A game of two halves for an improved Jaguar

It’s that slightly strange point of the racing year when most other championships have a way to go in their title battles, but Formula E is done and dusted and we are planning for the next season which begins in December at São Paulo. While we are doing that we also have a small amount of time to appraise what was achieved last season and naturally aspects of that will inform how we will approach the new campaign.

Last season brought a lot to enjoy for Jaguar TCS Racing, especially after we took a clean sweep of wins in the final races at London Excel at the end of July as Nick Cassidy scored his fourth victory in six races and we took our fifth in six as a team.

There’s no doubt that from both points and results perspectives, it was a championship of two halves. But from an understanding of what we were dealing with, it definitely didn’t feel like that because as a team we are always super motivated and hungry. We knew approximately where we were in the pecking order quite early on. It clearly wasn’t where we wanted to be and it took a lot of determination and dedication to get ourselves out of that situation.

When you look from the outside, the results show that it looks like we were asleep for the first half of the season and then woke up in Shanghai. That wasn’t the case; in reality we were dealing with technical challenges and the minute we solved those the performance came as we had been expecting.

The Jaguar I-Type 7 was a new car for us at the beginning of the season, with more than 1000 new components. The challenge with Formula E is that the margins of performance delta are so fine that just with those little bits of performance offset you fall into that world of what you consider ‘bad luck’. But you just have to keep believing and follow the processes to claw your way back into contention. And that’s what we did.

At the start of the 2024-25 Formula E World Championship Nick Cassidy was leading the São Paulo ePrix but then had an incident which in turn flipped Pascal Wehrlein – the reigning champion – upside down. Thankfully, Pascal was unhurt but it was a headline-grabbing shunt. It was no one’s fault but what was obscured was that it looked like we were again a favourite for the championship challenge ahead.

Then the fact that Mitch Evans went on to win that race from last on the grid also masked a few things in people’s minds. But not us as a team. We knew we had work to do because it was clear that Nissan and Porsche had made some serious steps forward in performance, and we needed to optimise our new package.

Formula E is so competitive. You’ll be hard pushed to find a closer championship in the world and the margins are super tight. In that first qualifying session in São Paulo, and considering it represented the first race in a new era of regs with a new homologation of car, the margin from pole to last on the grid was 0.6sec. That’s 22 cars from 11 teams and six different types of manufacturer powertrain.

So, for us to go from that tricky start and then be eighth in the teams’ standings at the halfway mark to then second at the end of the season is a really big testament and statement from the Jaguar TCS Racing team.

“We always stayed focused, we always believed in the process”

As mentioned, there were five wins from the final six races, with Nick Cassidy sealing four and Mitch getting one more to add to his São Paulo victory. It was a remarkable string of results but we deserved it because we always stayed focused, we always believed in the process and we put ourselves in a position to fight back from those early problems.

A lot of people forget that the Jaguar team was essentially a start-up in 2016. We didn’t go targeting other people’s staff in Formula E – we were quite respectful. Also, we didn’t have staff who were imbued in winning titles so culturally we are still learning how to stay in that winning sweet spot.

We knew that we’d got good people, and we knew it would come right at some point in 2025. The work ethic of Jaguar TCS Racing and our partners is quite humbling, and it was rewarding just to be within it and see it all come together the way that it did.

That of course is reflected in our drivers who together won more races than any of our competitors last season. Nick Cassidy is leaving us now, which was a decision he took a while ago. We wish Nick well because he’s been such a wonderful asset and a fierce competitor. And in Mitch Evans – who has been with us from the beginning – we have one of the most naturally talented and fastest drivers on the grid, and also one of its hungriest.

Shortly we will be announcing who replaces Nick and we will also have new senior staff coming to the team too, so it’s exciting times ahead – both for us as Jaguar TCS Racing and for Jaguar as a brand – and before we know it we will be back in São Paulo in a few months’ time going again.

While we can’t wait for that, we also need time to prepare to make sure that we take our race-winning form from the end of this season into next so we can challenge for more titles and carve out new records in 2025-26.