Ahead of the Miami race, Formula E commentator Jack Nicholls talks home advantage, manufacturers and conversing with drivers live during the race.

“It’s great to be in America. There’s a massive market there that motorsport outside the US isn’t really able to tap into. There’s NASCAR and IndyCar, but European and other global motor racing events haven’t really penetrated that audience yet. That’s something that has been a real issue in F1 – without an American team or driver, how do you attract an American audience?

Andretti is doing the organising for the Miami race – the perfect people to do it. The sports marketing arm knows exactly what is needed to organise a street race, and the Formula E team will know exactly what a Formula E race needs.

I haven’t seen the track in person yet, but I’ve heard from others who have that it will be great. There’s a really cool bit where the track goes under a flyover which will still have moving traffic on it. You’ll see it on the overhead TV shots. I’ve been preparing by listening to the Counting Crows record ‘Miami’ on repeat!

We’ll have the facility to talk to drivers in the race, which will be really cool too. We’ll probably select one driver and ask beforehand if we can come to them during the race, perhaps when there’s a safety car or something. We’ve also got live team radio. When we’re following a car on screen, the director will feed in that driver’s team radio. The channel will be open, so if anything gets said, everyone hears it. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s what happens when it’s live!

Nigel Mansell always said that racing at home helped him find a few extra seconds. I think drivers would say now – ‘If I can find extra performance at my home race, why can’t I do that elsewhere?’

You still have to look to e.dams and ABT to be front runners. That said, I think there’s a real chance that Andretti or Dragon could take victory in Miami. I think Scott Speed has a chance of victory. He’s another ex-Toro Rosso F1 driver, but he’s since done NASCAR and World Rallycross, and he’s driven the Formula E car too. He’s used to getting into a new car and going hell for leather. His biggest challenge will be beating Jean-Eric Vergne.

Oriol Servia has been racing in America for years, so he’ll have a decent following. If he wins for Dragon, that would be treated as a home win. It’s the IndyCar boys beating the world.

Mahindra is the team I’d most like to see something from this time. It’s the team that hasn’t quite managed to get anything down on paper in terms of a qualifying or race result. All the other teams have either shown pace in quali or a good result. Mahindra has had some solid qualifying but nothing that shows what they’re really capable of. You could say it’s the same with Venturi but they had Beijing, where Heidfeld could conceivably have won the race, and Buenos Aires, where he led the race. I think Mahindra will be really anxious to prove themselves in Miami.

Can Amlin Aguri repeat their Buenos Aires win? It’s taken them some time to put together the team they wanted from the start, and the team said Argentina was really the first time that they had all the personnel they wanted in place. But they wouldn’t have won that race on outright pace.

It will be interesting to see if Amlin and others have made any big steps forward during the long break. There’s been time to go through the data from previous races and to understand what worked and what didn’t.

Adding races (the Moscow venue and the extra race in London) has changed the dynamic of the season. We left Buenos Aires thinking we were a third of the way through the season. A month later, we’re not even half way through. There’s a lot of racing still to go. Moscow will be brilliant. There’s so much history in that city, and it will be spectacular with the Kremlin so close in the background.

Formula E is not about being a single make championship. This first season is getting the series off the ground, but now that manufacturers are on board for season two, it can only get better. Motorsport is about cars and technology as much as drivers. Look at F1 and Le Mans: the goal is to create the best car and driver combination. We won’t just be rewarding driver talent in Formula E: we’ll be rewarding engineering and design talent too.”

The Miami round of the 2014-15 Formula E season takes place on Saturday 14 March.