Paris E-Prix – Venturi have revealed that not utilising its simulator has been a significant hinderance to the team in the current Formula E season.

Despite it only being his second race in the series Edoardo Mortara led the majority of the second Hong Kong round before he spun and settled for the podium.

Since then Venturi has not been able to score any higher than eighth place, which it has put down to using old software for its simulator until the previous round in Rome.

“Obviously there’s quite a lot of work done in the simulator prior to the race weekend, especially to the ones that you or the team have never raced at,” Mortara explained.

“Let’s say if you have good correlation with real data it’s a lot easier to prepare the weekends.

“We were sort of using old software, old versions and you couldn’t really benefit from the simulator and this made it quite difficult because we couldn’t really prepare as we should have.

“We had to do a lot of work in free practice where we’ve had to solve some pretty crazy issues. So it’s quite a bit step there and I think that most of the issues that we were solving in FP1 we can solve already before coming here.

“That’s a lot of work that we don’t have to do on-track, so hopefully it’s going to help us.”

Team mate Maro Engel has had several appearances in the first group of qualifying, commonly known to be the worst one as the track conditions are at their trough, but agrees that the developments in the simulator have been significant.

“We’ve identified areas to improve the simulator which certainly hurt us a little bit in the first half of the season, we’ve made some big upgrades there,” he said.

“We feel it’s already a much better basis at helping us now but certainly a lot of work left to do.”