The 36 points he earned at London ExCeL last month thrust Nyck de Vries from 13th to 8th in the final standings, and Nick Cassidy apart he made the biggest ascent up the rankings. It was a satisfying way to finish his second season with Mahindra.
De Vries, like teammate Edoardo Mortara, has been instrumental in helping to turn around Mahindra’s fortunes from back of the grid entity in 2023, to promise and upward trajectory in 2024, and now to established front-runner and podium achiever in 2025.
The effort that has taken cannot be underestimated. The collective input of Mahindra to this turnaround in little over 18 months has been very impressive.
The 2025 campaign had its bumps along the way, but de Vries now feels well back in to his stride as potent Formula E racer who can bring home consistent top results.
“It wouldn’t be Formula E if it wasn’t very, let’s say, eventful,” de Vries tells FEN.
“I think it always will be a little bit of a rollercoaster ride. Even Oliver (Rowland) had a few weekends or a few races where he had a few troubles. But apart from all of that, I think everyone had their fair bit of troubles.
“Incidents, contacts, penalties, misfortune, I think it’s been eventful, but equally as a team I don’t like to use the word satisfied, but I think we had a good season. We came from pretty much the back of the grid and we made significant steps forward.”
De Vries has dovetailed his Mahindra efforts with racing for the Toyota Gazoo Racing squad in the FIA World Endurance Championship since the start of 2024. He’s exactly the type of driver who can juggle both programmes and actually learn from each too. This has the effect of assisting in development improvement even if the two programmes share very little in terms of out-and-out technical similarities.
“The performance of the car has been very good, generally speaking,” adds de Vries. “I think until Berlin, we had two cars in top five average qualifying positions across the whole grid, so the speed of the car has shown a lot of promise.
“But there have also been areas where we’ve probably not been strong enough to always convert that speed into tangible points. I think that’s natural. You can’t expect to go from the back to the front and understand everything and become a winning team overnight.
“Yet, generally speaking, I think we should be somewhat proud of how quickly the team has been able to turn things around and find performance and continue to push that performance forward.”
It’s something that de Vries’ team boss Frederic Bertrand also expands upon, saying that the fourth place was “the reward of so much work done in 24 months.”
“To accept to change the structure itself, change the organisation, find new people to join, change the mindset of the one who stayed, and make sure that we deliver a good car, which was a challenge because it was very short in time,” added Bertrand.
“And after that it is just making the right choices on finding and bringing the right drivers with us, with the right spirit, because in the way we were, to have a Season 10 with a car which was really behind, if you get drivers who are complaining every weekend, you don’t build.
“So, I found people to build with me something, and that’s right now the real feeling of being in this position. We build the thing in the way I want it, and then we get out of the basement.
“Then let’s see how we build the next step now. So, it’s kind of a relief, the fact that I feel it’s done. I said what I wanted to do, and I did what I said, so it’s much better.
“It gives a lot of credibility within the group to speak to people in the company, to tell them ‘okay, this is where we want to go now’ and you can always say we did what we wanted to do, and we just delivered exactly a bit better because I promised them top six or five in Season 11.
“Now I know that they will just want to be better, and I have to tell them if you do it again, it will be nice.”
