Engel and Mortara at Venturi

Maro Engel and Edoardo Mortara will participate in the FIA Formula E Championship for the Venturi Formula E Team in Season 4.

That will be the second season for Engel in the Series and the team, after a debut season, which didn’t go too well. He wasn’t classified as a finisher for 6 of the races, and had to skip the Paris round too, due to a date clash with DTM. So it only was enough for 17th in the Championship for the 32 year-old German, who did a full DTM season parallel with his Formula E commitment.

Edoardo Mortara has had a very changeable career during the last 12 months. The double Macau Formula 3 Championship and Formula 3 Euro Series Champion from 2010 was lucky to get hired as works driver for Audi Sport following that, and drove 6 seasons for the German brand in DTM, and selected GT race around the world.

However, there were tensions between him and the team during the whole 2016 season, which ended up in the switch to Mercedes. In fact, he was battling Mercedes in the fight for the Championship with Audi Sport, but ended up finishing second. Right after the season finale, Mercedes announced his arrival at the team in 2017. He still remained Audi Sport works driver until 31 December, so he had to only follow the first DTM tests in November 2016 from the sidelines – while he was sent to Macau to try and beat Mercedes in the FIA GT World Cup. Throughout the 2017 season, he has been driving for Mercedes-AMG in DTM, but has also done some GT races, and won one round of the ADAC GT Masters for BWT Mücke Motorsport.

Mortara was behind the wheel of the Venturi VM200-FE-03 racer for the first time during the testing in Valencia earlier this month. Engel wasn’t present for those tests, due to being occupied with his own wedding. So from those indications, it wasn’t clear if he would continue or not, but it now turns out that he was actually just being allowed to do his private stuff during that week.

Now it’s only MS&AD Andretti Formula E remaining, regarding full drive line-up announcements. Otherwise all other teams have both their drivers ready for the upcoming FIA Formula E Championship 2017/18, starting in Hong Kong on 2 December.