Alex Lynn has been wary of approaching doors in Formula E ever since he pulled off a scintillating cameo performance for DS Virgin Racing with a pole position on his debut at New York City in July 2017.
Some doors have been brutally slammed in his face, yet the latest one has been artfully prised open and then joyously kicked in.
The slings and arrows of Formula E have pinged off his chest at regular intervals, giving him a range of highly nuanced professional experiences to mull over.
Ultimately it have been these hurdles that have given him the ability to form himself into a even more formidable opponent in 2021.
All drivers naturally go through degrees of metamorphosis throughout their careers but Lynn’s seems deeper rooted in its meaning and veracity. It’s one that the man himself acknowledges came from a “hard reset” around this time last year which brought clarity to his smouldering ambition.
“I just took a good long and hard look in the mirror and said: ‘I’m not where I want to be'” :: Alex Lynn
After a challenging single full season as Sam Bird’s team-mate with DS Virgin in 2017/18, a solid but politically complex cameo half-season with Jaguar and then a revelatory Berlin performance with a technically compromised Mahindra last summer, Lynn’s rebirth has been forged amid the hard-knock coalface of international motorsport’s toughest racing.
“I promised myself I was going to make the most of those six races in Berlin and leave nothing on the table,” Lynn tells The Race on the eve of the 2021 season.
“In that first lockdown [last spring], I looked at where I was in my career and where I wanted to be and I just took a good long and hard look in the mirror and said: ‘I’m not where I want to be.’
“I was going to make sure I was the best version of myself. And I’d like to think I tried to try to show that.”
He did, and he surprised a few people, even his new team boss Dilbagh Gill.
The Mahindra chief wasn’t sold on Lynn completely ahead of the Berlin fortnight but quickly re-evaluated that position after witnessing, from his quarantined hotel room at least, some stellar performances.
Lynn appears to have cultivated a strange set of doubters for some reason. Given he has won a GP3 title, five GP2 races, and has Sebring 12 Hours (overall) and Le Mans 24 Hours (GTE class) wins under his belt at the age of 27, the reservations are disproportionate to say the least.
From a Formula E sense he’s really only fared poorly against Bird in the second half of 2017/18, and he was by no means completely at fault on that occasion.
Although on the surface the team appeared stable and serene then, the reality was very different amid DS vacating Virgin for a new partnership with Techeetah, a fraught internal political landscape with the arrival of new majority stakeholder Envision and the sudden and mostly unexplained ejection of the often divisive team principal Alex Tai.
“I don’t think there’s usually any criticism that I’ve heard about that I haven’t already thought about myself,” says Lynn candidly.
“I’m quite self-analytical, so from that side I’ve had quite a hard reset.
“I just looked at every aspect of where I was going and everything in my life and what I wanted to do. I really wanted to maximise everything.”
Lynn changed his management arrangements at the beginning of 2020 after Jaguar’s decision – as bewildering then as it is now – not to chose him as Mitch Evans’ team-mate for the 2019/20 season.
He won’t go in to the finer points of that time but simply attests that racing with Mahindra compared to Jaguar is “very different indeed” and something that gives him “a much clearer position to achieve some serious goals”.
Part of the textbook touchdown after his Mahindra leap last summer can be attributed to an instantly fruitful relationship with his engineering team. This consists of Cyril Blais (ex-Arden and Manor Marussia) and Saqib Khan (simulator and performance engineer).
It was a unit that developed quickly and positively and enabled Lynn to hit the ground running last August and make good on his promise to leave nothing on the table.
“There is a concerted focus on Formula E for this year but beyond that I want to race again at Le Mans and the future looks exciting there” :: Alex Lynn
“He’s a very strong personality and his credentials are strong,” Lynn says of Blais.
“When we started with each other I felt right at home with him really because I’ve had quite a few years of the French engineering school when I was at DAMS, so working with Cyril felt like going back to that straight away, which I feel very comfortable with.”
From Blais’ standpoint that instantaneous gelling was mutual.
“Even though the deal was put in place kind of late, we still had a bit of a chance to go through the normal race preparations,” says Blais.
“We were moving factories, so there was obviously some constraint there, but everything was in place. We did a lot of prep work at the new factory and we had a chance to do a test as well so that put us in a happy place.
“Alex had been putting a lot of hours in our simulator so I felt like we came to the event quite prepared.”
As soon as Lynn had returned from Berlin discussions began regarding the possibility of a race drive for the present season.
The deal was actually done some months before it was announced and Lynn was the first to sample the new-for-2021 Mahindra hardware, which is the first to include input from German tech giant ZF.
“The first day I drove the new package coming straight from Berlin I felt a difference straightaway. It was it was a noticeable step up,” he says.
“What was a really nice thing to feel was that was the first time I felt in Formula E to go straight from the current powertrain to the next season’s and feeling an improvement. Just the first lap you do, you’re like ‘wow, that’s a big step’.”
Finally, he had his new chance. Life looked good, but motorsport has a funny knack of giving with one hand and taking with the other.
After a sensational GTE Pro performance at the Le Mans 24 Hours, where he and Aston Martin team-mates Harry Tincknell and Maxime Martin achieved a memorable class victory, it was decided in late 2020 that Aston’s factory WEC programme would dissolve.
This was kept from team members including drivers until after the Bahrain WEC finale last November. While Lynn politely declined the offer to race on with Aston in sporadic customer GT3 races, his ambitions in endurance sportscar racing appear to have sufficient future thrust.
He and his management are all over the buoyant future LMH and LMDh landscape for 2022 and beyond. A crack at overall victory at Le Mans is a definite aim after class success and with that 2017 Sebring victory already in the bag.
“There is a concerted focus on Formula E for this year but beyond that I want to race again at Le Mans and the future looks exciting there,” he says.
“But at present I think that what Dilbagh has put in place with the new factory, the long-term investment in the team and their commitment to Formula E for the future is so important.
“It gives a real sense of stability and ambition for the engineering staff, mechanics, and everyone in the team.
“They are a talented bunch there and honestly I really did feel a central part of the team from the very first day I walked through the door.”
