“I’m 110% confident – I couldn’t be more confident in something to be honest. I’m not saying that means we’re going to go out already in season 10 and blow everybody’s doors off but I’m confident in the project, the plans, what the future holds and that it’s going to be a good place to be.”
Oliver Rowland’s return to the Nissan Formula E team ahead of the 2023-24 season is something of a homecoming for the Briton, and one which has filled him with renewed confidence.
Rewind nearly six months and the 2015 Formula Renault 3.5 champion was without a drive, having amicably split with Mahindra mid-season after a lacklustre run of form, and his Formula E future was in doubt. But amidst all the speculation, there was never any doubt in Rowland’s mind about returning to the team with which he enjoyed three seasons of relative success.
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“From my perspective, it was somewhere that I wanted to go,” Rowland exclusively tells Autosport. “I’d had a very good first experience with the team, I’d been there since I was a rookie. I knew some of the people still within the team, I had a good relationship with a lot of them and I trusted in what they did so for me, it was a no-brainer given the position that I found myself in.”
Nissan is the team that gave Rowland his Formula E break, offering him a full-time contract in 2018 after he made a one-off appearance, ironically for Mahindra, the season before. Over the following three years five podiums followed, including his sole Formula E victory to date in Berlin which helped him to fifth in the 2019-20 drivers’ standings.
But it’s a changed team from when he was last there in 2021, as the Japanese manufacturer ended its collaboration with the DAMS team last season. Rowland had strong connections with the French outfit, not least because he raced for it in Formula 2 where two wins – including the Monaco feature race – meant he finished third in the 2017 standings before his jump into Formula E.
It was a split which seemed inevitable after four seasons under the Nissan name, and dated back to the start of the championship when DAMS operated the team in partnership with Renault, albeit possibly hastened by the death of team co-founder Jean-Paul Driot in 2019.
Source: Autosport