STUTTGART, Germany – Mercedes-Benz officials confirmed Wednesday that the brand will conclude its run in ABB FIA Formula E as a team entrant and manufacturer at the end of season eight in August 2022.
Since HWA Racelab first took to the track in season five, laying the foundations for Mercedes’ Formula E entry, the goal has been to create a benchmark team at every level.
The first Mercedes win for Stoffel Vandoorne in the final round of season six was followed by a strong start to season seven, setting up the team’s championship challenge in its second season. That culminated last weekend in Berlin when Nyck de Vries and the Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team became the first all-electric motorsport world champions by winning the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship Drivers’ and Teams’ titles.
Mercedes-Benz made the strategic announcement in late July that the brand will be ready to go all-electric at the end of the decade, where market conditions allow.
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As part of the new strategic direction, the brand has deliberately chosen to shift resources for this accelerated ramp-up of electrification, including the development of three electric-only architectures to be launched in 2025. Therefore, Mercedes will reallocate resource away from its ABB FIA Formula E World Championship program and towards applying the lessons learned in competition to product development in series.
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Moving forward, the company will concentrate its works motorsport activities on Formula 1, reinforcing the sport’s status as the fastest laboratory for developing and proving sustainable and scalable future performance technologies.
“At Mercedes-Benz, we have committed ourselves to fighting climate change at full force in this decade,” said Markus Schäfer, Member of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Mercedes-Benz AG. “This demands the accelerated transformation of our company, products and services towards an emission-free and software-driven future, and to achieve this, we must give full focus to our core activities. In motorsport, Formula E has been a good driver for proving our expertise and establishing our Mercedes-EQ brand, but in future we will keep pushing technological progress – especially on the electric drive side – focusing on Formula One. It is the arena where we constantly test our technology in the most intense competition the automotive world has to offer – and the three-pointed star hardly shines brighter anywhere else. F1 offers rich potential for technology transfer, as we can see in ongoing projects such as the Vision EQXX, and our team and the entire series will achieve net-zero status by the end of the decade.”