Sam Bird and Abbi Pulling stay with Nissan for Season 13. Credit: Nissan Motor Co.
Nissan’s announcement on October 29 looked like housekeeping. Sam Bird stays on as reserve and development driver, Abbi Pulling stays on as rookie and simulator driver, and Oliver Rowland and Zane Maloney keep the race seats and the headlines. But when a championship swaps its car for an all-new one, the people who spend the winter in the simulator can matter more than their job titles suggest.
Here is the argument: the first real advantage of a new-car era is not a part, it is a trustworthy model of the car. A team whose simulator behaves like the real thing arrives at the first test with answers. A team whose simulator is quietly wrong arrives with expensive questions. By keeping Bird and Pulling, Nissan has chosen to protect that model before GEN4 reaches the track in anger.
What Nissan actually confirmed
According to Nissan’s own release, Bird joined the team in November 2025 as reserve and development driver, while Pulling has held the rookie and simulator role since June 2025. Both will work alongside Rowland, the 2024/25 champion, and Maloney ahead of pre-season testing at Circuito del Jarama in Spain on November 16–20. Nissan was also the first manufacturer to sign up for GEN4, announced in March 2024, and has committed to the era through Season 16 in 2029/30.
Why the simulator seat is the real story
GEN4 is not a facelift. Formula E’s official fact sheet lists active all-wheel drive that works in every phase of the race, not only at the start, in qualifying and in Attack Mode as on GEN3 Evo, plus regeneration of up to 700kW. Nissan’s figures put race power rising from 300kW to 450kW and Attack Mode from 350kW to 600kW. We have gone deeper on why permanent all-wheel drive matters more than the horsepower figure and why the 700 number is the one to watch.
My read: always-on all-wheel drive changes how energy is deployed and recovered corner to corner, and that is exactly the sort of behavior a simulator must get right before anyone spends real laps and real battery on it. Bird said the team has spent a lot of time setting the simulator up so Rowland and Maloney get “the most accurate representation of the new features.” That sentence is the whole point of his job.
Bird is a reference point, not a farewell tour
Bird has raced in Formula E since the inaugural 2014 race and has 12 wins and 27 podiums, with victories in all three car generations. His last win came in São Paulo in Season 10, driving for a Nissan customer team. That history is the useful part. Few people in the paddock can say how GEN1, GEN2 and GEN3 each felt at the limit, which makes him an unusually good judge of whether a simulator’s GEN4 is lying about braking, regen feel or how the car rotates. That is my interpretation rather than something Nissan has said, but Bird’s own description of working with engineering, strategy and the drivers points the same way.
Pulling’s role is the less glamorous half
Pulling is the 2024 F1 Academy champion. In 2025/26 she took part in the all-women’s test, Miami rookie free practice and the Madrid Rookie Test, and in 2026 she won a GB3 race at Spa. Team principal Tommaso Volpe says she will join test days and support the team before and during race weekends. Pulling herself plans to explore GEN4 first in the simulator and “hopefully” on race weekends.
Pairing the most experienced voice in the building with a younger driver still building Formula E mileage gives Nissan two reference points rather than one, and a useful check against any single driver’s habits baking themselves into the model. Again, that is analysis, but it is a sensible way to use two seats that do not score points.
What to watch at Jarama
Nissan has not said who will drive what in Spain, so do not read a line-up into it. Watch instead for how Rowland and Maloney describe the car against what they expected from the simulator. Maloney, entering his third Formula E season after top-10 finishes in São Paulo, Monaco and Tokyo, has called GEN4 a big opportunity for everyone to develop quickly, and the team that arrives with the cleanest correlation will develop fastest. For the wider stakes of this car, see why Formula E is betting its future on a 600-kilowatt car.
Race seats tell you who Nissan hopes will win in 2027. Reserve and simulator seats tell you how seriously it is taking the move to GEN4. On this evidence, very.
Lead image: Nissan Motor Co.
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