There was some pleasant irony in Jake Dennis winning the opening race of the 2025-26 Formula E season last Saturday and it won't have been lost on either Andretti or its manufacturer supplier Porsche.
The partnership between the two was born in 2022 and made a brilliant on-track start in January 2023 as Dennis took the first ever Gen3 win in his Andretti-run Porsche 99X Electric. The podium smiles only told one part of the story though.
Under the surface, there was tension and it didn't take long for it to bubble to the surface both on track and off it.
It became very clear to Porsche that, despite its efforts, Andretti would not bend or flex when elements of control started to descend upon it. When Dennis and Pascal Wehrlein started hitting and compromising each other on track in 2023, it was really just a reflection of what was going on off it.
Some of the bruises healed. Others did not. The reasons for the tensions were ultimately a legacy of Porsche, whether consciously or not, just wanting more control of its customer in several areas.
As The Race discussed when Porsche announced its new, two-factory-team Gen4 model last month, this control was a key reason for the manufacturer pursuing a doubling of its efforts.
So, Andretti and Porsche will definitely cease their collaboration at the end of this year, as Andretti goes a different direction and Porsche skips to a new model of four factory cars and two customer ones. That customer will be Cupra Kiro, which will renew its deal again after two seasons of running initial Gen3-spec (non-Evo) powertrains.
But what next for Andretti? Gen4 is closing in fast and its likely team principal Roger Griffiths and his fellow senior team at TWG will have made their decision by now.
Nissan and Jaguar were believed to be the two probable options and it is the first of those that has emerged as the hot favourite.
"I don't think an announcement will come until after the end of season 12, just from contractual obligations that we have with our current manufacturer," Griffiths told The Race in Sao Paulo last week.
"The only thing I'm saying there is it's highly unlikely that we're going to continue with Porsche, so that's the only thing you can take from that.
"We are in a good spot with who it is that we're talking to, so we're very happy there, but an official announcement won't come probably until August."
From Porsche's perspective, its partnership with Andretti has publicly been fruitful with four wins, the 2023 drivers' title with Dennis, and being able to shoehorn some of its drivers in such as Andre Lotterer, Nico Mueller and David Beckmann.
"When we look back I think we had a very good start together, especially in the first season which is always difficult," Florian Modlinger, Porsche's director of factory motorsport in Formula E, told The Race.
"Andretti was directly involved in performance work, and we are proud that we achieved in the first season there with Jake Dennis in the 99X Electric drivers' world championship.
"But we had also some times where we saw some things on track which we didn't like. When you run the same powertrain and you have heavy contacts in racing you should respect each other and race each other maybe in a way that you have no contacts, and proper normal overtakings. But this is what happened.
"We are now in the last season of this generation of cars, and the target is clearly to have six strong Porsche 99X Electrics fighting for good points. Because the manufacturers' championship is on the menu and where we need to work properly all together to extract the most points."
What does a four-car effort really mean for Porsche?
Andretti had a taste of being a kind of joint-manufacturer in Gen1 and Gen2 with BMW. That all ended abruptly, something which Michael Andretti and Griffiths in particular were highly unimpressed with.
But when BMW agreed to stay on as manufacturer powertrain supplier for the final Gen2 season of 2021-22 the fall was broken to a small extent. Still, Andretti had to rebuild and the fact it not only did this with Porsche but won the first Gen3 drivers' title with Dennis was highly impressive.
Griffiths is in an ideal viewing position therefore to have his say on Porsche's change of model, to having four factory cars for the start of Gen4, and his thoughts were intriguing.
"There's pros and cons to it," he said. "It certainly raised a lot of questions around the governance and how the FIA is going to effectively police not only the sporting aspect of how cars race on the racetrack, but the financial aspect too.
"Ensuring that there's proper accountability for the way the two teams are funded and how they spend their money also. I know that the FIA is looking for input from whether it's FETAMA [Formula E Teams and Manufacturers Association] or just the independent customer teams as to what they think should be done."
The structure of the second Porsche team is not yet known, with Modlinger telling The Race that "the build-up will start in spring, maybe early summer" and that then we will have more "clarity how everything will look like".
For Andretti and Griffiths, it will become more of a clear rival, an overt competitor if you will. But there are already many questions being posed as to what the four-car factory Porsche set-up will mean for the championship as a whole.
"I think there's still quite a bit for Porsche to work out," said Griffiths.
"On one hand, time will tell whether this is true or not, but I think there's a missed opportunity potentially around the exposure that a second Porsche team is going to get.
"Had it been more like the Stellantis model, another brand from within the VW [Volkswagen] group, I think a lot of us would feel a lot more comfortable because they would actively market their brand.
"But with two Porsche brands, is Porsche going to double down on their marketing spend? I hesitate to think that that will be the case. So, I think there's a bit of a missed opportunity there.
"On the positive side, it does put another franchise in the hands of a manufacturer or someone outside of the promoter, if you like. And that's a positive thing in terms of increasing the franchise's value."
