Stoffel Vandoorne will leave the DS Penske team after the London E-Prix and is weighing up offers to continue in the all-electric world championship next season.
Formula E 2021-22 champion Vandoorne is believed to have held recent talks with the Maserati and Envision teams as he again looks to combine Formula E with a 2025 World Endurance Championship campaign - either with Peugeot or a rival manufacturer.
The Race has discovered that Vandoorne will race for the French/American alliance for the last time this London weekend - and that DS Penske may already have signed a different driver to race alongside Jean-Eric Vergne going forward.
Speaking to The Race at the recent Portland E-Prix, Vandoorne said that his future was “not 100% clear yet” at that stage.
“I'm pretty close to knowing what will happen next year, but nothing is done yet. There's a lot of pieces of the puzzle that are going around at the moment.
“But I'm feeling positive, I know that I'll be in good conditions, which is a nice thing. I've got the speed and I can still go for another championship here.
“I feel like I've still got some business left to do [here]. That's my main focus right now, which is to arrive in the best shape possible next season and really challenge."
It is understood that Vandoorne was notified following the Portland weekend about DS Penske’s intention to change its line-up for next season, after two seasons with Vandoorne and Vergne partnership.
Formula E options for Vandoorne next season appear to be narrowed down to three paths - Maserati, Envision and Nissan.
He has long been known to be in negotiations with Envision but recent indications are that Sebastien Buemi and Robin Frijns now have an increased chance of remaining at the team for another season.
Nissan is still weighing up whether it replaces Sacha Fenestraz. This seems the least likely home for Vandoorne as a deal there would include more stringent restrictions on his other programmes - in F1 with Aston Martin and in WEC with one of its brands - through brand clashes and the present date clash between the Interlagos WEC race and the Berlin E-Prix next July.
That leaves Maserati MSG, which is believed to have a fluid driver line-up situation right now - with present drivers Maximilian Guenther and Jehan Daruvala expected to have degrees of flexibility in their options for 2025.
Who will replace Vandoorne?
One candidate that could step into the DS Penske team next season is Guenther.
He made his Formula E debut in 2018 for what was then the Dragon Racing team - which morphed into the Penske element that partnered with DS Automobiles ahead of the Gen3 era, for 2023.
Guenther, briefly stood down in favour of Felipe Nasr but subsequently drafted back into a Dragon seat, was then snapped up by BMW Andretti for the following season - one that yielded three race wins - before joining Nissan and then Maserati MSG ahead of the 2022-23 season.
Guenther is held in high regard with several team members at DS Penske, with most of them known to have been pushing for him to join Vergne from an early stage of what has been a fluctuating driver market spell.
Others that were known to have been of interest to DS Penske included Antonio Felix da Costa and sometime test driver Robert Shwartzman.
While the former will now see out his contract at Porsche for next season, Shwartzman is believed to be pursuing possibilities in IndyCar for next season, possibly with the new Prema squad he drove for through his junior career in Formula 3 and Formula 2.
Why a change is being made
Vandoorne’s results over the last two seasons have been modest, especially in the context of both the expectation prior to his joining and his performances in relation to team-mate Vergne.
After establishing himself as one of the best drivers of Formula E's Gen2 era with Mercedes, Vandoorne signed with a still-forming DS Penske alliance in the spring of 2022, a few months after it'd become clear Mercedes would withdraw from Formula E.
His first season with DS Penske, at the start of the Gen3 era, was largely disappointing, although there were highlights that pointed to the prospect of a much better second season.
It just hasn't played out. A third place at Monaco marked Vandoorne's first Gen3 podium but hasn't prevented him from ending up with 74 fewer points than his team-mate heading into London. Despite this, in terms of qualifying head-to-head Vandoorne is equal with Vergne on 7-7, although on average starting positions Vergne is sixth while Vandoorne’s mean grid position is eighth.
The DS e-TENSE FE23 has been far from an easy package - and the ultra-crazy pack racing is definitely not the best match for Vandoorne’s more refined approach to his craft. While having the speed over one lap he has more often than not just fallen down the order in the highly-physical peloton-style races.
But being able to adapt is part of the challenge and part of the expectation at this level - and sources within the DS Penske team have been perplexed as to why Vandoorne has not been able to achieve similar results to Vergne.
At the same time, the team that Vandoorne signed for in 2022 is far removed from the one that now exists - with many changes within the structure of the team, most of which have been implemented by new technical director Phil Charles.
Charles is employed by the Penske element of the alliance and has been tasked with strengthening several areas of the team in addition to other special project areas of Jay Penske’s motorsport interests.
It is not clear if Vandoorne was a casualty of this strategy or not, but the Belgian is known to be privately disappointed with the team’s decision to look for an alternative team-mate to Vergne.