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You’re a rookie about to make your debut on the big stage. You’ve known this moment has been coming and you’ve covered countless miles in pre-season testing. You might be new, but you’ve never been more ready to race. For Taylor Barnard, however, his Formula E debut was a bit of a different story.

Serving as the NEOM McLaren Formula E Team’s Reserve and Development Driver throughout the 2023/24 Formula E season, Taylor was no stranger to the team or the series, but it’s a role in which you are naturally confined to the simulator and the garage, rather than the cockpit.

“Taylor had been with us all weekend,” says Race Engineer Stephen Lane when recalling the 2024  Monaco E-Prix. “He was in all of the pre-event meetings and briefings that we had with the drivers and all of the other engineers. It isn’t a hugely active role, but you are there to listen and you’re participating.

“However, I think it's fair that as much as they might have an awareness, they can’t fully understand it until they've actually experienced it themselves.”

Laying the groundwork

When Sam Bird crashed out of the first practice session at the Monaco E-Prix and sustained a hand injury, Taylor’s experience as Reserve and Development Driver was proven to be fortuitous. As well as running through typical race weekend scenarios such as Qualifying simulations and tyre management, Taylor had also played a key part in the team's Monaco-specific preparations.

“As was the case for a number of events in Season 10, including Monaco, Taylor was the first of our drivers to use the simulator for pre-event preparation,” explains Grant Clarke, who oversaw Taylor’s simulator sessions during his time as Test and Development Driver and who now serves as his Race Engineer.

 

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“He was ahead of Sam and Jake [Hughes], which meant that he did a lot of the software sign-offs. He tested any new features, and he also gave direction on the initial energy management calibrations, providing feedback to the engineering team.

“So those additional responsibilities gave Taylor a great insight into developments ahead of individual events, and it ensured that he was in a good position if he was eventually called up, as he was in Monaco.”

Sam was ruled out of the race - and the two that followed - thrusting Taylor into the hot seat at a moment’s notice.

“It was 10, 15 minutes before FP2, and the thing I remember best is Gary [Paffett], the Team Manager, came to me - I had my headset on, I was in the middle of a meeting, preparing to watch the next session - and he said, ‘Get your stuff. We have to go right now,” Taylor says.

“I didn't have time to get nervous. I had not even five minutes to get my stuff on. I ran downstairs straight into the car, checked the pedals, checked the belts, and off I went.

“I'm kind of happy it was quick because if not, I would've been very, very, very nervous.”

Handling the pressure

Luckily for Taylor, one element that made the last-minute debut easier to deal with was the track. He’d driven Monaco the previous year in Formula 3, so that took away the need for even more last-minute learning, but the pressure of jumping in at the deep end for a team as big as NEOM McLaren remained.

“I'd already driven Monaco, so I didn't have to learn the track or anything, but it was the first time being in a Formula E car on a race weekend and the whole thing of, ‘Okay, I'm actually going to do an official session in a NEOM McLaren car.’ That was quite a lot for me.”

Helping to ease that pressure was Laney, part of who’s job was to ensure Taylor remained calm in the cockpit and wasn’t impacted by the size of the task.

“Quite a big part of being a Race Engineer is to be a bit of a driver mental coach,” he says. “Trying to keep the drivers calm is quite a common thing that we do.

“I think the way that we explain things to them, trying to keep things simple and making sure that we can translate between engineer language and driver language. I think that has a big impact on just keeping them calm, the fact that they understand what's going on.”

Despite racing a NEOM McLaren car at a high-profile location where we’ve enjoyed tremendous success over the years, the team’s expectations were clear - and not outlandish.

“The team made it very clear that, just don't crash, keep everything clean, and just learn,” Taylor recalls. “The most important thing was to learn because the chances of Sam being in for the next weekend, which was Berlin, were very slim. So, it was more just learn, learn, learn, and then for the next weekend, when you've got time to prepare, then we'll go for a result.”

Taylor at least had one practice session to get to grips with everything before Qualifying, and the team altered their existing plan in order to make sure he got the absolute maximum out of the short 30-minute session before things got serious.

“The first thing we actually did was to adjust the run plan for Taylor,” says Laney. “We made it a bit simpler compared to what would've been the initial plan for Sam. We tried to maximise his track time. We felt that he would get more from doing more laps than what we lose with the tyres being a little bit too hot.

“We also decided to focus only on the 300-kilowatt laps. Normally, you do a bit of a mixture – you're allowed to do two laps at 350kw, which is what you go to if we make it to the Duel stage in Qualifying.

