Coulthard Drove the Gen4 Formula E Car at Monaco. He Won There Twice and Called This Faster.

David Coulthard has a specific frame of reference for Monaco. He won the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix twice, in 2000 and 2002, in a McLaren. He knows what a fast car feels like at that circuit, through the tunnel, up the hill, around the hairpin. So when he climbed out of the new Generation 4 Formula E car during the Monaco E-Prix weekend and said it gave him the most acceleration he had ever experienced at that track, that is not a throwaway line. It is a calibrated observation from someone with a very particular baseline.

The Gen4 Formula E car is the first generation of the series to run permanent four-wheel drive. That is a meaningful shift from Gen3, which used a single rear motor in race configuration and a front motor only for regenerative braking under certain conditions. The Gen4 layout means power goes to all four wheels all the time, which changes the character of the car on corner exit in a way no previous Formula E generation has demonstrated. Formula E has run at Monaco since its debut season in 2014-15, using the same narrow street circuit that F1 abandoned years ago. The track suits electric racing's torque delivery well, and Gen4 has raised the stakes considerably. For context, Monaco week also saw Nyck de Vries win the E-Prix for Mahindra, ending a four-year drought for both driver and team, which suggests the new hardware is generating genuinely competitive racing rather than just a performance spectacle.

Coulthard described the sensation in detail: the car is looser at the rear than Gen3, which initially reads as a trade-off, but the AWD system means that extra rear movement is accompanied by far greater traction on exit. He noted that at the apex the tires still give you what they give you and no more, but once through the apex and back on power, the sensation is unlike anything he had felt in a racing car. He said he kept thinking the car could take more power and it kept proving him right, corner after corner. He paused and described himself as "a bit speechless," which is not a phrase you associate with Coulthard in front of a camera. He concluded that the Gen4 is redefining what a race car can do, not as hyperbole but as a genuine engineering observation from the driver's seat.

Bottom line: You can discount a lot of promotional drive reactions. Coulthard at Monaco is not promotional. He has laps around that circuit that span decades of F1 machinery. When someone with that reference point says the acceleration is unprecedented, that is a useful data point about how much ground the Gen4 Formula E car has covered relative to what came before it. The drivers competing at Monaco this weekend were about to experience something that prior generations of racing drivers simply could not have.