Former Formula One driver Jarno Trulli believes that Formula E can succeed in becoming a well respected championship after the first four rounds of the season. Trulli spoke exclusively to Formula E Zone about his life as a team owner and a reflection on Formula E so far.

Jarno Trulli began his own team shortly after testing the Formula E car for the first time at Donington Park early last year. However, the Italian admits that he knew he was already chasing the rest of the field in the development race, as his team started eight months behind all the others.

“When I tested the Formula E car, I was really impressed with how it works and all the technology behind it. As I began to understand how this new series would work my interest levels increased further; I began to feel that this sport could really succeed and provide a great stepping stone for the future of the car industry and that’s why I decided to become a team owner.”

Becoming a team owner was never an ambition of Jarno Trulli during his time in Formula One nor in his two-year absence from the sport. When the opportunity arose for Trulli to be involved in running his own team, the Italian was unable to turn down the offer.

“I never thought I would become a team owner and I never really had any ambition to do so, however, because of the opportunity I had to join the series and get involved with improving this groundbreaking technology, I decided that I would become a team owner. I only had a short period of time to set up a team of people so that we could get ready for the first test in July. Nevertheless, we were able to pull through and get to the first race of the season, and the team has been improving every day since Beijing.”

Trulli is also keen to assert his own style on his team, rather than adopt styles from his former team bosses like Alain Prost, Eddie Jordan and Flavio Briatore. Although Trulli does admit that his style will contain features from his former employees.

“I want to have my own style, but I have learnt from people like Flavio and Eddie. Despite this, I have brought in my own ideas to the team and I think that the best way to motivate a team is to be extremely positive and to make sure that you have the right people around you in order to achieve the maximum.”

Overall the 40-year-old has been happy with how the team has worked so far this season and believes that the team will keep improving every week to provide better results for the future. However, the Italian admits that he is frustrated by the lack of work his team can do on the car between races. This problem affects the entire Formula E grid, as each car is shipped to the next location after each eprix.

Trulli told us it becomes harder to implement improvements to the car. This is because if you have any technical problem from the last round, then you are more than likely going to carry over this problem to the next round.

“The problem we have as a team is the limited time we can spend on the car. This is the same for everybody, but if you have a problem and you need to analyses the data to find out the problem, you will lose too much time in the day. Therefore, you risk carrying over that problem into the next round.”

Over the next two months, Trulli is hopeful that his team can really work on understanding how to manage the power usage over the break. Trulli believes that understanding the power usage will be the key to success in this championship and is hopeful to have a productive meeting with his engineers about how to improve his car going forward to Miami.