When Stoffel Vandoorne swept to the 2022 world championship title with Mercedes, his Formula E move looked like it was going to produce all the top-level success his glittering junior years had promised, and make up for what had been anticipated as being a glorious Formula 1 career collapsing so abruptly.
Mercedes was on its way out of FE as Vandoorne sealed his title, but his new team DS Penske looked like a perfect vehicle for his ambition to match new team-mate Jean-Eric Vergne as a double Formula E champion.
That opportunity - and actually any concept of getting near it - never looked close to coming to fruition over two seasons of toil.
As a result, Vandoorne's reputation as one of Formula E's top drivers deflated somewhat.
But amid another team switch and - perhaps more importantly - the arrival of the revised Gen3 Evo car and a fresh tyre specification, Vandoorne has a chance to reignite his Formula E career and rediscover his winning mentality.
THE NEW TEAM
Having split with DS Penske, he is now at what is notionally a manufacturer in its own right in Maserati, although in reality it is a direct customer of brand sister DS Automobiles.
The Maserati MSG squad is a curiosity in Formula E for many reasons, not least of which is its standing as a kind of 'manufacturer without portfolio'.
It doesn't make its own powertrain but what it lacks in its own technical resources, it makes up for with an engineering spirit that casts it firmly as the underdog - but a winning one, as it's taken a victory in both Gen3 seasons so far with outgoing driver Maximilian Guenther (Vandoorne's DS Penske replacement).
Will this suit a slightly wounded Vandoorne as he joins a team that is in the final reaches of rebuilding and a recent recruitment drive?
Vandoorne hopes so, because he needs some success to come quickly after that brace of lean and fractious seasons in which a pole position in Sao Paulo in March 2023 and a third place in Monaco this April are the only true highlights.
"It's a great opportunity now to kind of hit the reset button and start with a new group of people," Vandoorne tells The Race in his first interview since being announced at Maserati MSG at the end of July.
The ex-F1 driver is also experienced enough to realise that "it's still not going to be a given as I still know that there are areas I have to work on".
His pure speed has never been a question but as he states himself "it's more that in those peloton races that we've seen that I haven't always been able to do the best job".
That fact perplexed many senior figures at DS Penske and it is said that team owner Jay Penske lost patience with Vandoorne after he failed to properly unpick the pack-racing lock, particularly in Berlin and Shanghai this year. In the first race in Berlin and second in Shanghai, he started on the front row but faded to seventh (after contact) and sixth respectively.
DS Penske gave him the occasional metaphorical slap around the face in an effort to get him attuned to a more brutal (Vandoorne would probably say cheap and gnarly) way of racing.
"I'm pretty aware of that and I know exactly what I need to work on," Vandoorne says.
"But I also feel working with a different group of people and having a strong team behind me will probably enable me as well to extract the most out of that."
That’s not any sort of barb at DS Penske, merely a rationale that maybe a combination of changes within his former team and his own shortcomings in being unable to get into the bullying groove of pack races conspired against him somewhat.
Add to that the fact that Vandoorne knows some elements of the Maserati MSG team from being a stablemate at Mercedes when it supplied what was then Venturi across the 2021 and 2022 seasons, and it's essentially a plug-in and play situation.
It will be aided in a peculiarly ironic way by the fact Vandoorne will be working with Vergne's former long-term engineer Thibault Arnal, who moved from DS Penske to join Maserati MSG this summer.
Arnal is one of the most highly rated engineers in the Formula E paddock and came to the series via stints at Arden and Fortec in Formula 3 and Formula 2 before developing a tight working relationship with Vergne, whom he engineered to back-to-back titles in 2018 and 2019.
Arnal knows his own mind and was something of a master at controlling some of Vergne's famed in-car, in-race agitation spikes. So he won't be shy in pushing Vandoorne to channel more positive aggression in the pack racing that will again be seen at some races in the coming season.
"I've had a very good feeling with the team so far and I'm just very excited to get going," said Vandoorne.
"To see how competitive we're going to be is a little bit hard to judge but I think everyone is going to make steps forward.
"Firstly, I'll just look at myself, I'll look at the areas that I have to improve on, and if I manage to put a season together with consistency and without mistakes, then I think that's the maximum we can do and then we'll count the points at the end of the season."
Will Gen3 Evo changes help?
The active element of the front axle - via the spec front powertrain - on the Gen3 cars being switched on for some parts of Formula E races, primarily the launch and attack mode periods, will change the game in the 2024-25 season.
Allied to this is a different spec of Hankook tyre which, although said to still be overly hard, will have quirks and nuances that could help some of the more sensitive drivers on the grid.
Additionally, the new steering damper system that The Race uncovered last month could also affect the feel for some drivers who are known to have heavy steering inputs.
Vandoorne is very much not one of those, being noted as a connoisseur of smooth inputs in general whether steering or throttle.
The changes in feel and performance, particularly from the standpoint of traction, mean attack mode could actually be used as a proactive (attacking) tactic again, having become more like a 'pitstop' in the first part of the Gen3 era that teams are keen to get out of the way because it likely means a loss of track position.
"From the testing that we've done so far, it definitely gives a big benefit, especially on the traction side," says Vandoorne of attack mode in the revised cars.
"So rather than it being a kind of inconvenience over the past couple of seasons, I think it will be really a benefit now to battle against someone that doesn't have the attack mode.
"We will probably see much more overtaking on attack mode. Unless you know everyone is on attack mode, then it will be status quo, let's say.
"But if you're smart and use it at the right time, I think you can make a big difference."
The new Hankooks may actually have the biggest impact.
“They are always a big thing in Formula E in terms of putting them in the right temperature window, especially for qualifying,” said Vandoorne of the tyres.
“So that's going to be one of the key learnings, where if you're on top of that early in the season, you can make an early impression, so I think that's the kind of the key points where we'll spend a lot of time on try to understand it and hopefully have a little bit of a headstart compared to some of our competitors.”
If he can get that headstart, then the star performer of Formula E’s final Gen2 years has a chance to chalk off Gen3 as another anomaly and properly re-establish himself in the Evo era.
