Next month Sebastien Buemi will have plenty of stress in the cockpit. Le Mans and Sanya back-to-back will be tough for lots of reasons. But he can manage that. He can deal with that because he knows he can influence how both of those can be executed.
What he can’t control is what the administrators are plotting for the Formula E and FIA WEC calendars next year. This will directly affect his future in Formula E because should there be multiple clashes then his boss at Envision, Sylvain Filippi, will be quite entitled to effectively end Buemi’s 12 season Formula E career.
That is because Buemi has a long-term contract with Toyota Racing, the manufacturer that he has become totally synonymous with. It is a brand with which he has also become the most success global sportscar driver with of modern times. Four WEC titles, four Le Mans wins and 27 race victories not so much as illustrates the record books, but it re-shapes them.
Buemi is rightly proud of all that. But deep down there is something else which he holds dear. The simple fact that after a three season F1 career he has held three key jobs at once and being successful at each of them.
“I’m very proud, actually prouder of the fact that I’ve been able to do the three things, WEC, Formula E and F1 for 14 years now,” he told Formula E Notebook earlier this month.
“Of course, I’ve been doing Toyota before Formula E, and I’m still doing it after nearly 15 years and I’m prouder of that than having achieved 150 races here (in Formula E).
“This is obviously very difficult, but I don’t think there have been many guys that have been able to be in a top team in Formula E and WEC for many, many years.
“Some (drivers) had to choose, some had to give up, and I’m happy that I’ve been able to manage for so long, and hopefully for a bit longer. But this is obviously every year like this and that we don’t know until we see those calendars. That’s tough.”
The resilience on that level is clearly there. So too is the racing toughness, which was tested to an extreme between 2019 and May 2025. These were Buemi’s fallow years in Formula E when he looked like he was lost and losing the winning plot entirely
The 2019-20 pandemic affected season ended strongly with three podiums at the Berlin finale. Then the season after it started to get lean with a lowly 21st position in the standings.
But then for sure, you’re not going to get the opportunity to win again. That’s it, done. I genuinely love racing and fighting and obviously winning races. Even if sometimes it’s hard, because you cannot deny that isn’t the case when you don’t have the results.
The following season, his last with the e.dams fronted Nissan concern was even worse with a fortuitous fifth place in New York his own result of note.
A resurgence of sorts came in 2023, his first with Envision, but from an outright pace and results point of view Nick Cassidy put him firmly in the shade. Instead of sulking though, which 25 years old instead of a 35-year-old Buemi might actually have done, he embraced the challenge.
But then came a difficult 2024, and by the time Monaco last May came around some questions about whether Buemi had some has-been tendencies in Formula E started to bubble to the surface.
It wasn’t that he was any slower. It was just that reading the pack-races wasn’t immediately apparent in his armory, unlike say Cassidy, Rowland, Evans or da Costa.
How bad did it get in 2024 and early 2025? Was there a temptation to concentrate on WEC and his Red Bull work?
“I would not say that I’ve ever thought of saying ‘you know what, that’s it’,” he says honestly.
“Because sometimes I’ve been a bit annoyed, all those (fixture) clashes, and I feel like I’ve lost a lot of energy, having to deal with calendars, and it made me older really, having to deal with all this. Even if at the end I’m just a passenger to what the FIA, Formula E and WEC comes up with.
“I cannot deny that when things go bad, everything is annoying, so I guess it depends a little bit on your character as well,” reckons Buemi.
“I don’t feel like I’m that kind of guy that, just because things are not going his way, wants to just stop and give up. Of course, maybe the easy thing would be to say, ‘you know what, it’s not going well, I’ll just stop,” he adds.
Such has Buemi’s form this season, six points scores from eight and a pole at Mexico City that a repeat of his 2025 Monaco heroics next weekend would not be a huge surprise.
But whether or not he will be in green, as well as ever green in 2027 still has a few elements of doubt that won’t be dispelled until he and Sylvain Filippi get full eyes on the all-important first Gen4 schedule.
