I’ve been thinking about constraints lately. The kind that make you better instead of smaller.

Formula E started in 2014 as motorsport’s awkward experiment. The cars were slow compared to F1 — embarrassingly slow, actually. The races were short. The tracks were temporary street circuits in city centers. Nobody in the traditional racing world took it seriously; most coverage had a patronizing tone. “Electric racing. How cute.”

Nine seasons later, the Gen3 car produces 350kW (roughly 470 horsepower), hits 200 mph, and recovers up to 600kW through regenerative braking. That regenerative figure is wild — it means the car harvests energy during deceleration at a rate that would’ve been the total power output of the original Formula E car.

What happened between “how cute” and “legitimately fast” is a story about constraints forcing innovation. And it has more to do with technology leadership than most business books I’ve read.

The Constraint That Changed Everything #

Formula E operates under strict energy limits. Each car gets a fixed battery capacity per race. You can’t just add more power; you have to be smarter about how you use it. Every watt counts — literally.

This constraint produced a counterintuitive result: Formula E powertrains are now more efficient than F1’s. The Gen3 drivetrain achieves roughly 95% energy efficiency. F1’s hybrid powertrain, despite a much larger development budget and decades more engineering heritage, sits around 40-50%.

The difference? F1 optimizes for peak performance within essentially unlimited energy (they carry hundreds of liters of fuel). Formula E optimizes for performance per unit of energy. Different objective functions produce radically different engineering cultures.

I see this pattern constantly in software. The team with unlimited cloud budget and no performance constraints ships bloated services. The team with a hard latency SLA and a fixed infrastructure footprint builds something elegant. Constraints aren’t obstacles; they’re design parameters.

The Ten-Year Bet #

What I find most interesting about Formula E isn’t the technology — it’s the timeline. The series committed to electric racing in 2014, when the cars were genuinely slower than a fast road car. They took a decade of incremental improvement, public skepticism, and financial risk to reach competitive performance.

Most organizations would’ve pivoted away. The quarterly pressure to show results, the media comparisons to established competitors, the internal doubt — these kill long-term technology bets all the time.

Formula E survived because the founding team made an explicit choice: we’re building for 2025, not 2015. The early seasons were proof of concept, not product launches. Every car generation was a stepping stone, and each one delivered measurable improvements. Gen1 to Gen2 doubled the battery capacity and eliminated mid-race car swaps. Gen2 to Gen3 added all-wheel drive and tripled regenerative braking power.

That kind of patient, compound improvement is rare in any industry. It requires leadership that can absorb short-term criticism while maintaining conviction in the long-term direction.

Race-to-Road Transfer #

The standard knock on motorsport is that it’s entertainment, not engineering. Expensive cars going fast — fun to watch but disconnected from real-world technology.

Formula E breaks that narrative. Jaguar’s Formula E team developed silicon carbide semiconductor technology for their race powertrain. Silicon carbide inverters handle higher voltages and temperatures with less energy loss than traditional silicon — perfect for race cars where every efficiency point matters. That same technology is now being integrated into Jaguar’s production EVs.

Porsche, Nissan, and Mahindra are running similar programs. The racing environment provides something that traditional R&D labs can’t: extreme stress testing under competitive pressure, with results measured in fractions of seconds. When your powertrain efficiency improvement is the difference between a podium finish and tenth place, the feedback loop is brutally fast.

This is the same dynamic that makes hackathons and time-boxed sprints productive. The pressure compresses the iteration cycle. You stop debating architecture and start shipping solutions, because the deadline isn’t negotiable.

What This Means for Technology Leaders #

I don’t think Formula E is a perfect analogy for technology transformation — no analogy is. But three principles from their journey apply broadly.

First, constraints are features. If you’re leading a technology pivot, don’t apologize for the limitations of the new approach. Define them clearly and optimize within them. The team that embraces constraints out-innovates the team that resents them.

Second, compound improvement beats breakthrough thinking. Formula E didn’t have a single eureka moment. They had nine seasons of steady, measurable progress. Each generation built on the last. That’s boring to write about but powerful to execute.

Third, the transfer value of innovation under pressure is real. Jaguar didn’t develop silicon carbide technology for fun; they developed it because their race results depended on it. The commercial application was a consequence, not the goal. When you put engineering talent under genuine competitive pressure, the solutions they produce tend to have broader applicability than anyone planned.

I’m in a transition period myself right now, thinking a lot about where to invest my energy next. The Formula E story keeps resonating with me because it’s proof that starting from a position of disadvantage — slower, smaller, less funded, less respected — doesn’t determine where you end up. It’s the quality of your constraints, and your willingness to work within them, that matters.