Sebastien Buemi will join Envision Racing in 2023, after a historic eight seasons with e.dams where he won the Formula E championship in 2016.
The change is understood to have been finalised during the Berlin E-Prix week, as reports originally revealed earlier this month. For Buemi this will be the first time since his Formula E’s debut, that he will race for a team other than e.dams’ Renault or Nissan teams. Since the first race in Beijing in 2014, he has been the only driver to use the same set-up.
Buemi had been considering other seats for a while, but when it became evident after the Rome E-Prix in April that Robin Frijns would not be staying with Envision, he held lengthy negotiations with the team as it became clear he would not be staying with Nissan.
The Swiss driver together with Nick Cassidy will be officially introduced at the Chinese-owned Silverstone-based team soon, and he will play a key role in Envision’s preparations for the Gen3 era, in which the company will develop a customer relationship with Jaguar.
This will entail incorporation into Jaguar’s powertrain development programme as well as some of the 20 test days available. After the Jakarta E-Prix next month, Jaguar is slated to race its car for the first time.
A total of 12 test days are given to each manufacturer, with an additional eight days given to those that supply a customer. This customer team is entitled to at least half of the additional track time, four days with “the same chassis and battery as during the other test days.”
Buemi won his debut race for Renault e.dams at the Punta del Este E-Prix in Uruguay in December 2014, and went on to dominate Formula E for the next two seasons.
He barely lost out on maintaining his 2015/16 title after a calendar clash with the World Endurance Championship in July 2017 which forced him to miss two races. With 13 victories under his belt, Buemi is the most successful Formula E driver.
The 33-year-old continued with the team when it switched from Renault to Nissan in 2018, and won an emotional victory in New York in July 2019, just two weeks before the company’s founding father Jean-Paul Driot passed away.
However, Nissan’s latest Gen2 car, which debuted at the Monaco E-Prix in May 2021, has been struggling with pace. It’s widely assumed that a homologated element of the powertrain is reducing its performance and, as a result, limiting Buemi and his new teammate, Maximilian Guenther.
Tommaso Volpe, Nissan e.dams team principal, remained tight-lipped about Buemi’s upcoming departure, but confirmed that the team would have “an experienced driver in our team” next season.
“We might also look at the rookies, but we’ll never have a team with two rookies. This wouldn’t make any sense,” said Volpe, speaking in Berlin.
“So definitely we will have at least an experienced driver. This is something that any big manufacturer probably will confirm to you and Nissan doesn’t make an exception.”
Guenther’s fate at Nissan is unknown, but he is widely regarded to have a good chance of retaining his seat for 2023.
“We are happy with him, to be honest, he did a good job,” said Volpe of Guenther. “In a way we have enough information to assess him and to say that he did a good job.”
“But then again, we haven’t taken a decision yet on the driver line-up for next season because there are many other things to take into consideration.”
Nissan is reportedly set to undergo a major restructure which will differ from the present arrangement with e.dams. Volpe acknowledged that the restructure’s review phase has passed following the acquisition of the Formula E team in April, and that certain objectives are currently being pursued as Nissan enters the Gen3 testing phase.
“The reason why Nissan bought this team is because we know that we have great talent, that we have also the possibility to attract new talent, which is our objective,” admitted Volpe.
“We want to build on what we have already. The two key objectives that we have are one, to try to take advantage more from the talent we have in the team.”
“The second objective is to maximise synergies between the engineers in the current development side and the rest of the team.”
“So, these are the two key objectives that I’m trying to achieve with whatever are going to be the changes in the future.”
