FE | The Shanghai track has been revealed: it will be among the fastest in the world championship

After having thought about it in the past as a possible alternative to the city stages, the real focus of the electric category, Formula E officially lands in Shanghai, China this year. It is not the first time that the electric category has stopped in the Asian country, which actually also hosted the first ever race of the series way back in 2015 on the Beijing street circuit.

Over the years the venue has changed and the last time Formula E visited China was in 2019, when it raced on the Sanya city track, at least before the pandemic forced the entire world of motorsport to stop. After a long period of absence from the calendars, China is ready to return to embrace not only Formula 1, but also Formula E, which will share the same track, namely Shanghai.

While the layout of the Formula 1 Grand Prix will remain unchanged, the design for the track that will host the electric series has been revised, albeit less radically than one might expect. The twenty-two drivers, in fact, will race on a variant of the West Long circuit.

The first sector will remain substantially unchanged, with the characteristic “snail” designed by the sequence that goes from the first to the fourth curve. It will be an interesting challenge for Formula E, which rarely faces such long sections and with these changes in gradient that put stress on the tyres. Likewise, what will be one of the best overtaking points on the entire track remains unchanged, namely the slightly downhill braking section of turn six. Therefore, we will not exploit the reduced configuration on the internal part, but we will guarantee pilots a good opportunity both to try an attack and to recharge the battery.

This also means that the next section will also remain unchanged. Among the various possible configurations, in fact, there was also the opportunity to skip turn six, opting for the route that cuts from turn four to the exit of turn seven, with the addition of a rapid chicane. Instead, up to turn nine, Formula E will follow the same layout as Formula 1, thus traveling through the high-speed zone where the lack of grip of the Gen 3 models will emerge more clearly. The new generation single-seaters, in fact, focus more on efficiency than on pure load and, a bit as already seen for example in the last corner of the Mexican track, on these long-distance sections the drivers will realistically have to fight with oversteer.

However, from turn nine onwards Formula E will follow a totally different path: the track will cut on the inside, with the addition of a chicane to recharge the battery, before returning to the main stretch that takes you back to the finish line. As expected, the electric series will not tackle the long straight that characterizes Shanghai, which would clearly have too high a specific weight on the energy available to the drivers during the race, even if broken up by an artificially created slow change of direction.

Nonetheless, the Shanghai track will be among the fastest in the world, very different from the other street circuits that characterize the world championship. The highest top speeds of the year probably won't be reached, given that there are tracks with longer straights, such as Brazil, the third ePrix of the season, but it will be one of the fastest and most challenging of the entire calendar.