A second Jaguar customer team has been mostly disregarded by the ‘Big Cat’ as it looks to cut and paste its Gen3 model of supplying only the Envision team once again for Gen4.
Despite Porsche preparing to field four factory cars, and another two via CUPRA Kiro in Gen4, Jaguar is not planning to match its rival for numbers. An announcement that it will continue supplying Envision is expected before the end of the present season, and Envision driver Sebastien Buemi has already tested the Gen4 car at Almeira earlier this year.
Paddock rumours have long since been swirling that Penske may be a consideration for Jaguar to ensure six Jags powered cars on the grid for the new rules set. That would be a seen as an extraordinary development considering that Penske deputy team principal and technical lead at Penske is Jaguar’s old technical chief, Phil Charles.
Charles left Jaguar reasonably abruptly at the end of 2023 to accept an offer from Penske, and he has since formed an independent powertrain that was planned to be used in Gen4. However, doubts have emerged in recent months if this can be suitably financed and developed in time for the start of Season 13 this December.
That means a Plan B of a customer deal, with Penske known to have held talks with Mahindra, Lola, Jaguar and Porsche. A deal to continue with Stellantis is believed to be highly unlikely.
From Jaguar’s standpoint, a deal to run a second customer team is unlikely according to team principal Ian James, who told Formula E Notebook at Paul Ricard last week that a desire to supply four cars in addition to the factory Jaguar outfit was “not particularly a consideration.”
“Firstly, if we take the Porsche-Jaguar dynamic out of it for a second, I don’t think it’s healthy for this to become an arms race between a couple of manufacturers. I think the worst thing we could do is to have a sort of a DTM style situation going on,” added James, in a not very thinly disguised dig at Porsche.
“I’m not suggesting for a second that we’ll get there with Porsche’s decisions. I think I said at the time the faith that their commitment they’re showing to the championship is admirable. So, they’re to be applauded for that.
“But it’s not a direction, at this stage that we’re looking at taking. The other reason is that I think there’s a sweet spot to be found in terms of where your focus lies. Gen4 is an incredible machine but it’s a very complicated beast, and we need to make sure that we focus on executing our development programme as well as we possibly can and that we hit the ground running with a product that’s mature come the start of the season.
James added that “in order to do that I think that focus on having our works team and supporting one customer team, probably in a lot more collaborative way than has been done in the past, is probably hitting that sweet spot.
“It (Four cars) still gives us the data that we need. Once we actually get racing then we’ll have four cars out there that are running the Jaguar power unit. That step up to six I don’t necessarily see the significance or benefit coming from that (running four customer cars).”
But when pushed if he was completely ruling out an expansion, James added that he was “not reading anything out at this stage. But what I can say is at this stage we’ve got no plans to expand beyond our current situation.”
Jaguar has only ever worked with the Envision team, which began in 2023 at the advent of the Gen3 era. Prior to that it ran just its two factory cars in Gen2, although it was not alone as Nissan, Mahindra and Porsche also concentrated on its own factory teams at that time.
