Bluebird to return in electric race series

The team which bears the name carried by the cars and speedboats driven by two generations of the Campbell family to break speed records from the 1920s to the 1960s is ‘almost certain’ to join the electric motor-racing championship Formula E from the start of the series, The Engineer has been told; the first time for almost a century that the name has been attached to cars in a race series.

Bluebird has been developing a Formula E car for some time, putting a prototype body shell on display last year, but its participation was in doubt following the announcement from the series promoter, Formula E Holdings, that all teams would be supplied with identical ‘customer cars’ for the first season. ‘We were reluctant to put the Bluebird name to a car that we hadn’t developed ourselves,’ said Martin Rees, Bluebird Formula E project director. ‘But taking the Bluebird name back to the track is very important to us. We now feel that development time is very short and having received the regulations from the promoter last week, we clearly have to make some changes to the car we’ve been developing. Whether we continue to develop our own car for 2014 or get involved with the project to develop the current customer car is something we’ll be discussing with the promoter.’