McLaren’s Formula 1 and IndyCar teams have been executing pit stops for years… And now they’ve landed in Formula E as well.

Pit Boost will be in action in Formula E for one race at each double-header event this season. Already starting with only around 50 per cent of the energy needed to complete a race, and need to strategically save and regenerate energy in order to make it to the end. But now, Pit Boost will see drivers pit for 34 seconds (total time stationary with the charge itself taking 30 seconds), gaining an additional 10 per cent (3.85 kWh) of usable energy that will change their approach on track.

“It's fast charging on a mega level. It's at 600 kilowatts, which is probably two times faster than anything available on the road at the moment,” explains NEOM McLaren Chief Engineer Albert Lau. “It's the culmination of two-plus years of work.”

A long wait for a quick stop

As Albert says, Pit Boost has been a long time coming. We’re now in the third season of Formula E’s third generation, with the cars now dubbed GEN3 Evo after their mid-cycle update, but only now is Pit Boost coming along. As with every technological development, it needed to go through a rigorous testing process to ensure not just functionality, but safety.

For comparison, road car EV chargers range from 2 kW to 350 kW depending on the type, but the Pit Boost chargers are 600 kW, demonstrating just how far removed they are from known, tried and tested tech, and how ambitious Formula E’s development is.

“Pit Boost should have been something that was on the cars at the beginning of GEN3, but it's had a fairly difficult teething period. The technology is prototype, and they set themselves some lofty goals, but when you're dealing with this level of new technology, it's to be expected.”

The processes are new, too. Formula E hasn’t had pit stops since GEN2 arrived in Season 5 – long before McLaren’s involvement – and then they involved entire car changes rather than a comparatively simple plug-in charge, so teams have had to adjust to that. McLaren has been among the teams pushing hard when it comes to preparation, even when Pit Boost’s introduction was delayed.

“We've always been one of the teams that has done the most practice stops, and we feel we're very comfortable in that process,” says Albert. “We'll continue to do that and put a priority on it in Jeddah during Free Practice to make sure everyone's as well trained as possible to be able to deliver what we need to.”

 

PITBOOST explained in 34 seconds. ⏲️ pic.twitter.com/OUnUkAoOlz

— NEOM McLaren FE (@McLarenFE) February 9, 2025

Risk vs reward

Away from the pit lane, drivers and teams will have to balance the risk of losing track position as they pit with the benefits of the additional energy, as well as how they deploy it in these races so often determined by efficiency rather than outright pace.

“The faster you go, the less energy saving you do,” Albert explains. “So, when there's less energy saving, generally there's a little bit less overtaking.

“Like in F1, if there was no tyre degradation, there would be a lot less overtaking. Likewise, for this, if you're not energy saving, there's less overtaking.”

The stops add to already strategically intriguing races. We have Attack Mode, where drivers dip off the racing line in order to activate the use of an additional 50 kW of power and four-wheel-drive, and that will remain in races with Pit Boost, but the two were almost tied together.

“Originally the plan was to link the pit stop to the Attack Mode,” Albert recalls. “So that once you've done the stop, it allows you to take Attack Mode, but they realised that everybody would then just stop on Lap 1 and then take the Attack Mode.

“Now you've got Attack Mode twice and the Pit Boost. That gives you three strategic elements to play with during the race.”

With the change to a pit stop – which can only be used when the car has between 60 and 40 per cent of its useable energy left, not just at any point in the race – it opens up the possibility for wider strategic variation over the course of a race. Not just that, but teams can only pit one car at a time, so knowing when to pit each car in the team could be vital in determining the outcome of a race and a wider team result. And how all of this will play out is, of course, still anyone’s guess.

“I don't necessarily think teams are going to do the same things,” says Albert. “I think they're going to feel each other out and see how they use it best within that window, within that 20 per cent of state of charge window that you're allowed to do it.

“We've only got one Pit Boost charger per team, so we need to manage which car we bring in first and look at how congested the pit lane might be. It's going to be interesting, I don't necessarily think it's super clear.”

From behind the wheel

From a driver’s perspective, executing the stop will be not too dissimilar to how they already tackle Attack Mode. There will be a pre-race plan that may or may not need to be adapted depending on how the race plays out, and with there being no telemetry in Formula E, communication will be vital.

“We'll give them a plan at the beginning of the race, and the best thing they can do is give us the information on how much energy they've got left in the car so that when we hit that window of when we can come in and when we can't is clear for everybody,” explains Albert.

“A lot of it is up to the driver to make sure everything is working okay from the car point of view, to when they stop, how they hit the countdown, when they release the car. It’s still something that they need to manage.”

Something else that will need to be considered is temperature. While the night races in Jeddah will be relatively cool, the rest of the races where Pit Boost will be utilised will take place in warmer climates.

“It's not a small amount of energy you're putting in, and that increase in energy is going to cause an increase in temperature,” Albert points out. “It's a matter of how that already fits into a race where you're in a very hot climate.

“It's definitely going to have an effect. It's adding an extra thing to make the battery hotter. We've already seen some races where we've had some temperature limitation, like São Paulo last year, where ambient conditions were already pushing the car to that temperature limitation. The fact that you're going to do a Pit Boost makes it even more critical that you manage it correctly.”