Andretti Formula E team has announced the signing of Felipe Drugovich on a multi-year deal to partner Jake Dennis.
It will be the first full-time program for the Brazilian following his 2022 Formula 2 championship triumph. Since then he has dovetailed a full-time role as Aston Martin’s test and reserve driver in Formula 1 alongside sporadic sports car appearances, but now he’s back in a race seat as his primary program.
“I’m so happy to announce that I’ll be joining Andretti Formula E, and I’m really excited about what’s ahead,” Drugovich said. “My team and I have been in touch with Andretti ever since I won the Formula 2 title, so it’s great that we’ve managed to stay connected all this time and finally have the opportunity to work together.
“It’s been far too long for me without racing, so I’m incredibly motivated to get back on a racetrack. It means a lot to know I’ll be competing in every session and not just serving as a reserve, as I have done the past few years.”
Drugovich made a brief appearance in Formula E last season, subbing for Nyck de Vries at the Berlin E-Prix while the Dutchman was racing in the FIA World Endurance Championship. It was a challenging event with car issues, rain, and component change penalties (inherited from de Vries at the previous round) hampering his progress, although he was able to end the weekend with a seventh place in the second race of the double-header.
This time around, Drugovich is going into the new season keen to enjoy it without any sort of pressure, and he doesn’t feel that joining a big-name championship-winning team such as Andretti will add any more.
“I’m really going into this challenge with a positive mindset,” he told RACER. “I think the challenge is already quite big to put any pressure on me, so I think it’s something that I really need to enjoy and also learn as much as I can every race.
“The team is something that it’s really cool to be part of. It’s a massive name in the motorsport world, and I’m just really excited. When I was approached back in 2023, they were at the top, top with Jake [Dennis[, and I still have those memories quite fresh in my mind. So that was really cool to be in touch again and get the deal done with them. I’m super happy, super thankful to the team as well for this opportunity. For sure we can, sooner than later, be fighting for wins again.”
Drugovich’s prominence as a Formula 2 champion, Formula 1 reserve, and a driver that has been linked with a number of seats in multiple series in recent years, will no doubt bring high expectations. But Andretti team principal Roger Griffiths says there are none from Drugovich nor the team, and that the fact that Formula E is wildly different from anything Drugovich has done before will mean that while he may need time to adjust, it could also be a benefit.
“I think every driver is motivated, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing this, but I just feel something a little extra little special here,” he told RACER. “He’s a driver that’s coming in with no specific expectations of himself, but I think there’s a lot of expectations from others that he is going to be super-strong.
“I think we’re realistic about how the racing may go, because FE is quite unique. I think qualifying, that aspect of it, I really expect him to be very strong.”
Drugovich joins the team as the sixth full-time teammate to Jake Dennis in as many years. While team principal Roger Griffiths stands by the driver calls his team has made, going for a driver with no full-season Formula E experience – but a big name nonetheless – marks something of a change of approach that he hopes will pay off this time around.
“I’m super-excited. It wasn’t that we went out looking for a big name, it just happens to be that way,” Griffiths said. “He’s a guy that’s been very prominent in his racing career, he dominated F2 in his championship season, but it was really about trying something different.
“Everybody’s very conscious of this revolving door of drivers as Jake’s teammate. And it’s not that I feel that we’ve made any bad decisions, it’s just it just never worked out the way we’d anticipated it. We always anticipated that Andre [Lotterer] would be super-strong – he’d come off a really strong run of results, consistently in the top six, top eight in the GEN2 car. Norman Nato, on his day, was super quick. And then Nico Mueller, throughout Season 10 was talked about as the next great driver, so, you know, it was always a little surprising that things never quite worked out.
“So we thought the other route to explore is to go with a rookie driver – although I think rookie and Felipe is is an oxymoron, just because of his vast experience – but we thought we’d try something different.
“We’d always seen in the rookie sessions, and then in the race he did with Mahindra, he was very strong. Typically, top two or three on the timesheets in the rookie sessions, and then a point scoring finish in Berlin.
“So we knew he was a strong driver. We had a little bit of information from the Cadillac program, just because of our association through TWG motorsport, but really it was just the right fit. And it was a pretty straightforward conversation with him and his management team.”