“The other thing we did was make sure we did as much Attack Mode practice as we could because the Attack Zone is in quite a difficult position at Monaco. When the drivers go through that activation, they lose quite a lot of lap time, so in the race, if you attempt it and miss it, it's a huge problem.”

Tapping into the team

After practice wrapped, with the basics covered, the focus immediately shifted to going faster. Taylor and the engineers worked on everything, including improving his braking points, while Sam and Jake Hughes, our other driver last season, offered their input, too.

“Jake was talking to me about the way the races work, but of course, he has a job to do himself, so I didn't really go to him so much,” Taylor says. “But Sam and the rest of the team were so supportive in giving me the information that I wanted, the environment that I needed to perform, and to be calm.

“And fair play to Sam, because he's just broken his hand and ruined his weekend and the next couple of weekends, his first thought was to come and help me. You don't get that very often in this kind of sport, so I think that's why we now have such a good, friendly relationship.”

Laney adds: “I think the collaboration that he's had with Sam has been hugely beneficial for him gaining confidence because Sam's been completely open with him.

“He's tried to pass on all of his experience, all of his knowledge. Not many drivers would do that, to be fair, and Sam’s also praised Taylor when he's been there and I think that's helped Taylor a lot.”

Time to race

Taylor had prepared as best he could, but despite his last-minute cramming, Formula E races present something that even the best can’t pre-empt. With so many ways to approach the race, Taylor’s main aim was to keep out of the inevitable trouble, while working out for himself what was the most comfortable way of getting to the Chequered Flag.

“The team wanted me to hang back and stay out of trouble and save as much energy as I could at the start of the race,” he says. “There's so many different ways and techniques and understandings of the race which work. [Nick] Cassidy can start at the front, he drops all the way to the back, and then comes to the front at the end. [Oliver] Rowland likes to go from the back to the front and control it from the front. There's so many different approaches that you can take, and at that point they were ‘we don't know what yours is, so go and find it’, go and feel how you think you should race.

“I think I was fairly conservative at the start because everyone was extremely aggressive, and I wasn't used to that kind of racing yet,” he adds. “But then, 10 laps in, I understood how I had to do it. That's when I got my elbows out, and it was very chaotic but actually quite a lot of fun.”

Getting his elbows out was all part of the learning experience. Taylor could have had an easier, safer debut, but with one eye on a potential - and ultimately inevitable - second outing in Berlin, the decision was made to thrust him into the thick of it to speed up his Formula E education.

“There was no expectation to score points, so the priority was to try and maximise his learnings, especially regarding energy saving and the race strategy,” Laney says. “We made a decision to do a proper race start and to get him into the pack. Occasionally, with drivers that have qualified at the back, they'll go into an extreme energy-saving strategy where they're saving massive energy, and they're just crossing their fingers for a Safety Car. But we thought that if we don't have a Safety Car, he's just going to spend the whole race driving on his own slowly, and that's not the best learning.”

While it might sound rather daunting, jumping into a highly-competitive series like Formula E on a track like Monaco with bucket loads of pressure pouring over you, Taylor recalls his debut fondly.

“I passed [Sebastien] Buemi around the outside of the really slow hairpin and that was like, ‘Okay, it's my first race and not too bad,” he says. “There was so much chaos everywhere, and I remember it being a lot to take in. Obviously, I'd watched the races before, but never from the point of view of a driver, and to experience that was something that I was not used to.

“It was a lot to take in at first, but it was actually really a lot of fun.”

 

The new kid on the block 🙌

From 22nd to 14th in your first Formula E race! Not a bad afternoon in Monaco for Taylor Barnard. pic.twitter.com/cU9PwsFPrS

— Formula E (@FIAFormulaE) May 2, 2024

Confidence was the biggest prize

Laney points out that the manic Monaco weekend delivered a surge of confidence for Taylor, too, which stood him in good stead for his next outing, where he scored his first points.

“It was probably a combination of relief as much as building confidence,” he says. “Just to get that first one out of the way was probably a big sigh of relief. Formula E’s's always been so competitive and I think you could argue it's still the most competitive championship at a high level, so I think to be thrown in at the deep end, and deliver such a solid performance, I think must have been a huge help to build his confidence.

“And it was clear by the time we got to Berlin, you could already see that that confidence had grown a bit more.”

“He showed such a star quality from getting that call-up in Monaco,” he says. “He was the youngest driver on the grid, and then in Berlin, became the youngest driver to score points.

“For him, the sky's the limit, and as much as he's been made aware of that fact, with all the media attention, he's got that level of self-confidence, but it doesn't overcome him at all.”

“He's got that belief in his ability and he's got the belief in the team's ability. Hopefully that success can continue.”