Evans: Jaguar a “completely different team” from last year

Mitch Evans made his Formula E race debut in Hong Kong last year, as a rookie to the series with a brand-new team – and only one functioning car. He told us that Jaguar are now a totally different team, heading into their sophomore year.

He said the weekend in Hong Kong last year was “Tough. For many reasons, first race for the team, first race for me – I only had one car, the second car wasn’t running the whole day.”

Evans retired halfway through the race, starting knowing that he would have to stop at his pit stop as the second car had an electrical fault – a difficult way to begin a Formula E career; “It was tough way to start our campaign but we’re a completely different team now, compared to October last year, whole new power train so we’re hoping for a bigger step compared to last year and obviously with experience, compared to last year the performance will naturally come.”

Returning to Hong Kong is the first time that rookies Jaguar will be coming to a Formula E circuit which they’ve previously raced – “I think it’s good to be back here – it’s a track that we know, it’s the first time we’ve gone to a circuit that we’ve done before so yeah, I’m looking forward to it.”

Asked what the biggest lesson he’d taken from Season 3 was, Evans said almost everything had been a learning curve – “Obviously last year we were brand spanking new so as a team we’ve learnt a lot, we were quite slick by the end of the season but the first few races were just all over the place so even operationally we were a bit behind at the start.

“But yeah we got on top of it towards the end and just trying to maximise our power train. We’re still trying to find the limits of our new one but we’re feeling a lot better than we did at the start of last year.”

Evans said that the Jaguar power train had made significant progress for Season 4, having underperformed in their debut year but that the team had learnt enough to move forward- “We had a lot of room to improve. It was compromised last year so we’ve probably made the biggest change, in terms of the manufacturers but everyone else has at least definitely evolved or I know there’s a few other teams that have brought new power trains but most of them have just evolved from last year.

“We’ve had to make like a double jump to catch up. We’re hoping to be a lot more competitive this year and start battling with the guys at the front, that’ll be nice.