The survivor championship no one saw coming

A trip down Formula E's memory lane must, obviously, start with the 2009 GP2 season.

Back then, Alejandro Agag was running the Addax squad that had taken over Campos Racing's entry in the Formula 1 feeder series. Romain Grosjean would leave the team mid-year to join Renault for an unsuccessful first stint in grand prix racing, and Vitaly Petrov would finish as runner-up to Nico Hulkenberg. So far, nothing out of the ordinary.

Indeed, when Autosport asks Agag if establishing an all-electric category had crossed his mind at that stage, he replies: "Absolutely not. Definitely not - it was not in my mind at all - zero."

Moving forward through GP2 history to the 2011 season - the year Addax won the teams' championship with Charles Pic and Giedo van der Garde - FE's own story finally begins.

A much-vaunted dinner in Paris attended by FIA president Jean Todt, Agag and Antonio Tajani (an Italian politician and until last July the president of the European Parliament) led to the initial idea for the championship being jotted down on the back of a napkin.

From there, tender requests to run the championship were submitted. Alongside Agag, other applicants included Lord Drayson (whose eponymous Drayson Racing outfit was the first team to commit to an FE entry, before it was taken over by Trulli GP until its ignominious collapse at the start of FE's second season) and an initiative involving Mark Preston, who would go on to have major FE success running Team Aguri/DS Techeetah.

Agag's application - with an all-encompassing promoter package and a plan to have Spark Racing Technologies build the cars FE would need hit the grid - won out, somewhat unsurprisingly in 2012. From there, cars (remember the Formulec EF01 machine that made demo runs?), teams, drivers, calendars (more on that later) and the overall championship came to be, starting with its first season in 2014-15.

"Formula E is definitely a product of the decade," says Agag. And that is what we're here to consider, rather than FE's full history (the championship has recently commissioned a book to tell that tale). Although, if this writer can be permitted to include a mysterious historical snippet, Formula 'E' is said to not actually stand for 'electric'...

So, if FE's founder didn't see an all-electric motorsport series taking off, it's fair to say hardly anyone else did either. But take-off it did - starting with Nick Heidfeld actually doing that at the first race.

Heidfeld's Nico Prost-induced flight into the Beijing barriers gave FE a shot in the arm when it came to initial publicity - something it has struggled to regularly enjoy in the mainstream media in the years since. The 10-week gap to the next race in Putrajaya didn't help things that year as it cost the championship momentum.

The manufacturer influx has almost certainly been FE's biggest achievement to date

But that is the nature of the beast - by setting out to go racing in major world capitals, the series is at the mercy of cities being able to accommodate it, as well as having to deal with the fluctuations created by democracy in most of the championship's venues. This is why FE's recent trend of racing in more out-of-the-way locations, or using existing urban venues, makes so much sense.

But despite the lengthy gap in the initial calendar - a problem FE could have faced again in the current campaign given the recent protests in Santiago - the inaugural season carried on until it reached its second and most serious hurdle.

Before the Miami round in 2015, FE was close to collapsing. It faced a debt of $25million, but was saved by investment from Liberty Global (F1 owner Liberty Media's sister corporation) and Discovery Communications. By this stage, FE had already been saved from a different kind of death before it had even been born, with Williams Advanced Engineering asked to step in at short notice to become the first battery supplier when a major manufacturer wasn't up to the task.

FE has indeed been through quite a bit since the FIA announced Agag's bid had won the tender to front the series seven years ago. On the track, things haven't exactly been quiet either (don't mention car noise, leave it to the Twitter snarks).

There was the drama of Nelson Piquet Jr's last-gasp first title win. Lucas di Grassi shunting into the back of Sebastien Buemi at the first corner of the last race of the second season. Buemi's Montreal meltdown as di Grassi scooped the third crown Buemi had long looked set to retain. Jean-Eric Vergne and Andre Lotterer doing their best to put the Techeetah-run cars in the wall when running 1-2 in Santiago in 2017-18. And, of course, di Grassi nipping around Pascal Wehrlein's expiring car to win at the line in Mexico City earlier this year - the best race finish this writer has ever seen, let alone the best of the decade about to end.

There were questions over whether the switch to one car for the Gen2 era would work - suggestions for how many cars would finish 2018-19's first race were taken in the Riyadh media centre just a year ago. With hindsight that was particularly cynical and disingenuous given the major manufacturers FE had attracted by that point.

• The hurdles FE has faced (and some it still has to clear)
• How close FE came to financial collapse
• FE drivers react to 2019/20 calendar clashes with WEC
• Rally Chile cancellation not set to affect Santiago FE race

While it would be naive not to underestimate the role of dieselgate (paired with FE's comparatively low costs versus, say, F1 or LMP1), the manufacturer influx has almost certainly been FE's biggest achievement to date. Factory squads from Mercedes, Porsche, Audi, BMW, Jaguar, DS and Nissan - plus Mahindra, NIO and Dragon, and successful independents in Envision Virgin Racing and Venturi - make for one hell of a grid.

FE has had its problems in addition to the financial and practical ones outlined above.

Many critics like to take potshots at the diesel generators that power some of the paddocks and, since the grid expanded for 2018-19, partly charge the cars. While this is a legitimate criticism, 'breaking a few eggs to make an omelette' seems pretty apt here.

The calendar still has issues - FE and the World Endurance Championship really shouldn't be clashing, and there are more countries run by dubious regimes than would be ideal. But then, if money from these parts of the world help FE stay afloat and have blue ribband events such as New York and the new race in London, they can be understood, even if not outright supported. F1, for what it's worth (and this is absolutely not a 'good versus evil' exercise, it just doesn't really matter), has been making such deals for decades.

On a personal note, fewer future race-result-altering penalties would be good, and FE must work hard not to let its rules become so complex that they put off fans - it is, after all, still working out how to attract more of them in the first place.

Just before Christmas, the FIA put out 176 pages worth of tender application notes for the Gen3 car, which will be used from FE's 2022-2023 campaign, with a planned three-season lifespan. If produced as the governing body and FE desire, the car will be lighter and smaller, feature fast-charging pitstop technology, and have a standard second powertrain installed on the front axle.

"I remember I started shouting when the cars went off at the start. It was kind of an explosion of emotion" Alejandro Agag

If it comes off, it will be a major step for the championship. Not only, "If you put Gen2 and Gen3 together, Gen3 will run circles around it," per Virgin team principal Sylvain Fillippi, but the fast-charging targets are said to be genuinely electric vehicle industry leading.

There is no guarantee FE will around forever, or that it will ultimately achieve its primary aim of advancing the electric car business - after all, almost nothing is certain in the world's current state.

But that FE has gone from a napkin idea to real racing, survived challenges that would - and did - kill other series, and is trying to build an ambitious future is to its credit.

"I cannot even believe it myself," says Agag. And this is a story that will belong to the 2010s alone.

Agag says FE's "spark" was that dinner in February 2011, but unequivocally feels its "biggest moment" was that first race.

"I remember I started shouting when the cars went off at the start," he concludes. "It was kind of an explosion of emotion. At the time, I'd been working like crazy for years to get to that moment.

"And that was, I think, the most important moment in Formula E history. And one of the best moments or biggest moments in motorsport history, probably - the start with that first race in Beijing."