Days after winning Season 7 of the Formula E championship, Mercedes has announced that it will end its involvement in the series at the end of Season 8. The decision has been taken in the context of a strategic refocus of resource for electric vehicle development.
Since HWA Racelab first took to the track in Season 5, laying the foundations for Mercedes' Formula E entry, the goal has been to create a benchmark team at every level.
A first Mercedes win for Stoffel Vandoorne in the final round of Season 6 was followed by a strong start to Season 7, setting up the German team's championship challenge in only its second season.
This culminated last weekend in Berlin when Nyck de Vries and the Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team became the first ever all-electric motorsport world champions, by winning the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship Drivers' and Teams' titles.
In parallel, Mercedes-Benz made the strategic announcement in late July that the brand will be ready to go all-electric at the end of the decade, where market conditions allow.
As part of the new strategic direction, Mercedes has deliberately chosen to shift resources for this accelerated ramp-up of electrification, including the development of three electric-only architectures to be launched in 2025. Therefore, it will reallocate resource away from its ABB FIA Formula E World Championship programme and towards applying the lessons learned in competition to product development in series.
Moving forward, the company will concentrate its works motorsport activities on Formula 1, reinforcing the sport's status as the fastest laboratory for developing and proving sustainable and scalable future performance technologies.
This learning will be brought to life through future product architectures like the AMG.EA platform, the dedicated performance vehicle electric platform that will be launched in 2025, and projects such as the Vision EQXX.
While Mercedes-Benz will depart Formula E at the end of Season 8, the team's leadership group has begun exploring options for the team to continue competing in the series during the Gen 3 era, including a potential sale to new owners.
"At Mercedes-Benz, we have committed ourselves to fighting climate change at full force in this decade," said Markus Schafer, Member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Mercedes-Benz AG; responsible for Daimler Group Research and Mercedes-Benz Cars COO. "This demands the accelerated transformation of our company, products and services towards an emission-free and software-driven future, and to achieve this, we must give full focus to our core activities.
"In motorsport, Formula E has been a good driver for proving our expertise and establishing our Mercedes-EQ brand, but in future we will keep pushing technological progress - especially on the electric drive side - focusing on Formula One. It is the arena where we constantly test our technology in the most intense competition the automotive world has to offer - and the three-pointed star hardly shines brighter anywhere else. F1 offers rich potential for technology transfer, as we can see in ongoing projects such as the Vision EQXX, and our team and the entire series will achieve net-zero status by the end of the decade."
"We entered Formula E with an open mind about the series and its innovative approach to motorsport," added Toto Wolff. "A lot of hard work went into building the team and making it competitive - and we have seen an incredible group of talented women and men deliver at the highest level.
"We can be proud of our achievements and especially the double world championship won last weekend in Berlin, which will stand as an historic milestone in the long motorsport history of Mercedes-Benz.
"We will be giving everything to make sure that we finish our Formula E adventure in style in Season 8."
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