Opel team principal Jörg Schrott and test and development driver Sophia Flörsch with the GSE 27FE prototype at Paul Ricard. (Photo: Opel / Stellantis)
For a decade, Stellantis has gone racing in Formula E the way a landlord rents out a flat: the badge on the nose belonged to the manufacturer, but the people turning the wheel guns, writing the energy targets and running the garage worked for somebody else. DS won four titles that way. Maserati and Citroën followed the same template.
Opel is breaking it. When the 2026/27 season opens in Jeddah on December 18–19, the Opel GSE Formula E Team will be run by Opel itself, from its headquarters in Rüsselsheim, with a company lifer as team principal and no outside operator standing between the factory and the pit wall. That is a bigger structural bet than the press-kit specs suggest, and it lands in the one season where it has the best chance of paying off.
How Stellantis has done it until now
The group’s Formula E history is a story of brand-plus-partner arrangements. DS spent its final years as DS Penske and signed off at the end of Season 12 with four championship titles, 18 race wins and 55 podiums from more than 139 starts, by Formula E’s own count. It was also the first manufacturer to win back-to-back driver and team doubles.
Maserati’s Gen3 entry ran as Maserati MSG Racing, with Monaco Sports Group as the operator. When Citroën replaced Maserati for Season 12, the operator stayed: a joint statement from Formula E, the FIA, Stellantis Motorsport and Citroën in July 2026 described Monaco Sports Group as “operator of the Citroën Racing Formula E Team.”
That model made sense. Formula E rewards operational polish—energy management, software, race-day calls—as much as raw hardware, and a seasoned customer outfit brings all of that on day one. The manufacturer supplies the powertrain and the marketing budget; the team supplies the know-how. Stellantis Motorsport handles the technical core either way; when it confirmed its Gen4 commitment in late 2024, it said it would develop the powertrains for the group’s entries.
What changes with Opel
Opel announced its four-year factory deal on March 20, the day after Formula E confirmed DS would leave. Eleven days later it named Jörg Schrott team principal. Schrott joined Opel in 1997 and has run its motorsport department since 2012, overseeing junior rally programmes that delivered six junior European championship titles. He is a rally man, not a Formula E veteran, and Opel was candid about it: its own announcement said key positions would be “successively filled with Formula E expertise.”
That is the honest trade at the heart of this project. A works team owns its data, its people and its priorities. Nobody has to negotiate with a partner over how many engineers sit on the pit wall or whose sponsor gets the sidepod. Schrott has called the car, named the GSE 27FE, a “strategic technology accelerator” for series production, and that pipeline is far shorter when the race team and the road-car division share a postcode.
The cost is institutional memory. A customer operator arrives with years of race-weekend reps; Opel has to assemble them. Every decision about energy targets, Attack Mode timing and safety-car responses—the decisions that win and lose Formula E races—will be made by a group that has never done it together.
Why Gen4 is the right time to try
If you are going to start a team from scratch, do it when everybody else is effectively starting over too. Gen4 is not an update. Race power jumps to 450 kW, qualifying and Attack Mode reach 600 kW, all-wheel drive becomes permanent rather than situational, and regenerative capacity rises to 700 kW. The car runs two distinct aero configurations: a low-drag race setup and a higher-downforce qualifying setup.
That last part matters for a new team. Much of what established outfits learned about Gen3 energy management—how to lift and coast, when to harvest, how to manage a car that only drove its rear wheels—does not transfer cleanly to a car that harvests through both axles at up to 700 kW. We’ve unpacked why that 700 kW regen figure matters more than the headline horsepower, and how permanent all-wheel drive reshapes the racing. Short version: the head start that experienced operators normally enjoy is smaller now than at any point since 2023.
Opel has been treating the off-season accordingly. It planned roughly 15 test days across European circuits before the opener and put the car in a wind tunnel to map both aero configurations. Simon Merchet leads development on the project.
Mitch Evans is the shortcut
If a new team cannot buy experience in its garage, it can buy some in the cockpit. Opel signed Mitch Evans, Formula E’s all-time wins leader with 16 victories and runner-up in the 2025/26 championship after a dramatic London finale. Evans spent a decade at Jaguar, and Schrott said he was “the preferred candidate from the very beginning.”
For a team without a back catalogue, a driver like Evans is more than a points-scorer. He becomes a reference for what “normal” should look like on a race weekend, from debrief structure to how aggressive an energy target ought to be in the final ten minutes. That kind of informal transfer of know-how is precisely what a customer operator would otherwise supply.
His teammate is Théo Pourchaire, the 2023 Formula 2 champion, who has been part of the Gen4 development work and will make his Formula E race debut in Jeddah. Sophia Flörsch is the test and development driver. Pairing a ten-year veteran with a rookie is a familiar formula; at a brand-new team, the gap between them will also tell you how quickly Opel’s internal processes are maturing.
Stellantis now has a controlled experiment
Here is the part worth watching all season. Stellantis will have two Gen4 programmes on the grid, both drawing on Stellantis Motorsport’s development work, but built around different operating models. Citroën enters its second year with Beth Paretta promoted to team principal, Frédéric Espinos arriving from Lola Yamaha ABT as deputy, and Jean-Éric Vergne and Nick Cassidy retained after a fifth-place finish in the teams’ standings. Opel starts from zero with a factory structure and its own staff.
If the Opel cars match or beat the Citroëns by mid-season, the group has evidence that it can run Formula E in-house without an intermediary. If Opel struggles for operational reasons—bungled Attack Mode windows, energy miscalculations, pit-wall errors—while the hardware looks sound, the partner model gets a strong endorsement. Either way, Stellantis gets cleaner data on how to structure its motorsport spending than any consultant could give it.
What to watch
- October 12, Paris Motor Show: Opel holds its press conference with the GSE 27FE on the stand in its final race livery.
- Qualifying versus race pace in Jeddah: new teams often find one-lap speed before they find race execution. A strong grid slot followed by a fade would point to energy management, not hardware.
- Opel versus Citroën: the most useful comparison on the grid for anyone trying to judge whether in-house beats outsourced.
- Who Opel hires next: any senior trackside appointment with Formula E history will show how quickly the team is closing its experience gap.
Formula E has also reworked its broadcast graphics for Gen4 to make the energy game easier to follow, which should make Opel’s learning curve unusually visible from the sofa. For the first time, Stellantis will have nobody else to credit, or to blame, for how that curve looks.
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