Andre Lotterer is the new driver at Techeetah in FIA Formula E Championship.
The 35 year-old German will participate in Season Four alongside Jean-Eric Vergne, who was part of the inaugural Formula E season for the team in 2016/17.
Lotterer is a triple Le Mans winner and World Champion in the FIA World Endurance Championship in 2012. Since then he has claimed three second places in the FIA WEC Championship – all for the Audi Sport team. When they shut their sportscar programme down at the end of 2016, he changed to Porsche in FIA WEC. They will be closing their LMP1 programme after 2017, and Lotterer will have to find a new job again – and now he has found one.
Porsche have announced that he will still be attached to the brand, so that might be a prelude to him driving for Porsche in Formula E, when they start participating in the 2018/19 season. His Porsche teammate, Neel Jani has a Formula E seat too for the upcoming season, where he will compete for Dragon Racing.
Lotterer has plenty of single seater knowledge from Super Formula – the championship formerly known as Formula Nippon, which is the fastest single seater series in Japan. Over the last 15 years, he has claimed the Championship Title in 2011, along with 9 other Championship medals in 15 seasons! He has won the Super GT Championship in Japan twice, and claimed two further Championship trophies.
Oh yeah – and then he had a single Formula 1 start for Caterham at Spa Francorchamps in 2014, where he impressed most of the paddock through the weekend but had to retire after only a few laps with technical problems on the car.
Photo: JJ Media
Jean-Eric Vergne will be getting ready to his fourth season in the FIA Formula E Championship. He didn’t participate in the first two weekends, but has been racing in the series ever since. He has been swapping and changing between the teams, where he started at Andretti Autosport, before going to DS Virgin Racing.
In the 2016/17 he changed to the new Techeetah team, where he got the role as main driver. For the first three weekends he had Ma Qing Hua as teammate at the Chinese team. They quickly realized that their compatriot didn’t have Championship potential, and the team went for Esteban Gutierrez, who had given up on his Formula 1 dream. He was part of the team for the next three weekends, before he was offered an Indycar seat. The Mexican was quick to grab his Sombrero and leave for the American Series – a bit too fast for the teams liking, who sued him for an alleged contract breach. That has gone a bit silent – but fact is that Stephane Sarrazin was put in the Techeetah car for the last 6 races, where he was on the podium twice. But that somehow wasn’t enough for him to keep his seat.
With this announcement, 12 of 20 seats have been taken. Audi Sport ABT Schaffler will announce their drivers tomorrow, but no big surprises are expected.
The FIA Formula E Championship starts in Hong Kong on December 2.
