The Quiet Constant: Sébastien Buemi at 150
There are only two men left on the Formula E grid who can say they were there at the very beginning. One is Lucas di Grassi.
The other, sitting opposite me with the unhurried calm of a driver who has long since stopped needing to prove anything, is Sébastien Buemi. When the lights went out in Beijing in September 2014 and the world’s first all-electric single-seater championship lurched into life, the Swiss was on the grid. This weekend in Berlin, twelve years on, he will line up for his 150th start.
It is a milestone that arrives quietly, in the manner of the man himself. There has been no fanfare, no carefully staged retrospective. Buemi simply turns up, as he always has, and gets on with the job. And yet the numbers make the case for him with a certain unanswerable force: a world championship, fourteen race wins, thirty-six podiums, and a record-equalling Julius Baer Pole Position picked up only weeks ago in Mexico City. He took a podium in Jeddah earlier this season, too. At thirty-seven, in a paddock that increasingly belongs to a younger generation, Buemi is not so much surviving as quietly refusing to fade.
I ask him about the GEN4 car, unveiled to drivers and media only last week. He smiles in the way drivers do when they are trying not to sound too enthusiastic in public.
“I like the look of the GEN4 car,” he says. “We don’t care about the look at the end of the day, but still, you look at the car and it looks nice. It’s big, and I really feel like there’s a lot of performance. So as a driver, it’s very nice to be driving that car. I feel that I’m going to like it.”
That he will be driving it at all is, in itself, a statement. After his victory in Monaco last season, Buemi signed a multi-year extension with Envision Racing, the team where he has rebuilt his reputation as one of the championship’s sharpest operators. The deal said something about the team’s faith in him, and rather more about his own appetite. He is not, as he readily admits, short of options.
Around the paddock, Buemi has long carried the half-affectionate, half-exhausted nickname of “motorsport’s busiest man.” It is well earned. Alongside his Formula E commitments he is the simulator driver for Red Bull Racing in Formula 1, and only a fortnight ago he was part of the Toyota crew that won at Imola in the World Endurance Championship. Few drivers in modern motorsport spread themselves across so many disciplines at the highest level. Fewer still do it well.
But pressed on what comes next, he is candid about the difficulty of the juggling act.
“Of course, with WEC, Red Bull and Formula E, to put it all together is not that simple,” he says. “A lot will depend on performance in general, you have to be good, but also the calendars, as usual.”
Berlin, where he picked up wins at Tempelhof and on the temporary street circuit at Strausberger Platz in 2016, has always been a happy hunting ground. This weekend’s double-header brings a PIT BOOST race on Saturday and a more conventional Sunday encounter, and Buemi has thought carefully about the mechanics of each.
“With PIT BOOST I usually like those races,” he says. “The fact that there is only one ATTACK MODE, even if it’s a bit longer at six minutes, I think the problem is that you need to qualify quite well, because the PIT BOOST races usually have more energy, less saving. With only one ATTACK MODE, it makes it more important to qualify well. The second race, being more traditional, usually allows you, even if you have a great strategy, not to be that fast. Whereas in the first race, you’ve got to have some proper speed, in my opinion.”
It is the answer of a man who has thought about the sport from every angle, which is, of course, exactly what Red Bull are paying him to do. Almost half of the current Formula E grid are understood to be advising Formula 1 teams as the sport prepares for its 2026 regulatory upheaval, a fifty-fifty split between combustion and electrical power that will demand precisely the kind of energy-management instincts Formula E drivers have been honing for over a decade. Buemi’s input has, by his own account, been considerable.
“We’ve been working on the 2026 cars for a very long time, so of course I’ve given my feedback on what I think makes sense and what doesn’t. You have to keep in mind that in F1 the scope to do things is a lot more reduced compared to here. The regulations are a lot tighter and do not allow you to do what you want.
“At the beginning, the learning process was very quick and very big because of my experience. Now I already feel like within the team, and even in F1 generally, people are getting on top of it already, and obviously the input you can bring will reduce. But it’s been interesting, because as you can imagine, with fifty per cent combustion and fifty per cent electric, you rely a lot more on energy management. That will be very important in F1 this year, depending on the track. It’s going to be interesting to see.”
There is something unmistakably Buemi about that final line, measured, faintly understated, the verdict of a man who long ago stopped over-claiming. He is not a driver who deals in hyperbole, and perhaps that is why his longevity has been so easy to take for granted. While others have come and gone, while teams have folded and reformed, while the championship has reinvented itself across four generations of car, Buemi has been the quiet constant: still fast, still sharp, still on the podium, still relevant.
Whatever comes next, and at thirty-seven, with a young family at home and a contract that runs into Formula E’s next chapter, the question is now genuinely open, the milestone in Berlin this weekend deserves to be marked. One hundred and fifty starts is not merely a number. It is the record of a driver who arrived with the championship, grew with it, and, against the odds of a sport that rarely permits anyone to stay too long at the top, is still very much part of its future.
