The miracle turnaround from a major rules bust-up

"Well, we just chopped it in half and then showed up. It was pretty easy - just put a bandsaw down the middle and it's good to go," Michael Carcamo deadpans to Autosport as he explains Nissan e.dams' transition from a two-motor powertrain to a single-motor approach over the Formula E off-season.

His face remains stern. But, after a beat, there's a wry grin and chuckles from the small group he's addressing.

Carcamo, Nissan's global motorsport director, is now far more at ease fielding questions about powertrains ahead of the new FE season after spending the past year keeping Nissan's secretive twin-motor arrangement for 2018-19 - its first year as an FE manufacturer - under wraps.

After the FIA outlawed double motors at the World Motorsport Council meeting in June, days prior to last season's Bern E-Prix, Nissan had to quickly embark on a short-notice development cycle upheaval. This was not only necessary to have a powertrain ready for 2019-20 testing at Valencia last month, but to develop something that was competitive in a highly congested FE grid.

Carcamo's sardonic explanation is quickly traded for the real story of how Nissan put together a 'new' motor for the sixth FE season.

"If it was that easy, that would've been nice!" he continues. "But no, for sure we didn't have time to develop an entirely new powertrain, but because the base of the system was still going to be the most important part, we were able to extract the best parts to put together what is an updated system. It would have been great to make a new system, but there wasn't enough time."

Nissan's engineers haven't quite sliced the motor in half with a bandsaw, but instead have been able to use last year's design as the basis for a rules-compliant system. It's still largely unknown how Nissan precisely laid out its 2018-19 motor, with rumours suggesting it may have had everything from a bog-standard twin to a 'main' motor augmented by a flywheel. But apparently that design at least had the flexibility to transition to a single-motor arrangement.

The key rationale behind the FIA's decision to ban twin motors is to even out the playing field - with cost, the governing body stresses, the key consideration. With two motors, the powertrain generally produces a greater torque output and, while FE engineers cannot take advantage of torque vectoring as each car uses a standard differential, the twin-motor approach provides a healthy dose of extra acceleration on corner exit thanks to the improved traction.

That's why Nissan was so competitive towards the end of last season. Initially, the team struggled with getting the motor to work as it should in race trim, and ran out of energy at the end of the Mexico City race after not setting up its software to cope with an extra lap.

Even once the glitches had been ironed out, Nissan remained cagey about the motor configuration nestled in the silver-and-black-painted Spark chassis. The team's engineers had just got their heads around the team's new toys, and didn't want to risk losing them. But, in explaining the decision to ban twin motors, the FIA highlighted costs and fears of an arms race over the technology.

"From a development standpoint, the big challenge for the powertrain side was obviously getting to Valencia on time" Michael Carcamo

The outlawing of twin-motor powertrains didn't catch Nissan by surprise, however. Carcamo explains that while the team was annoyed to have lost the use of its innovative powertrain, it had plenty of other options available.

FE's first real conflict over technical regulations was a test for all parties - and while timescales were tight, Nissan's back-up thinking made the pill easier to swallow.

"A well-prepared team has multiple contingency plans," Carcamo explains. "Even if we didn't have a final decision, and which way it would go for season six, there were preparations being made. So, what was difficult for us in the end was having all the parts to go testing and to do the development work, and that came late. In concept, we had people studying it for quite a while.

"The regulations have become more clear in terms of what the frame is or what the box is, and that allows more competitiveness on one side because everyone's focused on the same area. But it also takes away ambiguity. So, I would say unless something really radical comes up, we should be on a pretty good path."

Francois Sicard, e.dams managing director, concurs. While the development of the powertrain falls in Nissan's court, the race team - an off-shoot of junior series veterans DAMS - must extract everything from the package at the circuit.

As Renault's partners before Nissan, e.dams proved it could do exactly that, and now it must reignite its championship credentials with Nissan hardware. For Sicard and e.dams, Nissan's ability to turn around and successfully deliver a reconfigured powertrain in four months has been crucial to its hopes for the upcoming season.

"We managed to make it approximately on time, in the sequence we wanted," he says. "We have been lucky with Nissan - to have a concept that was really good and from which we could update to a monomotor.

