There’s a shortening list of generic complaints about Formula E. It’s too quiet, the circuits aren't classic tracks, the drivers are all F1 rejects, the racing is bumper cars, and the most consistently and provenly wrongheaded one: it’s a spec series.

A spec series is when you run a season of motorsport races of cars that are all exactly the same. They might get tooled by different teams – and there’s some limited options for changing setup, if a driver prefers smoother or tighter suspension or whatever – but the cars are fundamentally the same, come from the same supplier and all have the same bits under the hood. If you want some more bits, you go back to the same people.

So for example, the Porsche Carrera cup is a spec series. F2 is a spec series – with every car supplied by Dallara. Formula One and WEC aren't spec series, as different manufacturers make different elements of the cars. Indycar isn’t a spec series, as it’s got multiple different engine suppliers.

There’s lots to be said about spec series – generally, the racing is much closer than in a manufacturer arms race and as a consequence they can be more fun to watch. Before almost every processional “grown-up” race there’s some mad lads paying seven-figure stakes to take it five-wide round a corner for not much more than the possibility of a whiff of prosecco and a backmarker FP1 outing.

Formula E, of course, has that close racing, and at a ferocious level of professional skill it’s hard to imagine anywhere else at the minute. And the cars all, to some extent, look the same.

T​he Gen2 chassis is revealed in Geneva with an innovative 'touch the truck' challenge (Image: ABB Formula E) T​he Gen2 chassis is revealed in Geneva with an innovative 'touch the truck' challenge (Image: ABB Formula E)

Rather than have chassis specifications that constructors interpret, like F1 or WEC, Formula E supplies teams with a Spark-designed chassis and suspension with the specially-designed survival cell to protect driver and battery. Which is why the cars look pretty similar – and you get things like the launch of the Gen2 look at the Geneva Motor Show.

But after that, the similarities end.

I asked current DTM champion Gary Paffett – who’s now driving for HWA in Formula E but has had years of experience in other series from F1 to touring cars – what he’d expected from the series’ technology.

“When I came into FE I saw it more as a spec series than it is and I was very surprised at the differences in the cars – in the performance and the software.

“The amount you can actually do was really surprising to me, the cars are very different. The front of the car, the suspension, the chassis is the same but the drivetrain, the software, everything is completely different for everyone and you can do a lot yourself. So there’s a lot of scope to find lap time.”

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Even though HWA don’t make their own powertrains (they’re supplied by Venturi) the team are free to develop their own software. Which might sound like a minor thing – the alert that tells you when your car’s a bit warm, say, but in all race cars the software maps are crucially different modes, almost like switching gears. You’ve probably heard radio messages telling the driver to switch.

“For us, the hardware from Venturi is the same – we get the same as they get, we’re a customer. The difference is the software. We have the same software system but you can develop your own brake-shaping software, your own traction software, things like that.

“So you can develop your own software to the car. We share all this with the car, they do stuff and we do stuff and we share everything but the cars end up quite different.”

Formula E’s map changes are, if anything, more manual than most series despite the introduction of brake-by-wire meaning drivers are at least not actually putting in the brake regen balance before every single corner of a circuit.

Same lights but not much more - the cars on track at the first Gen2 round (Image: ABB Formula E) Same lights but not much more - the cars on track at the first Gen2 round (Image: ABB Formula E)

Software updates are as crucial as in any race car; Season 2 champion Sebastien Buemi compared them to F1’s aero updates at pre-season testing this year. That’s no small thing – when the car needs to let the driver manage battery temperatures, regeneration and output with zero time for updates once they actually hit the track, they are as fixed and set as a manufactured feature.

That’s nerdy stuff though. What you need to know is that the cars also have fearsome amounts of actual hardware in the back, all of which is custom to a manufacturer.

So custom, in fact, that the season has been dogged by controversy after Nissan e.Dams were the first team to make a dual-MGU system really work – a system now banned from next season onwards to simplify paddock chatter and homologation, but certainly something that demonstrates how different the systems are.

Each team is allowed to build their own electric motor-generator unit – which delivers power to the car, and recovers it back into the battery under regenerative braking, like a massively souped-up version of F1’s MGU-K. Then they can make their own inverter, a piece of an electric vehicle so integral that Lucas di Grassi’s failed one at the start of Season 4 almost certainly cost him a second title last year.

They also build their own gearbox and have the option of supplying their own regenerative braking system – which only DS Techeetah have chosen to do, using an adapted version of the Citroen World Rally Championship system, rather than the Brembo brakes supplied to every other team.

N​IO running data during in-season rookie testing this year with Jake Hughes - image: ABB FIA Formula E N​IO running data during in-season rookie testing this year with Jake Hughes - image: ABB FIA Formula E

With all of that variation under the hood, it’s incredible that the lap times are as close as they are. Chinese EV giant NIO are having, by anyone’s standard, a pretty torrid season but Oliver Turvey’s last-place qualifying time was only 1.7 seconds back from Jean-Eric Vergne’s pole in Bern, on a 2.6km track where there’s not much time to find that.

Maybe that’s where Formula E fools people, more than the chassis, into thinking it must be spec – that sort of closeness doesn’t usually happen in manufactured series. Anyone inside the paddock knows the difference between the dominant DS Techeetah and the struggling NIO is huge – but on paper it looks like almost nothing.

But the fact is the cars – and the teams furiously working to develop them – are nothing alike beneath the hood. You wouldn’t get nine manufacturers rushing to a spec series, let alone trying to use it as a hotbed to test their EV technology.

Speaking to Alexander Sims, who drives for the BMW factory team in Formula E, he said that the parts Formula E does supply only serve to keep the racing within a competitive budget, rather than stopping manufacturers developing them. “It’s not like you can build an electric car using Formula E technology and not give it a battery or a chassis when you sell it to a customer, it keeps the technology focussed on what matters most for competition, that can then be transferred to the road."

So stop calling it a spec series. It’s just close racing, in badass cars.