It has been well documented that Dragon Racing will be using Venturi’s powertrain for the second season of the Formula E championship, but the reasons behind the move have yet to be explored–until now.

During pre-season testing, Formula E Zone caught up with Oriol Servia the Managing Director of Dragon Racing to find out exactly why they decided to choose Venturi to power their car.

“We were in an unusual position,” said Servia. “It is not very often you find yourself in a situation where everybody tells you exactly how their powertrain works for the following season. To us, Venturi made the most sense.”

“There are quite a few reasons why we also thought that Venturi would be the right powertrain for us, as they already have 15 years of experience working with electric powertrains.”

“This was essential because not many teams have that amount of prior experience with working with these sorts of powertrains.”

“The other reason was that to us this was the only system that was offering a similar package to what we had last year in terms of performance and reliability.”

With the championship effectively entering a new era of development. Servia went on to explain that reliability will be one of the most important aspects in this championship.

So far, teams have come up with so many different solutions, which may cause reliability issues, as teams decode their bugs.

“Reliability is the most important aspect in this championship this season. It is so easy for these cars to pick up a mechanical issue, or not even a mechanical or electronic problem, these cars easily develop a fail-safe mode. Therefore, there are so many things that we as a team need to get right for these things not to happen.”

“However, I’m not saying that Venturi will offer a bulletproof powertrain. There is no insurance on that; we can still easily have reliability problems, but the way the powertrain is setup we think that it should be relatively uncommon for us to have reliability issues,” said Servia.

You can read more about what Oriol Servia had to say about Dragon Racing’s powertrain on our Free digital magazine. You can sign up here