Taylor Barnard will race for the new Fortescue Zero Racing squad this coming season after finally putting pen to paper with the Australian owned team recently.
The winner of the last E-Prix at London Excel in August will drive a Jaguar GEN4 car with an as yet unknown teammate across the 2026-27 season. Barnard will embark on his third full season in Formula E after previously racing for NEOM McLaren and DS Penske.
His signature to a new deal was far from straightforward and included several distractions. A new agreement had to be forged, as did all the other carried over DS Penske staff, and it was this that caused a delay in securing his services.
This may or may not have been influenced and caused a subsequent delay by the possibility of at one stage Barnard getting a deal with the nascent customer Porsche team, which is still being formed ahead of being granted a possible official entry on October 16.
Paddock rumour had suggested for some weeks that Barnard’s manager, Paul Mueller, may have been or may still be involved in these plans, although no official confirmation of the former F2 team owner actually being associated with it has so far come to light.
Barnard said of his signing that he was “incredibly excited to join Fortescue Zero Racing and be part of building something from the ground up.
“Fortescue Zero has a strong history of developing high-performance electric technology, and I’m looking forward to working with the team and helping push that technology further and faster than ever before. We know there is a lot of hard work ahead, but that is exactly what makes this opportunity so exciting. I can’t wait to get started.”
The new operation’s Team Principal, Jim Wright, added that Barnard was “young, hungry and has a huge amount of potential. Just as importantly, he understands how to work with engineers and extract every bit of performance and efficiency from the car.
“We are building a new team with serious ambitions. Taylor is the first piece of that picture, and we are excited to see what we can achieve together.”
Formula E Notebook understands that Barnard will continue to be engineered by Kyle-Wilson Clarke, who ran him at DS Penske last season. Wilson-Clarke has previously worked with Neel Jani and Pascal Wehrlein at Porsche and Stoffel Vandoorne in the 2024-25 campaign.
Former DS Penske senior team members Phil Charles and Nicolas Mauduit are not part of the Fortescue Zero team, although the latter is understood to still be working with Jay Penske, who remains as a minority stakeholder in the Fortescue Zero Racing operation in Formula E.
