Why no one’s safe in a series where the driver makes a difference
Or: when will there finally be justice for Robin Frijns?
Formula E started Season 4 with five rookies confirmed to the grid, as well as a guesting Kamui Kobayashi at Hong Kong.
Neel Jani, Tom Blomqvist, Luca Filippi, Andre Lotterer and Edoardo Mortara had all been part of lineups, confirmed or otherwise, at the Valencia testing. But so had Alexander Sims (in the car for BMW) and James Rossiter (testing against Mortara at Venturi) so to get to the first (or err, third in Blomqvist’s case) race in the actual car was no mean feat.
Elsewhere, Alex Lynn had graduated from DS Virgin reserve to full-time driver, after two races in for Jose Maria Lopez in New York last season and Dani Juncadella was, at the time, hoping for a reserve role with Mahindra.
Drivers who’d exited the series included multiple-podium-finisher Stephane Sarrazin, presumed to be concentrating on running the race teams he owns and Robin Frijns, who had out-scored his Andretti teammate Antonio Felix da Costa by 120% but whose Audi association ousted him from the incoming BMW-stickered squad. Loic Duval, in from the first season, was also dropped by Dragon after increasing conflict with team boss Jay Penske over DTM clashes and Adam Carroll wasn’t re-signed by Jaguar after their struggle-heavy debut season. Jose-Maria Lopez was caught between manufacturer arguments and slipped out of DS Virgin and mid-season draft Tom Dillman seemed to quietly exit contention for a Venturi seat.
Formula E has an unbelievably competitive driver market currently — teams can fundamentally pick from anyone they like. Former F1 drivers, current WEC champions, almost any highly-rated juniors and there seems to be some correlation that GT/TC drivers hold up particularly well in the series, so anyone from the likes of Blancpain, IMSA, Super GT or privateer DTM.
Not a second-best flop to F1 anymore, Formula E’s driver market is part of what makes it appealing — drive here against the best in the world and prove yourself. It also means you’re under tremendous pressure to do that.
Today, Andretti have announced that Tom Blomqvist will exit the #27 car to “concentrate on GT racing” — ok sure, BMW have just entered WEC and find themselves joint-last after the first race but at the end of the day, they’ve booted their own factory driver out of their Formula E car.
Some slightly strange behaviour about Blomqvist’s seat aside (he was ejected from the car for the two season-opening races in Hong Kong for Kamui Kobayashi, presumably at the urging of Japanese sponsors MS&AD) he’d seemed the firm selection by the now-factory team.
But then, so did Luca Filippi at NIO, Edoardo Mortara at Venturi, Lotterer in Techeetah and without any question, LMP1 World Champion Neel Jani at Dragon.
Two miserable races in, Jani was out. More to do with a row between Porsche and Dragon than the direness of his results in Hong Kong, a weekend entirely written off by the team after serious car issues, it nonetheless came as something of a shock. First blood had been drawn, against an undoubtedly proven driver, however it had come about.
At the time, Edoardo Mortara had just scored Venturi’s best result since Season 2 and Andre Lotterer had ignominously crashed or been disqualified from nearly every session he had participated in. Luca Filippi’s quieter approach meant he’d at least walked away with a point from his first race and Alex Lynn seemed well out of the stress-zone, with two points finishes even if he wasn’t yet matching race-winner Sam Bird.
Enter Marrakesh and everyone’s a little more nervous, though. Jani’s sudden departure was a stark reminder that fortunes flip in Formula E quite fast and nevermind the rookies but veteran Jerome D’Ambrosio was suddenly being embarrassed by new teammate Lopez.
Still, things seemed relatively stable for the South American bit of the season, with no further changes. Or any standout results for the majority of the incomers. Lotterer turned a performance that had led his team principle to suggest he “wasn’t taking it seriously” into a historic Techeetah 1–2 in Santiago but qualifying and race incidents saw no one else really stand out. And Andre’s podium was his only points finish.
Rome marked the season turning point — and two drivers’ home race. Mortara still seemed relatively safe, Filippi less so and the second blood of the season seemed drawn when he was removed from the #68 NIO in favour of Ma Qing Hua for the Paris Eprix.
There’s a lot of interesting things going on in Formula E currently, driver-market-wise. Random pick, to not get too far off-topic: even Sebastien Buemi doesn’t have a safe seat for next year, his Toyota drive in WEC a potential problem for incoming Nissan as well as a general lack of results, by his standard, this year. Which means in your next year plans, as a team, you could put ‘the man who had won six out of eight races by this time last year,’ if you were feeling speculative.
(There’s no guarantee that Buemi will move, of course — it’s just that there’s no absolute guarantee he’d stay, either, as confirmed by e.Dams boss Jean-Paul Driot in Paris)
So that’s two rookies ousted — and Mortara will be missing Berlin due to a DTM clash. Andre Lotterer’s second podium in Rome prompted the team to re-confirm him for Season 5, always the intention as Techeetah want to stabilise their lineup but none of the rest are signed for next year.
And it’s reaching crunch time. There are just four races left in the Formula E calendar — Berlin, Zurich and the New York double header. As has been shown this year, with differences between teammate performance particularly stark, the driver makes a huge difference in Formula E and with only less than half the points left to scrap over, now is the point when teams urgently need to bank them.
Which is backed up by Andretti’s reasoning about Blomqvist’s replacement, the former Toyota factory driver Stephane Sarrazin, who’ll also be doing just as much WEC racing as Blomqvist, only not in their car. Experienced in Formula E, BMW want him to help them to the podium that’s — one unexpectedly brilliant Super Pole outing in Rome for da Costa aside — looked distant for them all season.
Can Sarrazin really take the sort-of-dismal Andretti and get it into the top three? Possibly. If he does, I’d feel extremely nervous, if I was Antonio.
Formula E teams know that driver skill, mentality, concentration, etc are all extremely important. How else to explain the performance gap between struggling Buemi and dominant Vergne, in fundamentally the same car? Which means no one is safe, if performance isn’t where the team wants it.
There’s no guarantee another driver will magically unlock extra perfomance — but a struggling driver might underperform one grasping an opportunity, there’s no doubt. So it’s worth rolling the dice, in a series where you can’t do a huge amount to change your car’s performance mid-season and with one totally-new track still to come.
Comparatively, Formula One has stagnated into a very staid lineup, in the hybrid era. It’s partly teams struggling with the setup and so needing decent stability more than outstanding scattershot performances (the possible exception being whatever goes on at Red Bull) but it’s also an upshot of the basic admission that the driver makes very little difference, unless they’re bringing additional sponsorship.
Formula E is a drivers’ championship. And it’s made me feel sympathetically stressed to interview the rookies, including the personable, charming and undoubtedly talented Blomqvist this year, as they get increasingly stressed about performance but that’s the other side of all this great racing: you have to be a great racer.
There’s a lot of metrics to that. But only one’s going to matter, now, for teams: the biggest share possible of the remaining 376 points on the table.
