Maximilian Guenther will replace Stoffel Vandoorne at the DS Penske team in Formula E next season, with Vandoorne potentially heading the other way to race for fellow Stellantis brand Maserati MSG.
The Race can reveal that 27-year-old Guenther has a multi-year deal confirmed with DS Penske and will rejoin the man who first signed him to an FE deal when he was running the Dragon team, Jay Penske.
Guenther who won March’s Tokyo E-Prix for Maserati MSG, has already tested DS's Gen3 Evo test and development car as part of his Maserati role recently. He'll begin additional tests in the coming weeks except this time as team-mate to long-time DS driver Jean-Eric Vergne.
Guenther is known to have informed some senior team members at Maserati MSG of his switch ahead of the London E-Prix finale last weekend, with the deal agreed well in advance of the end of the season.
Maserati MSG’s replacement for Guenther could be Vandoorne, who himself has known for several weeks that his two-year tenure at DS Penske will end after the London races.
The 2022 Formula E world champion had been talking to several teams until earlier this month, including Jaguar customer Envision Racing. But Maserati offers a possibility to stay within the Stellantis framework of brands, with which he also competes in the World Endurance Championship for Peugeot.
Vandoorne though is still understood to have the possibility to switch to Envision, with which he had talks in London last weekend.
Current Maserati MSG driver Jehan Daruvala is still under contract there and has an option to stay on, although this is believed to be highly unlikely as it stands. He could instead be retained as a reserve and development driver.
That means Maserati is expected to announce an all-new driver line-up for the 2024-25 season which will kick-off in Sao Paulo in early December.
The MSG element of the Maserati squad is known to have evaluated several drivers, including current McLaren driver Jake Hughes.
Deputy team principal Cyril Blais told The Race recently that Maserati MSG was evaluating several drivers for next season, saying that “the market is volatile, so we must look at all possibilities".
Blais said called 2024 “a challenging year for lots of reasons" for Maserati MSG, which was only eighth in the teams' championship - 73 of its 81 points coming via Guenther.
“We managed to survive but next season we need to strengthen the team in depth and try to make some leaps forward.”
Formula E’s new odd couple
The pairing of Guenther with double Formula E champion Vergne will create a potent line-up for DS Penske as it aims to get back into the winner’s circle for the first time in almost two years when it starts its 2024-25 campaign.
The French/American alliance took its only win at the Hyderabad E-Prix in February of 2023, and despite being a consistent top six and occasional podium-achieving force, it has never looked like taking the challenge to the Porsche and Jaguar-powered cars at the top.
This contributed to the hiring of former Jaguar technical chief Phil Charles earlier this year, with the British engineer shaking up the structure and dynamic of the team significantly since he joined.
That policy has been a shock in several quarters with some at the team being public in their opposition to the change in direction of a team that has its roots in two former entities – DS Techeetah and Dragon Racing.
Those two combined at the end of 2022 at the advent of the Gen3 era, a time when it was felt that the best elements of each - the dying Techeetah side of that entry and Jay Penske’s ongoing commitment to Formula E - effectively merged.
Despite Guenther having only driven 10 races at the old incarnation of Dragon in 2018-19, Penske maintained a good relationship with him, electing to dispose of Vandoorne to make way for a deal that is expected to run for at least two seasons.
The German now alongside Vergne will make for an intriguing partnership as they are vastly different characters.
Vergne, the canny professional, who has mostly had the better of his team-mates in Formula E, and is still the only double champion in a decade of it, is known for his ultra-methodical and driven work ethic in helping to develop cars and drive teams forward.
Guenther is generally less outwardly vocal, although those who have worked with him closely describe a driver who has grown in confidence and direction within his teams in recent years.
His highlights of two victories and four other podium positions in his two seasons at Maserati MSG were impressive, but a slow and incident-prone start to 2023 and some difficult races this season haven’t completely banished his reputational trait as a sometimes inconsistent performer.
Though that's arguably a harsh conclusion when held up against the light of Formula E’s full-on challenge and notoriously difficult sporting format and the fact that the Maserati MSG team has gone through several changes within its organisation since it metamorphosed from Venturi at the end of 2022.
