Oliver Rowland’s Formula E renaissance

Motorsport history is littered with examples of drivers revisiting old stomping grounds to much fanfare but ultimately disappointing results. Fernando Alonso experienced this multiple times, at Renault (2008-09), McLaren (2015-18) and a third Team Enstone stint (2021-22), each time failing to recapture previous glories.

The still short history of Formula E provides fewer illustrations. The jury is out on Robin Frijns since his return to Envision, likewise Norman Nato at Nissan. But Nato’s team-mate Oliver Rowland is categorically demonstrating that resuming a partnership can yield better results second time around.

As the championship leader after four races, of which he has won two, Rowland is flourishing in his second season back with the team he vacated in 2021 for Mahindra. The Rowland-Nissan combination could have been arriving at the next round in Miami unbeaten if not for an overpower issue in Sao Paulo that resulted in a penalty while leading, and Max Guenther’s final corner pass in Jeddah.

Revisit the 2023-24 campaign, and the signs were there that the Dubai-based Barnsley native could mix it with Formula E’s big beasts – Jaguar and Porsche.

Two victories and fourth in the points, despite missing Portland’s double-header, made it Rowland’s most successful campaign in the all-electric world championship, and was double the win tally from his first three seasons with Nissan. The gradual shift from dark horse to established benchmark is one he admits has been “a pleasant surprise”.

“Since I’ve rejoined Nissan, it’s just been a catalogue of expectations exceeded,” smiles Rowland. “Last year if we were in the top 10, we were quite happy. We knew we had a bit of an efficiency deficit and it was my first year back. This year we know we’ve improved our race car, but our qualifying car remains relatively similar. It’s not like we have anything revolutionary on that side. We’ve just been solid.”

Rowland and his Nissan crew celebrate their Mexico City race win in January

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Getty Images

It’s a far cry from the scenario in which Rowland found himself at Mahindra when Gen3 rules arrived for 2023. A troubled testing programme had further implications throughout a difficult second season with the team, capped by a forced withdrawal from Cape Town prompted by rear suspension safety concerns. After a best result of sixth, he walked away with seven races remaining.

Rowland insists that he didn’t have anything on the table at that stage and “I was giving up a good salary” for a spell sitting on the sidelines, but on balance didn’t see it as a risk. “At the time that I left, I was pretty depressed with the situation,” reveals the 2011 McLaren Autosport BRDC Award winner. “I wasn’t happy with my racing anymore, I wasn’t enjoying it.”

The ‘gamble’ paid off handsomely when Nissan came calling, drafting in Rowland to replace Nato alongside Sacha Fenestraz. The squad formerly known as Nissan e.dams, still based in France although fully owned by the Japanese manufacturer since 2022, was much-changed; Rowland estimates he’d only worked with around 20% of the personnel before, but crucially “the people in the really key positions knew me from my first stint”.

“There was an element of having to prove myself to the new people. Credit to those that took me back, they believed in me and spread that around the team” Oliver Rowland

These included team principal Tommaso Volpe, who arrived in 2020, and team director Dorian Boisdron, previously the team and sporting manager.

“In the beginning there was an element of having to prove myself to the new people,” reflects Rowland, whose vanquished Franco-Argentinian team-mate would later remark that “Oliver at his best is easily on a par” with Max Verstappen. “Credit to the people that took me back, Tommaso and Dorian, they believed in me and spread that around the team.”

Rowland insists that he hasn’t given too much thought to what could have been without the illness that prevented him from travelling to Portland. He was just 11 points behind eventual champion Pascal Wehrlein before that event and won on his return at the London finale. He is instead focused on fully exploiting his current opportunity, with what he calls a “steady mindset of trying to achieve your goals each weekend”.

Nissan is much-changed since Rowland’s first stint, though key personnel remain

Photo by: Alastair Staley / Getty Images

“I have a very simple way of going about each race,” the 32-year-old explains. “I have my own targets and if things are going better, it’s a bonus.”

Rowland concedes that expectations have changed since the start of last season, internally and externally, from there initially being a “no pressure, we’ll just do the best we can sort of mentality”. Partly, he reasons, this is because Nissan is more settled operationally: “Last year there was quite a lot of new people in new roles. I feel like this year they are more certain in the job they’re doing and have that little bit more experience.”

