Three points from 33 races and 29 fewer than your teammate is hardly form that screams to a big manufacturer ‘come and get me’ but Zane Maloney looks as though he is heading for Nissan next season.
It’s a move very few saw coming, probably not even the man himself until recently. But it may very well become one of the steals of the silly season if the potential that Maloney has can be given the platform that many think it deserves.
The story of Maloney’s two season stint at Lola is one generally of a bit of rookie underachievement in 2025 and some outrageously bad look and poor reliability in 2026.
A resume of his last season reads as a genuine sob story, like he’d just run over a dozen black cats while being forced to drive under the same amount of ladders. As the great Mario Andretti once said of Chris Amon’s notoriously poor luck in racing: “If Chris became an undertaker, people would stop dying.”
The advice to Maloney after this season is, stick to motorsport and leave the ultimate check-out business to others. His luck has been so bad that there was no hope of it ever balancing out. At a certain stage, he and his management team ADD, the same that brokered the deal for stablemate Sacha Fenestraz to go to Nissan at the end of 2022, Maloney’s name started to rise to the top of Tommaso Volpe’s preferred list of drivers.
By just before the London EPrix things started to crystalise significantly. The Oliver Rowland disquiet was quelled around the same time, and Nissan settled on a straight choice between Maloney and longtime tester Victor Martins.
Quite why Martins’ name slid out of favour so much is not fully understood, so it is presumed that Nissan just wanted that little bit of Formula E racing experience for its seat alongside Rowland.
All of a sudden the luck changed and Maloney was in. He should be confirmed around the present month.
From the Bajan’s perspective, while he wouldn’t answer questions directly about his future, he did say that the last two years he had “learned a lot” and that Lola were “so new to the championship, we were never going to be fighting at the front, which allowed me to learn a lot more things outside of winning races.”
A kind of graduation from the school of hard knocks, Maloney may well actually look back at these two seasons with Lola and be kind of thankful for the scars he earned.
“How to develop a car, how to really work with the team and push the team forward in the right ways were good groundings I learned about,” he added.
“It’s very easy as a driver to push the team in the wrong way, especially when you’re so inexperienced. I feel like I’ve learned a lot in that sense.
“I don’t think I’m any faster of a driver than when I was in F2, but I do feel I have a much better understanding of how to make things happen around me and how to manage a weekend, a season.”
He will be putting that to use in red and white instead of yellow and blue next season, and this time around he should be able to manage his own luck much more.
