Nissan is not resting on any laurels after a strong start to the 2024-25 ABB FIA Formula E world championship. It has been a launch that has seen it lead each of the three championship ships after Oliver Rowland and Taylor Barnard have amassed a whopping 199 points between them, or in other words an average of just under 30 points. In other words, title winning form.
That Rowland didn’t score in the opening Sao Paulo race makes that statistic even more frightening for his and Nissan’s competitors. Now, we go to Homestead as the final three-quarters of the campaign gets set to play out with 12 races in just over three months.
Nissan has spent the lull in the campaign working hard at its south Parisian factory which is located in the same industrial complex as the Alpine F1 engine effort. It has also tested with both Rowland, teammate Norman Nato and reserve driver Sergio Sette Camara in recent weeks. There is, as team principal Tommaso Volpe told Formula E Notebook last week, still a lot to hone and perfect.
“My view on the first four events, looking not just at the races, but also the whole weekends, is that we have seen very clearly, from our perspective, the strengths and the weakness of our operation in general, meaning drivers, team and car,” he said.
“So, despite the good results in terms of purely the numbers, looking also at all free practice and not just what happened on track during the races, we can tell where our strengths are and where are our weaknesses are.
“Hopefully, we won’t find new weakness in the rest of the season, but definitely we have to address the ones that we have discovered in this first three months.”
“There is definitely there is more to work on in the second half of the season,” added Volpe.
“You always have room to improve anyway, so but what I mean is that we have a quite realistic view now on strengths and weakness of our operations, and we have a plan for the rest of the season to try to address the weakness and consolidate the strengths.”
One of those weaknesses was clearly the power legality cut issues seen in Brazil. Those were quickly understood and were put down to a basic oversight on the software used by the team and its customer NEOM McLaren who were also hid by the malady.
Key Technical Change for Gen4
Tadashi Nishikawa the Chief Powertrain Engineer for the Nissan Formula E programme for the last four seasons is set end his period embedded at the team and will be replaced by Takuro Iwase, who will look to further develop his predecessor’s excellent progress.
Talking about his time in France with Nissan, Nishikawa-san said that it had been “an unforgettable experience and one that I would recommend to any fellow Nissan engineers willing to learn and develop their careers in a motorsport environment.
“The different elements of the role are challenging, but there is a real bond within the team which helps with the acclimatization and learning process. I would like to thank Tommaso and everyone here at Nissan Formula E Team who made this possible, as well as my amazing family for their support. I wish Iwase-san all the best, I know that he has what it takes to continue the success long into the future with GEN4 on the horizon.”
Volpe added that it had been “a pleasure to work with Tad and to see him grow in his role as Chief Powertrain Engineer, helping us to achieve so much in his time with us. His expertise from the Nissan’s automotive side has helped greatly in improving key elements of the GEN3 Evo car.
“We now welcome onboard Takuro as we look to maintain this level of performance heading into the GEN4 era.”
The Gen4 project has been led by Nissan’s technical director Theophile Gouzin. Nissan operates with a joint team structure that sees two distinct departments reporting to Volpe. The racing team led by Dorian Boisdron as team director, and the car manufacturing department led by Gouzin as technical director.
“Below this level, of course, you will have two different groups of people reporting to the two directors, but there will be some tasks that seem more like an organization as a matrix, because we do want to have a development which is influenced more and more by inputs coming directly from the track,” added Volpe.
“This is crucial, obviously, because there is part of the study of car development which is done in isolation.”
