The NIO333 Formula E team is adding to its technical team ahead of the new season following a recent mutual parting of ways with engineering partner QEV Technologies.
QEV, the Spanish based engineering specialist which will run its own Extreme E team next year, had a 10% share of NIO333 after joining forces with Lisheng Racing, which acquired the majority of the team in the summer of 2019.
Several engineers, including Joan Orus and Andres Castillo, had moved from the Mahindra team to NIO333 but will now be replaced at the team after they worked their final races with it at Berlin in August.
“We are now working on building the NIO333 team up in a different way here in the UK” :: Christian Silk
The move has been described as “completely amicable” by NIO333 team principal Christian Silk, who took over the day-today running of the team last September.
“We’re building the team for season seven [2020/21],” he told The Race.
“We posted a lot of job adverts, which is no secret, and received a large number of quality applications, which has been really pleasing. We are now filling these positions and growing the team in the UK.
“QEV has been a really good supporter of the team and we’ve enjoyed working with them over the past season.
“We are still very friendly with them and talk regularly, but we are now working on building the NIO333 team up in a different way here in the UK.”
NIO has started testing its 2021 challenger, to be known as the NIO FE-006 car, after beginning the first homologation slot open to it last month.
This included a crash test in Italy earlier this month and then reliability testing before more performance based running began in the UK with Oliver Turvey completing near 400 miles of running at Abingdon Airfield recently.
“We had two really good days last week,” said Silk.
“Obviously, when you first run a new car, you’ve got to make it reliable and it ticked that box. Now we are heavily into the performance side of the development process.”
Turvey is expected to stay with the team for another campaign. It will be his sixth with the outfit, which has gone through several guises since the inaugural campaign in 2014/15 – when it took Nelson Piquet Jr to the title while running as first China Racing then NEXTEV TCR.
It is understood that NIO333 has yet to decide who will be Turvey’s 2021 team-mate, but that Ma Qing Hua and Daniel Abt – who both occupied the seat for parts of last season – are in the running.