Better preparation is something Rowland also cites as a major factor in his rapid start to the current campaign, the first with the Gen3 Evo incorporating four-wheel drive in qualifying, at race starts and in Attack Mode. Whereas Mahindra’s troubled Gen3 test programme meant “the learning slope was extremely high in our first season”, Rowland identifies his development work with the Gen3 Evo with hitting the ground running.

Compared to last season, when Rowland says “I was spending a lot of time trying to understand and learn and I wasn’t always in the perfect mindset in terms of what I wanted from the car, or when it needed to be delivered”, he has been a consistent threat this term. Rowland hasn’t scored a pole position this season, but his feat in reaching the semi-final stage of Formula E’s duel qualifying format at every race translates into a supergrid average of 2.75.

That compares favourably to double polesitter Wehrlein (4.25) and Rowland’s closest title challenger Taylor Barnard (10.25), the McLaren rookie also using Nissan powertrains.

But when asked about what else changed prior to the new campaign, Rowland’s response is telling. Above the more powerful car, his change of team-mate (Nato replaced Fenestraz after a single season with Andretti, bringing fresh understanding of Porsche’s powertrain) or even an engineer swap (Rowland now works with Fenestraz’s engineer from last season, Johann Aime), the biggest difference for the Briton concerns the tyres.

Rowland’s experience enables him to optimise systems and extract more from the car

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Getty Images

Hankook’s latest offering is peakier and degrades more quickly, which Rowland likens to the Michelin from Gen2. The requirement this creates to be “on the limit as quickly as possible”, he believes, plays to his strengths in qualifying.

Where previously drivers could “get four attempts at a lap with a very similar amount of grip, this year the tyres are performing at a much higher level when they’re brand new. In qualifying you have to find the grip on either the first or the second lap and this is definitely something that suits me".

Rowland is among a group of drivers including Guenther and Wehrlein who’ll be knocking on the door of 100 Formula E starts by the present campaign’s culmination. He’s come a long way since his Punta del Este debut in 2015 as a stand-in at Mahindra, which Rowland describes as “a rushed experiment at a time when the championship was relatively new”.

“My pace is very much the same. I think I can probably get more out of the car just through optimisation of systems and having that experience” Oliver Rowland

Now imbued with the experience to lead a team, he credits former team-mates Sebastien Buemi, Alexander Sims and Lucas di Grassi with helping him understand how to get the best out of a car and deliver valuable feedback.

“My pace is very much the same,” he reasons. “I think I can probably get more out of the car just through optimisation of systems and having that experience.”

The 2015 Formula Renault 3.5 champion is no stranger to title fights, which will surely be invaluable in the months ahead navigating Formula E’s numerous curveballs. The latest of those, Pit Boost, Rowland adapted to seamlessly when it was belatedly introduced last time out in Jeddah.

Rowland leads the Formula E standings after wins here in Mexico City and Jeddah

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

“I love the challenges of Pit Boost and new strategic stuff,” he states. “I love thinking about it and discussing it with the team. From my perspective, these new things are a huge opportunity to do things better than everybody else.

“I’m enjoying the Pit Boost and different Attack Modes, it really suits my adaptive style and the ability to think outside the box.”

The timing of the safety car and his own Attack Mode aided Rowland’s victory in Mexico, but a near-perfect Jeddah display culminating in a dominant 5.8-second victory showed Nissan doesn’t need luck to win.

Rowland says the weekend “was proof that we know what we’re doing, proof that we can do it. I don’t expect that the whole season is going to be in the way that I can win every single race. I still think people are going to fight back, like Porsche and Jaguar. We still need to firmly keep our feet on the ground and keep working hard”.

Rowland notes that Nissan has “still got small weaknesses that we need to work on” but is confident “we’re in a really good place”, and identifies his team as “probably one of the strongest I’ve been involved with in my career”.

That’s a notable statement that suggests Rowland should be in the fight for the long haul.

Rowland reckons his Nissan team is “probably one of the strongest I’ve been involved with in my career”

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Getty Images