Sebastien Buemi in the Envision Racing Gen3 Evo at the 2025 Berlin E-Prix. Photo: Steffen Prossdorf, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
On the eve of his 150th Formula E start back in May, Sébastien Buemi was asked what would settle his future in the all-electric championship. He mentioned performance, the way drivers always do, then landed on the variable that actually decides these things: his future would depend on “the calendars, as usual.” Three months later, the calendar has answered him.
Envision Racing confirmed on 13 August that Buemi will finish his run as one of its race drivers after this weekend’s London E-Prix, closing out four seasons with the squad and moving into what the team calls an advisory and development role. Joel Eriksson is going at the same time. Formula E confirmed both departures the same day. Two seats at one of the championship’s founding entries are suddenly open, four months out from the GEN4 era.
Read the wording, not the headline
Two things have been confirmed. Buemi stops racing for Envision. Buemi stays at Envision away from the cockpit. What nobody has confirmed — not the team, not the series, not Buemi, whose own channels have said nothing at all — is that he is done with Formula E.
That distinction is worth holding onto, because this championship knows exactly how to announce a retirement when it has one. When Lucas di Grassi decided he was finished, Formula E published it under that word. Buemi’s says he is leaving Envision Racing. Until somebody puts it in writing, the accurate line is that Buemi has no Formula E drive for Season 13 — not that he has stopped being a Formula E driver. Those are different sentences, and the second one is the one everyone is reaching for.
He is walking away from a contract, not running out of one
This is not a veteran being quietly moved on at the end of a deal. Buemi signed a multi-year agreement with Envision after winning the 2025 Monaco E-Prix, his first victory in nearly five years and the peak of the partnership. That contract was built to carry him into GEN4. It is ending early instead.
Sylvain Filippi, Envision’s managing director and CTO, called it a difficult decision and pointed at the same pressure Buemi had flagged in May: an increasingly demanding Formula E calendar landing at the same moment the team enters what he described as an important period of development. Teams do not tear up multi-year deals with world champions out of sentiment. They do it when the arithmetic stops working.
The arithmetic that made the call
Buemi’s other job carries a factory badge. The FIA’s World Endurance Championship entry list has him in the No. 8 Toyota GR010 Hybrid alongside Brendon Hartley and Ryō Hirakawa. That is a Hypercar seat at a manufacturer he has driven for since the LMP1 days, and it has produced four world endurance titles and four Le Mans wins. Nothing in Formula E outranks that on his CV, and top-flight sportscar racing is not a discipline that rewards part-time attention.
Meanwhile, Formula E has gone shopping for dates. Season 13 is the biggest the series has run: 21 races across 12 events, opening with a night double-header in Jeddah on 18–19 December 2026 and finishing in Tokyo on 24–25 July 2027, with brand-new stops at COTA and Zandvoort. Formula E had already shifted the 2027 Monaco E-Prix forward a fortnight, to 1–2 May, specifically to clear a WEC clash. That fixed a collision. It did nothing about the load.
Twelve Formula E events, most of them double-headers, stretched across seven months that overlap almost entirely with a WEC campaign, on top of simulator duty for Red Bull Racing. Something in that diary had to give. It was never going to be Toyota.
Advisory and development is not a retirement gift
It would be easy to file the new role under polite send-off. Look at what GEN4 actually is and that reading falls apart. The official specification lists 600kW in ATTACK MODE, 700kW of regeneration, a 43 per cent jump in race energy to 55kWh, and active all-wheel drive working in every phase of a race rather than in short bursts. Then comes the line that should make every race engineer sit up: unlimited traction control and ABS.
That single allowance converts a large slice of lap time from a driving problem into a software problem. Whoever writes the best torque-split, slip-target and brake-blending strategies will bank an advantage before anyone turns a wheel in anger, and those strategies get tuned by drivers who can articulate what a control map feels like at the limit rather than just reporting understeer. Buemi does exactly that for a living twice over. He is Red Bull Racing’s simulator driver, and he has spent the past two years feeding back on the energy-management side of F1’s 2026 rules reset. Envision keeping him on the payroll as a development asset is the least sentimental part of this whole announcement.
Eriksson is the colder call
The Buemi news arrived roughly half a day after Envision confirmed Eriksson is also leaving, and his is the harder one to defend on results alone. A Formula E rookie who took a podium in Shanghai in Round 13 and scored steadily either side of it would, in most seasons, be exactly the driver a mid-grid team keeps while it learns a new car. Envision goes into London seventh in the teams’ standings, a long way from the outfit that won the title at this same circuit in Season 9.
Clearing both seats says the team believes its GEN4 problem is not the drivers. It also drops two vacancies into a market where the music is already moving quickly — and Formula E is not the only paddock where seats have been rearranging themselves all year. Whoever Envision signs will arrive with no reference data on a car nobody has raced.
One last night at ExCeL
The timing at least has some shape to it. This weekend is the final Formula E meeting at ExCeL London before the London E-Prix moves to Brands Hatch for Season 13, and Buemi has stood on the London podium in each of the last three seasons. He also has nine drivers still mathematically alive in the title fight around him, which means the farewell will be conducted in traffic rather than in soft focus.
For the record, this is a driver who started the very first Formula E race in Beijing in 2014, won the title in Season 2, and has 14 wins and 36 podiums to his name. Only di Grassi shares that Beijing-to-now lineage, and he has already called time. The GEN3 era is closing out with the last of the originals stepping back at the same moment.
What to actually take from this
If you are a Formula E fan, the useful takeaway is not the nostalgia. It is that GEN4 has already started reshaping the grid before a single race has run: a champion has chosen a factory endurance programme over a 21-race electric calendar, a podium-scoring rookie has been cut loose, and a former teams’ champion has decided that a clean sheet is worth more than continuity. Expect at least one more established name to make the same calculation before December, and watch which teams start hiring for simulator feel rather than raw pace. In a formula where traction control is unlimited, that is where the lap time now lives.
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