Win on Sunday, sell on Monday, goes the old theory of racing. If your car crosses the finish line first on the weekend, then come the start of the work week, anyone looking to buy your car will have a warmer and fuzzier feeling about doing so. Racing, of course, improves the breed (there really are a lot of cliches when it comes to this sort of thing...).
While that theory certainly holds true from a marketing and advertising perspective, it's doubly so when developing cutting-edge engineering. You see, motor racing isn't just driving in circles - races are hot (usually), bumpy (often), high-speed (always) and the margins between success and failure (or worse) are wafer-thin. In that sort of environment, you have to be able to rely on the kit being able to perform at peak levels all the time.
While it's been the tradition down through the years to use motor racing as a proving ground for all manner of mechanical innovations - fuel injection, disc brakes, dual-clutch gearboxes - just to name three things that got their first outings on race tracks - nowadays, racing is also being used to perfect and hone battery technology. If a car can win races with a battery and electric motor, it stands to reason that the battery and electric motor in question will be robust and have high performance on the road.
Thus it is with DS Automobiles. As a brand, DS is more angled towards luxury than high performance, you might think. A DS is likelier to swish you effortlessly along the Rue de Rivoli than to clip the Eau Rouge apex.
That's only partly right, though. Oh sure, a DS will do the whole swishing along the Rue thing, but the brand has also been involved in Formula E - the all-electric racing series - since its inception, and it has been a big winner in that series too. Indeed, DS has won the double championship, both the manufacturers' and drivers' titles, twice - the only team to do so, and this is against opposition that includes the likes of Porsche, Mercedes, Jaguar, Nissan, NIO, McLaren and Maserati. DS has racked up 47 podium finishes and 16 victories in 98 races in fact.
It's not just about the racing and the winning, though. That hotbed of competition also means that DS can learn huge amounts in a short time about how its electric car and hybrid systems work under pressure, and that experience is fed directly back into the development of road cars, such as the new high-performance DS 7 E-Tense 4x4 360.
While the chassis of the cars in Formula E are built to a standard spec, the teams can design and fit their own bespoke parts. DS makes the likes of the rear motor unit, including the energy recovery system and transmission, cooling system, electrical system and rear suspension, along with the software and algorithms that optimise energy management. Everything DS Performance learns through Formula E feeds into developing the range of electrified E-Tense road cars.
This is all helping to pave the way for DS to become a fully-electric brand, and that's a process that really starts next year. You can already buy one fully-electric DS model - the DS 3 E-Tense - and starting from 2024, all newly-launched DS models will come only and entirely with battery power.
Béatrice Foucher, CEO of DS Automobiles, said, "Since the Formula E championship opened itself up to manufacturers, we have taken the decision to enter this innovative competition with the objective of accelerating the development of our electrified range and growing the profile of DS Automobiles. The expertise we have accumulated since 2015, underlined by our four world titles and the many victories we have taken throughout all the continents visited by the championship, directly benefits our customers thanks to the continuous technology transfer we have put in place. Because it's our customers who are the real winners from our success in the world's most prominent 100 per cent electric championship."
Eugenio Franzetti, DS Performance director, said, "Motorsport has always been an extraordinary research and development tool. That's even more true today as we're at the heart of an electrical revolution within the car industry. Formula E is a very useful laboratory to accelerate and fine-tune electrification. Thanks to motorsport, DS Performance has developed ultra-powerful energy recovery software, as well as physical components such as the engine and inverter that have become smaller and more efficient as time goes on. All this experience has already been built into our current electrified range and will be found once more in the forthcoming 100 per cent electric cars from the brand."
The experience has also fed into the development of the new DS 7 E-Tense 360 4x4, which uses a combination of a 1.6-litre turbocharged petrol engine with twin electric motors and a plug-in hybrid battery to provide a mix of 360hp punch with 40g/km CO2 emissions. A car that can whisk you silently along the Rue de Rivoli and then, in the same breath, clip the apex at Eau Rouge? That's what racing in Formula E does for you...