Getting an accomplished job done efficiently and early or tailing off alarmingly?
There are two ways of looking at Nissan’s Formula E campaign last time around, as Oliver Rowland swept to the title with two races to spare.
That in itself is a rarity in Formula E, only done once before when Antonio Felix da Costa took the pandemic-affected championship in 2020.
Between the second round at Mexico City, which Rowland won brilliantly to the first Shanghai in the 10th round, Nissan scored an average of 27 points per race. From the 11th round to the season finale, it averaged just 2.8 points.
Not only that, but it went from teams' title challenger to distant third-place finishers in the space of six weeks.
'Yips' are real in sport, particularly golf, but in motorsport, the nerves also kick in and a weird energy can often pervade. It did for Rowland last season, but the fact that he and Nissan had been so brilliant in that golden period from January to June meant that the clubs were, in a sense, packed away and they were heading victoriously to the clubhouse.
Except there was a big debrief to be had post-season, once the celebrations had been digested. Add into that mix several key Nissan personnel being poached from their positions in Viry-Chatillon and the build, calibration and activation of a brand new simulator, and all of a sudden, the stability on the surface started to ripple quite a bit.
“The last part [of the 2024-25 season] was very disappointing to the point that we were almost the worst team, basically,” a straightforward Dorian Boisdron, Nissan team director, tells The Race.
“It's nice to see what went well, but it's even more important to understand what went wrong too.
“We could identify that; it's a mix of different reasons. But for us, what is crystal clear is we lost the momentum in qualifying, and if you look at the tracks for the last part of the season, like Jakarta, for example, and London, if you don't qualify, well you have almost no chance."
There was also Shanghai, where the team made an operational mess. Yet still the race performance was mostly there, with Rowland coming through for useful points at Shanghai, where he qualified decently on the third row of the grid.
“We don't think that at some point we completely lost the performance itself, so it's more mix of different things we clearly identified,” says Boisdron.
“It was super important for us to define a plan to prepare season 12, to make sure that it won't happen again, because if you look in the mirror at season 10 [2024], it was almost the same, the last part of the season was very difficult for us also.”
At the time that Rowland punched the air and received his memorable message from daughter Harper as the title became reality, there was already a lot that was changing in the team, and Boisdron was mentally already prepping for crucial months in August and September when Nissan had to reshape and recalibrate itself.
The same but different
At the penultimate round at Berlin's Tempelhof in July, there was a notable absence from the Nissan pitbox. Its technical director Theophile Gouzin, was missing, presumed benched.
That bench was in his garden, as the dreaded gardening leave was already in its early stages. That he was not there to see Rowland win the title must have been a galling blow, but it was a legacy of him informing team principal Tommaso Volpe a week before that he was leaving for a new role in Formula E. That will be at Jaguar once he has exhausted his potting plants later this year.
The Race understands that Gouzin will not be directly replaced and that a kind of committee within the existing team will manage the equivalent role.
But several other team members also took up new posts, notably head of performance & simulation, Cristina Manas Fernandez, who has joined the Williams Formula 1 team to work with Carlos Sainz. So Nissan had some decisions to make.
“We could work on it quite early, before the end of the season,” says Boisdron.
“We have been quite aggressive on the recruitment process. The absolute target was to start the season with all this adaptation done super early, because we did four days of testing in September, and we already had all the people in place.”
This was a vital target for the team because with the delivery of the Gen4 car and the new simulator coming on stream, Abbi Pulling was the first to try the low latency, high bandwidth of Dynisma’s DMG-1 system.
“I would have preferred, by far, to keep the same people and stay stable, because stability is king in motorsport,” adds Boisdron.
“But we find solutions internally because when we restarted the project with the transition from Gen2 to Gen3 [away from being run by e.dams to a full factory Nissan set-up], we brought onboard many talents who were quite young, and we had the opportunity to make some people step up in some roles.
“It’s a mix of internal changes, let's say evolutions, plus the recruitment of new talents. We are in good shape.”
Because Nissan won the drivers' title last season, there is a temptation to assume that it is the benchmark in a way. But the inconsistency at times last season is perhaps merely a reminder that the team in its current incarnation is really only in its infancy. Competing with Porsche and Jaguar on a constant basis is a process which is ongoing and still clearly needs honing.
That is a point that reflects on second driver Norman Nato too. Despite the clear paucity of points collated on Nato’s side of the garage, it can’t be forgotten that he came back to the team relatively late in 2024.
That was, in a way, why the testing Nissan completed early in September was a vital component of getting on top of some elements of his disappointing campaign, as a collective, had to be addressed, and why clarity on his future came as early as the London E-Prix weekend in July, something that didn’t happen in 2024 when Sacha Fenestraz’s position within the team was dwelt upon too much.
That shows Nissan is learning from its missteps and getting on the coattails of Porsche and Jaguar, something which it aims to do much more of over the coming season.
