“We had a reasonably good Season 11 but that created an additional appetite because you start to feel that you can get there. So the fact that we can keep the team stable is very strong. We kept everyone in the team, from the mechanics to engineers to drivers, everyone is the same,” Mahindra Racing’s CEO and team principal Frederic Bertrand told HT.
“We hope that it could be a nice advantage to quickly be effective in action. Then you look on the other side of testing in Valencia which was quite encouraging, even if you have to be super careful because testing everyone is playing and trying to hide a little bit his game, maybe also us (laughs).”
In the 11 seasons of Formula E, Mahindra’s best was 2016-17 when they finished third in the championship. They finished fourth in 2017-18 and 2024-25 but fared very poorly in the first two seasons of the Gen3 era when they finished 10th out of 11 teams in both 2022-23 and 2023-24.
Last season, however, Bertrand’s team turned things around with its drivers Nyck de Vries, 2020-21 world champion, and Edoardo Mortara earning five podiums to help Mahindra Racing — the only team that has participated in all 11 seasons of Formula E — finish fourth. But a win still remains elusive with Mahindra’s last victory coming in at the London ePrix in July 2021.
“Season 12 could be quite exciting because all the ingredients are there to do something, probably better than ever. Now, where it will bring us, I don’t know. I definitely hope that we can do better than we did, win races,” said Bertrand, who joined Mahindra in November 2022 from FIA where he was Director of Formula E and Innovative Sport Projects.
“I would really love to hear the (Indian) national anthem because I know that it will make so many people proud that we are raising the car, the Mahindra name and the Indian flag on top of the podium. It is kind of a mission we all have. Reasonably, being on the podium would be much better because P4 was good. It’s all on us to make sure that execution will be totally good so that we don’t have any regrets and that’s the goal.”
The 2025-26 season will be the final season that will see Gen3 cars before the series makes the progression to Gen4 vehicles. The new season will see 17 races — the longest season yet — at 11 different locations.
December 6 will see the first race on the Sao Paulo Street Circuit with the final one scheduled in London on August 16, 2026.
