Photo: Porsche AG
Pascal Wehrlein won the 2025/26 ABB FIA Formula E Drivers’ World Championship on Sunday in London by finishing fourteenth. He scored zero points. His closest championship rival, Jake Dennis, finished four spots further back in eighteenth and also scored nothing, which meant the title got settled less by what happened in the finale and more by everything both men had already banked over the previous fifteen rounds.
Wehrlein and Porsche teammate Nico Muller started third and fourth in their Porsche 99X Electric cars, then spent 35 laps getting shuffled backward through the London field. Wehrlein and Dennis were both caught up in an incident with another driver late in the race that dropped them out of scoring position for good. Muller salvaged twelfth. Dennis, driving for Porsche customer squad Andretti Formula E, ended up eighteenth. When the numbers settled, Wehrlein’s championship margin was five points, 169 to 164, almost exactly the gap he had already built before anyone got to London.
The Title Porsche Didn’t Win
Here’s the part that trips up fans coming from series with one set of standings: Porsche left London as Formula E’s Drivers’ and Manufacturers’ champion, but not its Teams’ champion. Jaguar TCS Racing took that trophy, outscoring the factory Porsche Formula E Team 288 points to 271 and denying Porsche what would have been a clean sweep of every title on offer, having already wrapped up the Manufacturers’ crown a round earlier in Tokyo.
The split exists because Formula E, unlike NASCAR’s or IndyCar’s single points battle, runs three separate championships that measure different things. The Teams’ title counts only what one specific two-car entry scores, in this case the factory Porsche Formula E Team and nobody else. The Manufacturers’ title works differently: it credits the best two finishing results from any car running a given manufacturer’s hardware, regardless of which team fields it. That’s why Porsche’s manufacturer total of 498 points blew past Jaguar’s 400 points, stacking factory results with what customer teams Andretti Formula E (229 points) and Cupra Kiro (128 points) managed in their own 99X-based machinery. Jaguar’s works squad, without a customer team supplying bonus results, simply had a better single-entry season than Porsche’s factory operation did.
How You Win a Title From P14
Wehrlein’s championship wasn’t built in London. He led the field in wins this season with three, tied for the most podiums with six, and tied for the most poles with four, the kind of season-long consistency that buys enough of a cushion to survive a bad final round intact. Dennis needed a big result and a Wehrlein disaster to flip the standings. He got the disaster and still couldn’t cash it in, because his own race fell apart just as badly.
The win makes Wehrlein just the second driver in Formula E’s history to claim two Drivers’ titles, joining Frenchman Jean-Eric Vergne in a series that has only been running since 2014. It also makes him the most recent German driver to win a global FIA single-seater championship since Nico Rosberg’s 2016 Formula One title with Mercedes. Wehrlein isn’t the only driver building his most decorated chapter somewhere other than Formula One’s top division, plenty of paddocks are quietly stocked with F1 refugees who found better opportunities elsewhere, a trend Backfire Racing has been tracking in IndyCar’s paddock this summer too.
The Car Leaving With Him
Sunday’s race wasn’t only Wehrlein’s moment. It was also the last start for the Porsche 99X Electric, which closes out Formula E’s GEN3 era with six of the ten possible World Championship titles, making it the most successful single-seater Porsche has ever built, a legacy Backfire Racing covered in full after the checkered flag fell. Wehrlein’s own reaction pointed straight at what comes next: after the celebrations, he said, “bring on GEN4.”
Sunday’s race also carried a second scoreboard. Porsche has spent the season donating 400 euros to children’s charities for every lap completed by its two factory 99X Electric entries, a running tally that stood at 449,200 euros heading into the finale, with the final figure still to be confirmed. The money supports Kinderherzen retten e.V., Interplast Germany e.V., and the Ferry Porsche Foundation, organizations focused on seriously ill children.
None of that changes the shape of the story. Porsche leaves Formula E’s GEN3 era as the class of the field by nearly every measure that matters, except the one trophy that requires beating Jaguar’s specific two-car entry rather than the combined tally of a manufacturer’s entire customer roster. Jaguar TCS Racing carries that momentum, and the Teams’ trophy, into next season’s GEN4 cars. Porsche brings a new Drivers’ champion, a new Manufacturers’ crown, and a 975 RSE waiting to prove the next chapter can be just as dominant as the last.
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