"If we had to come back to a completely new solution it would have been a big problem. Fortunately, the concept was very good at the beginning and, [while] for sure we had some work to do, the basics were there to make it a pretty performant powertrain in a single-motor solution."

On first glance, the resulting powertrain's performance looks encouraging. Sicard's initial impression is that testing at Valencia went "pretty smoothly" and that Nissan has, out of the box, put together something for 2019-20 with no obvious drawbacks. By the end of the second day, Nissan and e.dams were already looking at performance runs, which suggests that the overall reliability of the system proved to be strong from the get-go.

"From a development standpoint, the big challenge for the powertrain side was obviously getting to Valencia on time and making sure the cars were running at 9am [on the first day], both cars out of the box, and having two reliable, fault-free days helps the team develop much more in this setting," Carcamo adds.

Race pace, in particular, looks much improved for Nissan. Sebastien Buemi was the notional 'winner' of the test's second 'race' event, with the Toyota LMP1 driver and his team-mate Oliver Rowland both holding the top two average lap times in Autosport's analysis. Other race simulation comparisons consistently featured both Nissans at the sharp end.

While Nissan's cumulative best sectors from qualifying simulations at Valencia were a quarter of a second down on the highest average - set by BMW - that's still a tiny margin that can be easily overcome. But read too much into the fastest times at your peril, as the unrepresentative nature of the Valencia track for FE cars means that Nissan is not keen to fully show its hand early.

"We will only look at pure performance in Riyadh," says Sicard. "We are still fine-tuning some things we are working on. We were not only focused on pure performance, we were making sure everything was running smoothly from the engineering side, on strategy - a lot of things we wanted to make sure were working. It was just to make sure that what we have developed was OK."

Nissan appears to be a very competitive prospect for the 2019-20 season

"We also have to be careful about that because we never race at a track like this," Carcamo adds. "Chasing the track is a danger - a simple danger that happens all the time because people are competitive. But for us, the team is very focused on the objectives and the objective was to do our race sim in order to understand what our performance is. But that's much more on an optimisation strategy rather than chasing the track."

For 2019-20, Nissan also benefits from consistency on the driving front. Last year, Buemi had to conduct much of the corresponding Valenica running himself, as Alex Albon was prised out of his seat by the Formula 1 overtures from Red Bull. Late replacement Rowland now has a full season under his belt, and should be well equipped for another campaign of the cut-and-thrust nature of FE races.

One weakness Rowland must overcome is his lack of consistency in qualifying. While the Yorkshireman matched Buemi's three poles, Rowland could only muster half the number of the superpole appearances as his team-mate. Qualifying is key in FE, and getting it right can really stack the odds in a driver's favour.

But Nissan is incredibly happy with both of its charges; and the feeling between Sicard and Carcamo is that it can traverse any choppy technical waters with its line-up over the year.

"If there's a difference today in what one brings to the other," Carcamo ponders, "Seb's fast, and experience in many categories allows him to help isolate a specific issue or point us in the right direction. And then Ollie can also help with the extraction and the optimisation. But I think they have different skill-sets in that respect, but that comes with the vastly different experiences that they both have."

With that extra year in Rowland's pocket, Nissan will hope that he can present a genuine challenge to Buemi. Although e.dams won the first three teams' titles with FE's strongest package during the Renault days, it did not do so with two evenly matched drivers in Buemi and Nico Prost. If both of its current drivers can operate on Buemi's level, then championship honours look markedly realistic.

"We have a nice atmosphere," Sicard says. "They are two competitor wolves and they want to do better than the other, but at the same time they are working closely, which really helps the dynamic of the team.

"I think we have a good package, and it's up to us to do our homework properly and we'll see. [Ollie] already has shown that he was a match for Seb."

As with any two 'competitor wolves', the danger is that they'll one day turn on each other. But for now, they work together as part of a pack, and the Nissan package looks as if it has the teeth to cause some very serious damage in the new season.

Nissan has already turned two motors into one over the four-month off-season and appears to be a very competitive prospect. What other magic does it have up its sleeve?