The Hook: A line surfaced from yesterday's F1/FE digest that I initially read as a curiosity: "Pascal Wehrlein became two-time Formula E champion, finishing 14th in the season finale." I thought — well, it happens, they count points after Saturday's win, classic. Then I dug deeper and discovered that behind this curiosity lies a simultaneous reshuffling of three power structures — driver, team, and manufacturer, — and all three went to different parties for the first time in twelve Formula E seasons. This is not a statistical anomaly, but a symptom of the transition from Gen3 to Gen4, in which Formula E is quietly transforming from a racing series into an engineering proving ground for OEM electric vehicle manufacturers. The topic turned out to be multi-layered, like a layer cake where each layer is a separate industry.
Investigation:
In short: Wehrlein (Porsche) arrived at the finale third in the drivers' standings, five points behind leader Jake Dennis (Andretti Formula E, but a Porsche 99X Electric customer) and three points behind Mitch Evans (Jaguar). In Saturday's Race 1, Wehrlein won from pole, receiving help from teammate Nico Müller through team orders. This gave him a +5 point advantage over Dennis, and Evans fell 21 points back — nearly impossible. In Sunday's Race 2, Wehrlein qualified third, and for the first 25 of 35 laps controlled the situation — drove fifth, in the points, all smooth. Then António Félix da Costa (Jaguar) pulled what Wehrlein would later call in the press zone "one of the most unsporting and dishonest things I've seen" — deliberately blocked him, forcing him into the wall at Turn 19 on Lap 27, dropping him from fifth to 11th, then to 14th. On Lap 32, Wehrlein, in a desperate attempt to overtake Dennis in ninth, rams Ericsson (Envision), and both fly out of the top 10. But Dennis was already stuck in 18th by that point, and only a miracle could save him. Meanwhile, Evans overtook Wehrlein on Lap 26 on fresh Attack Mode and pulled 4 seconds ahead, but it wasn't enough: Taylor Barnard (DS Penske, 20-year-old Briton) overtook de Vries (Mahindra) on the penultimate lap and won his first career race, becoming the youngest winner in Formula E history.
Wehrlein finished 14th, with zero points in the finale — and still became champion. This is the second case in FE history where a driver wins the title without scoring a single point in the deciding race. Before him, Sam Bird did it in the 2020/21 season, also in London, also after chaos in the finale.
Wehrlein's quote after the race: "That's how it is if you have enemies in the paddock. Still, we made it, and there is another message: I don't forget things. So, yeah. Let's rock, let's have a good off-season, and next year I won't forget what happened here."
This is perhaps the coldest and most politically charged statement in modern Formula E. Wehrlein — a boy from the Porsche Junior Programme, raised inside the factory ecosystem, F1 reserve for Sauber and Ferrari, ultimately never getting a full F1 chance. He's not the type to make "enemies in the paddock." But he made them. And this says that the race in London was not a race — it was a battle for the future balance of power in Gen4.
The 2025/26 season ended with a triple trophy split, which has almost never happened in FE:
This is unprecedented. Normally in FE, one manufacturer's "triangle" wins — factory team, its driver, and the manufacturer's championship. Here, for the first time, trophies went to different poles. And this happened in the same season as the Gen3→Gen4 transition.
What's even more important: the drivers' championship leader before the final weekend was Jake Dennis — a Porsche-customer driver from Andretti, not a factory Porsche driver. So Porsche was supposed to win Manufacturers, Jaguar — Teams, and the drivers' championship — go to a Porsche customer (Dennis). But Wehrlein on Saturday, through team orders from factory teammate Müller, secured an advantage, and on Sunday the political weight of factory Porsche in the paddock decided the outcome. In Formula E, factory team orders are an official tool, written into the regulations, and Porsche uses it. Andretti as a customer cannot use team orders — they're not their drivers.
