The 2025-26 Formula E champion has scored six points in his electric racing career, but none of them have come in his six races so far with his new team Andretti.
Felipe Drugovich’s points tally is six collected in his first weekend in the series, in Berlin last July, as Mahindra’s stand-in. It was that performance that convinced Andretti team principal Roger Griffiths to go for a new line of attack and pick a rookie, the first time he and the team have taken that route since Oliver Askew improved the 2022 campaign.
This season’s six scoreless races so far have produced plenty of promise, but, unfortunately, no results of note. As a result, Drugovich is pitted against fellow rookie Pepe Marti in the Cupra Kiro, who has taken four top-10s and 19 points so far. So, are alarm bells ringing?
The way they are and maybe it is being analyzed through the lens of Drugovich has gone three seasons without a full racing program after his Formula 2 title success in 2022. That does not mean that Drugovich is rusty, far from it, it’s just that finding clean races where he can build speed is blinded by mistakes.
He’s been faster every time this season, though he’s 5-1 behind teammate Jake Dennis in qualifying. In Miami in January, he led the race confidently and seemed in good shape for the podium at least. But a mistake sent him to work on Antonio Felix da Costa and he came out of contention with a successful result. Was Andretti’s second seat curse rearing its ugly head again?
That hex has affected Askew, Andre Lotterer, Norman Nato and Nico Mueller over the past four seasons to a greater or lesser extent. Including Drugovich’s first six-point streak of the season, their combined totals stand at 142 points in four seasons — an average of more than two points per game. Across the garage, Dennis scored 570 points during that time, an average of nine points per race.
Those numbers can’t be a coincidence, and the team’s lopsided performance from a results standpoint has greatly disappointed Andretti’s senior staff. Is Dennis okay? Is there a problem with the engineering materials? Or is it possible that the terms and annual agreements have a negative effect on drivers of varying experience?
Maybe the answers are still being found this time because Drugovich should have at least 15-20 points on the board right now. However mistakes have thrown him: qualifying in Sao Paulo with an independent shunt; In Mexico City, he failed to hit his method of attacking transponder loops; and the aforementioned ramming of da Costa’s Jaguar in Miami. If you were harsh you would also say that his mistake in the first half in Miami cost him the high position, which a grateful Mueller accepted and used.
There was good luck between these events. Especially in Jeddah, where his race was destroyed in the debris on his radiator, and also in Jarama, when he was put on the wrong tires for qualifying, stopping him at the back of the grid where he was pushed into the strategy game of the first attack.
However, more is expected of Drugovich without the occasional flashbacks. Did you forget Form E? It is not visible. He knew from his tests and his brief appearance in Berlin with Mahindra last summer that this would be a big challenge, and so it proved.
The race at the front, on the tracks he knows – Berlin Tempelhof and Monaco – is important, therefore, and he has two laps in them, something that seemed to work for him in Berlin, the track he has tried before with Maserati in 2024.
The positives for Drugovich are the signs that he has the pace to challenge: a top showing in FP2 at Jarama last month, and his excellent run in Miami.
“P1 to FP2 [in Jarama] and to drive through the field with a lot of confidence was good,” Griffiths tells The Race.
“We are starting to see these things more often and that is encouraging. We hope that we just give one or two races and he puts it all together. Maybe when we go to the Monaco track, where he lives and has raced there many times, it could be a very different story.”
Although no one outside the team knows his contract with Andretti, Drugovich is believed to have two years left. That will provide a point of protection and in a way that is why internal pressure has not yet arrived. But personal pressure and an element of doubt could start to creep in if the series of points continues in the second half of the campaign.
“What we’re starting to see over and over again is what we expected when we found him and hired him,” Griffiths concluded.
However, the rays should be brighter soon if Drugovich is to add valuable points to lead the race and qualify on the front row. It won’t be until then that Andretti’s theory of the so-called curse of the second car is properly framed as anything other than strange, confusing and inexplicable.
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