrew has rightly set very high targets for his team. We'll get there as quickly as we can do.”

For Forrest, it's about the team mirroring the real world development of electrification and decarbonization – a point emphasized by the team's choice of race numbers of 20 and 30. The whole Fortescue business, Forrest says, will be carbon zero, not net zero, by 2030.

“Anywhere in the top three, I think would be spectacular,” Forrest says. “To go from nothing [to that] would be spectacular. And of course, that's what green energy has to have done. It's gone from nothing. It's got to challenge a two-century-old industry. We've got no time to do it. We have to win.”