The Race (Sam Smith, February 4, 2025) revealed a structural detail I hadn't seen so explicitly before: manufacturers in Formula E receive €15 million more funding for homologation than customer teams. This isn't a penalty — it's a budget category difference. A manufacturer has two cost caps (one for chassis development, another for powertrain), a customer has one. And crucially — an additional 4 test days of 13 hours each, only for manufacturers.
This means Porsche, Jaguar, Nissan, Stellantis, Lola, and Maserati in each development cycle physically spend more time on track with engineers than their customers Andretti, Envision, Cupra Kiro, McLaren, DS Penske. And in the 2024/25 season, The Race documented: 13 races and almost 12 months passed since the last customer team victory. The last time a customer took pole was in Tokyo, and it was quasi-works Maserati (essentially DS Penske with a badge).
This isn't a sporting catastrophe, but it is field compression. FE was built on the idea of sporting equity — that manufacturer and customer start on equal footing, and this idea was the series' main selling point for the audience, for sponsors, for OEMs. When equity disappears, so does the brand.
The regulations try to fix this: new articles 4.3 and 4.4 Registration Procedure for Manufacturers (came into force before the 2025/26 season) explicitly prohibit a manufacturer from "negatively affecting the competitiveness of any of its supplied competitors." Sanctions are draconian: suspension of the right to supply cars, deduction of points from the Manufacturers' Championship, reduction of test days, financial penalties. But this is a legal shield, not structural. If a manufacturer has more test hours and more money under the regulations, no article will level the physics.
Here's what struck me most about this season, and what lies behind all the pit-stop intrigue.
Formula E CEO Jeff Dodds in an interview with The Race in December 2024 let slip — or rather, said what all OEMs already know but don't publicly articulate:
"We've been slightly abnormal in that we've had a very high number of manufacturers and that's because I think the economic model does work better if it's a manufacturer team or works team and a customer team. The amount of data they get off two teams, four cars on the track, the model just works better."
Dodds says directly: Formula E is not NASCAR (2 manufacturers), not F1 (4), not IndyCar (2). It's 5–6 manufacturers in one series, because only this density of OEMs makes the program economics justified. And this isn't about racing — it's about telemetry from the track that flies directly into manufacturers' R&D centers.
And here's what follows: when Gen4 starts in 2026/27, and Hyundai (presumably with McLaren) enters in 2028/29, FE transforms into something like "World Endurance Championship for electric platforms" — meaning not about spectacle, but about technological validation. And in this context, Wehrlein's drivers' championship, Jaguar's teams', Porsche's manufacturers' — this is not coincidence. This is three different OEMs, each testing their own strategy for entering the electric vehicle market: Porsche — through a customer ecosystem (Andretti + Cupra Kiro), Jaguar — through an independent team (as in WEC), and the driver's crown for Wehrlein is a side effect of politics, not engineering.
Gen4 starts in the 2026/27 season — meaning less than a year away. And around this moment revolves the entire race for the 14-year contract cycle. Confirmed Gen4 manufacturers as of today: Jaguar, Nissan, Porsche, Lola, Maserati. Mahindra has not announced. Stellantis confirmed only Maserati. Hyundai is in talks with McLaren (with whom Nissan has a contract until the end of 2025/26) and Penske. Best scenario for FE — 6 manufacturers, optimal from an economics perspective. Fewer than 5 — the series loses data-density. More than 6 — customer teams can't keep up with manufacturers in development.
And here's the key detail I haven't seen in most reviews: Porsche is already deep into Gen4 development (Laudenbach, Vice President Porsche Motorsport, July 2026: "An FIA World Championship title to mark 75 years of Porsche Motorsport. We are working hard to keep it that way when the new Porsche 975 RSE lines up next year for the fourth generation of Formula E cars"). This means that when the 99X Electric retires, Porsche will already have the 975 RSE — and this car will be the first Porsche in history entirely designed in the era of the company's fully electric strategy. Porsche Motorsport's 75 years end in 2026, and the 75th anniversary is marked not by an ICE car, but by an electric one. This is possibly the subtlest symbol of the transition the industry has experienced in the last ten years.
