Envision Racing will run an unchanged line-up in the shape of Robin Frijns and Sebastien Buemi next season but the continuity was only absolutely confirmed after the end of the last campaign.
Frijns is believed to have been particularly at risk of being replaced at one stage in June when discussions took place with Stoffel Vandoorne before the 2021/22 world champion signed for the Maserati MSG team.
That was a legacy of Vandoorne’s all-encompassing deal to race for fellow Stellantis brand Peugeot again in 2025, meaning that he would continue to race in a duel programme for the second season in succession.
Frijns’ prospects of staying on for another season of his second spell with Envision Racing took a positive swing after he took a double podium at the Portland EPrix meeting in late June but this came after lengthy and animated talks with the team about his future.
Buemi meanwhile had a three season deal with the Silverstone based squad but a disappointing campaign for the majority of last season cast doubts on whether he would stay on.
These were dispelled quickly with Buemi expected to see out his eleven year Formula E career next season before concentrating on other areas of his career in endurance racing and his long-time association with Red Bull in 2026.
On sticking and not twisting for the new season, Envision managing director Sylvain Filippi told FEN that despite poor results in the last campaign, the closeness of the margins ultimately gave Buemi and Frijns the benefit of the doubt.
“Once you don’t get the result you’re used to, you do a lot of soul searching, you analyse but at the end of the day it came down to drivers, team, car,” said Filippi.
“But when you look really empirically at season 10, we missed so many duels by like hundreds of a second and in season 10 we were just missing and just on the cusp of it, which is not good enough, but the margins were tiny.
“Sometimes our drivers didn’t quite do the best lap but also we had a period in the middle where we just didn’t put the best car on track too.”
Ultimately, Buemi and Frijns have been backed by Envision after a difficult 2024. Do they owe the team something or do the team owe them?
In reality it is probably a bit of both, meaning that the green army have the hunger and capacity to come marauding back in the 2024/25 season to something that could approach its 2023 zenith.
Berlin/Interlagos Clash
Envision will face the same challenge of its drivers facing a fixture clash with the Berlin EPrix double-header next July, which is scheduled for the same weekend as the Interlagos round of the FIA World Endurance Championship.
But crucially both Buemi and Frijns will next year stand a much improved chance of being able to take part in the penultimate event of the 2024-25 Formula E season at the Tempelhof airfield track.
That is because the Interlagos race will take place after the Le Mans 24 Hours and is likely be more agreeable for both Buemi and Frijns to miss from a contractual standpoint. Toyota Gazoo Racing is known to have a stipulation in its contracts ringfencing pre-Le Mans rounds for exclusivity with its drivers to compete in, while BMW may have scope to replace Frijns in Brazil too.
Last season Envision was forced to recruit two stand-in drivers Joel Eriksson and Paul Aron to replace Buemi and Frijns. Both showed flashes of potential with Eriksson scoring two points for a ninth place finish in the latter of the two rounds.
“I’m quite confident we’ve sorted the situation,” said Filippi.
“It’s different because it’s a clash with Berlin, but it’s a clash after Le Mans, so I think we will be fine.
“Every time you change, you have to relearn everything the software on the code everything, and even though, formerly, cars are similar in architecture, the software and the controls are quite different from team to team and so on. So yeah, I’m very confident and quite happy that we’ll extract all the performance we can extract next year with these two boys in the car.”
Jaguar Relationship Reviewed
Envision Racing and Jaguar held an in-depth review regarding their on-going collaboration which will go up to at least the 2025-26 season, the final campaign of Gen3 competition.
Last season Envision’s points total dwarfed that of its manufacturer provider by 368pts to 121pts. That overturned the previous seasons tally, when Envision took the teams title with Nick Cassidy and Buemi, significantly.
It led to a post-season review which is said internally to have led to a refreshment of the aims for Envision for the new season and some new recruits on the software side to add to what has been a reasonable stable team over the years.
“They’ve (Jaguar) done a great job, and I’m really, really happy that they won last year, because we’ve got one (title), and they’ve got one, and that’s great,” said Filippi.
“There’s a bit less to prove once you’ve ticked that box. We have another two years at least, so the aim is the same. Be clever, work together and there’s so much to get on top of with this new car, in terms of the controls and so on.”
