The legendary three-time Formula E championship winning e.dams team suffered its worst season yet last year, securing just two podium positions and finishing tenth in the teams championship with Nissan support. This comes despite Nissan developing a brand-new power unit and the team employing one of the most competitive driver pairings on the grid. The series is continuing to get ever more competitive, and Nissan e.dams was not helped by a pair of retirements and a whopping five disqualifications across the season.
It makes sense, then, that Nissan e.dams is looking to completely revamp everything going into season eight. This will be the fourth year that Nissan has been the powertrain provider of e.dams, following stablemate Renault’s departure, and once again the team has chosen to anchor itself with three-time champion Sebastien Buemi. Team driver Oliver Rowland has been pushed aside for former BMW i Andretti driver Maximillian Guenther.
Another major change is the team’s livery. Instead of the silver and black with red accent livery that the team has stuck with for three seasons, the car will now be mostly red with a bit of black and a bit of silver. The same Japanese kimono flourish will be included on the car’s nose cone, though will now be much brighter and should be more easily identified on the television cameras.
“It’s great to be back with Nissan e.dams for our fourth season together, and I would like to warmly welcome Maximilian to the team. Maximilian brings good pace and some fresh approaches to racing, so I hope we can create a powerful combination based on the strong foundations and extensive experience we have at Nissan e.dams. We aim to be competitive from the first race to the last. We’ve got work to do and the team is highly motivated.” — Sebastien Buemi
“We want to be bolder than ever in this new Formula E racing season,” said Tommaso Volpe, Nissan global motor sports director. “Nissan is here not only to race and win, but to entertain the fans and showcase just how thrilling electric vehicles can be. With our powerful new racing livery our cars will be unmissable on the track as we compete in this exciting global championship. We will also be activating our racing endeavors like never before this season with fresh and innovative activities like our Nissan Brain to Performance program that aims to train our racing drivers’ brains to be even faster. We can’t wait to get season eight started.”
The team’s first outing kicks off ahead of season eight next week at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo in Spain. This preseason test is the first opportunity for all of the new pieces to come together in one place to see how everything shakes out. The team is hoping that all of the work it has done in the off season will have paid off, and obviously welcoming a new driver into the fold is an exciting time all around. Here’s hoping that Guenther will be a great fit within the Nissan e.dams team, and that Nissan can be a bit closer to the front again in the final season of the Gen 2 chassis.
“I’m really excited to go racing with such a historic and successful racing brand as Nissan. Formula E is extremely competitive and thrilling to race in, and I feel that with Seb as my teammate and the team behind me, together we can do great things. In my first weeks with the team, I can see that there are big plans both on and off the track and I am looking forward to a busy and competitive season eight. The new race car looks stunning, and I can’t wait to drive it at full race pace at the Valencia test.” — Maximilian Guenther
Nissan has kicked off a new program that it is hoping will bring things full circle for them. The so-called Nissan Brain to Performance program is a neurological analysis platform that Nissan has been working on. Brain to Performance is a cutting-edge program that uses real-time brain imaging and analysis to determine not only what makes the brains of professional drivers specifically function well in high performance environments, but also to help train their brains to work better. Nissan is seeking better brain performance for Guenther and Buemi and hoping that will translate to even greater performance on the racetrack.