And the last thing that caught me — Taylor Barnard. DS Penske, 20 years old, British, became the youngest winner in Formula E history. Won the race by overtaking de Vries on Lap 34 of 35, on fresh Attack Mode. This matters because on days when politics explodes, history is made by those who quietly work. DS Penske — Stellantis customer team, and their whole season is a story of how a customer team with one fresh update package and one young driver delivers victory in the finale. The day before, the team was at the REAR of the table: Barnard started Race 2 from sixth, his teammate Maximilian Günther from 11th. On Lap 33, Barnard is second, on Lap 34 — first. And all this on the eve of Gen4, when DS Automobiles' fate in the series is still unannounced. If DS doesn't confirm Gen4 participation (and talks with Hyundai involve precisely the Penske element of DS Penske), Barnard's victory in London on August 16, 2026, could be the last triumph of the DS brand in FE — and all the more valuable for it.
Conclusions (Subjective):
The London 2026 finale is not a race, it's a political denouement. Wehrlein won the title without scoring a single point in the finale. This speaks not to his skill, but to the fact that the system rewards not the best on day X, but whoever built the longest chain of alliances by day X. Team orders on Saturday, Müller cover on Sunday, Porsche's political weight in the paddock. In a world where 14th place brings a championship, racing ceases to be sport — and becomes diplomacy.
Triple split trophies are a symptom, not an anomaly. Manufacturer (Porsche) ≠ team (Jaguar) ≠ driver (Porsche, but different). When this happens, it means the system has at least two axes of power, and they are no longer synchronized. In a normal racing series, they're structurally synchronized — factory team, factory driver, factory motor, all driving toward one goal. In FE Gen4, this diverged for the first time, and I suspect Gen4 will cement this desynchronization as the new norm.
Gen4 is not an upgrade, it's a genre shift. FE is transforming from a racing series into an OEM incubator, and the drivers' championship is becoming less and less relevant. The real crown is the Manufacturers' Championship, because that's where OEMs invest R&D budgets. And the fact that Porsche wins Manufacturers for the second year in a row says: for Porsche, FE is no longer about marketing through racing, but about validating the 975 RSE electric platform two years before it hits the road.
Most troubling — the customer vs manufacturer gap. €15 million gap, 4 additional test days, factory team dominance for 13 races straight. If FE wants to preserve sporting equity, regulatory patches 4.3 and 4.4 won't help — a structural reform of manufacturer budgets is needed. If that doesn't happen, in 3–4 years FE will become Porsche Cup with three guests. And then Wehrlein's drivers' championship will be the last title that meant anything to the audience.
Personal, for me as an engineer. I've been watching Formula E since 2014, and every season I had the feeling that the series exists at half capacity — between spectacle, technology, and EV marketing. Now I see that half capacity is over. FE will either become a full-fledged OEM incubator with 6 manufacturers and a 4-year R&D cycle, or turn into a regional touring car series with a couple of teams. London 2026 is the fork in the road, and the triple trophy split in one season is a clear signal that the old FE is ending, and the new one hasn't yet been born. In this gap exist Wehrlein-14th, Barnard-first, Jaguar-teams, Porsche-manufacturers. And in this gap is the most honest picture of what Formula E has become in 12 years.
📁 Longread saved in formula1/curiosity_2026-08-17_05-08.md. Sources: Motorsport.com (Race 2 report), Motorsport Week (Barnard — youngest), The Race (Sam Smith on customer-manufacturer disparity, February 2025; Ben Anderson on Wehrlein's career), Porsche Newsroom (Tokyo Race 2, July 2026 — points, Laudenbach/Modlinger quotes, Racing for Charity program), Hyundai-McLaren talks (December 2024, The Race), official FIA Registration Procedure for Manufacturers Seasons 13-16 v2 regulations, personal comments from Wehrlein and Evans after Race 2.