During the history of Formula E only four drivers have ever led the drivers’ championship. Three of those are easy to identify: Lucas di Grassi, winner of the first ever race; Nelson Piquet Jr, the inaugural champion; and Sebastien Buemi, the defending champ and current points leader.
But who is the fourth member of this quartet, the bass player if you will? The answer is Nico Prost, who spent three weeks at the top of the charts between March 14 and April 4 during Season 1. Prost shot to the head of the standings with victory in the Miami ePrix, the first of his three Formula E wins.
Those three wins make him – alongside Sam Bird – the third most successful driver in the history of the all-electric racing championship. His career points tally of 262 is only bettered by Buemi and di Grassi, while only his Renault e.dams team-mate Buemi can equal his record of nine front row starting positions.
Not a bad haul for a driver who was still studying at university while most of his peers were out at the track every weekend honing their racecraft and establishing their reputations.
Given that he’s the son of one of the greatest and most famous racing drivers of all time, you would be forgiven for expecting that he would have spent half his childhood hanging around at tracks and garages, but in reality this is far from the case.
“I never saw my dad driving, I was never in the paddock at the race weekend,” he says. “The only time I saw him drive was when they inaugurated the new Mugello when Ferrari bought it and had it completely redone. It was in 1990 and my dad went to the first test and then we went to Maranello. And that was the only time I saw my dad driving in real conditions.
“I remember because they took off the engine cover, which was quite special in the Ferrari, and I went to see him and I put both hands on the radiator and I burnt myself. I ended up in Maranello’s hospital! I started to spend a bit more time when he was at McLaren as a test driver in 1995, then he would take me. He wouldn’t drive too much, it was mainly Mika [Hakkinen] and David [Coulthard] driving, and then when he had the team I went three or four times, but I never spent too much time in the paddock as a kid.”
Instead Prost was excelling in other sports like skiing, football and golf. And it was the latter, combined with his aptitude for mathematics, that led him to making the move to the US aged 17 for a place at Columbia University.
“I was quite a good student at school, and there are very good schools in Switzerland but there’s not much going on, while America was a bit more lively,” he says. “In Europe if you’re good at mathematics that’s all you do, in America you can keep doing other things. I went to one of the best schools in the world, but still you are an athlete for the school and they would organize things so that I could keep training and that I could do my tests normally. In the end I graduated in three years instead of four and I was still very successful in the golf team. You can do both but you need the school to help you, which is really hard to find in Europe.”
Despite his success on the NCAA golf tour, Prost decided to return home and change his focus to a different sport. Ask by dad what present he would like for graduating, he requested a test in a Formula Renault car…
“I think at the beginning he thought I would be very slow, because I’d never driven,” he admits. “I’d been driving go karts, because Jarno Trulli gave me a go kart when I was a bit younger, so I used to train in that thing all the time, but that was my only experience. And I was actually really fast when I did the test, especially for the first day. And then I went to driving school.”
For the next four years as he worked his way up the racing ladder, Prost combined his passion with a day job as a fund manager. But on the advice of his father’s life-long friend Jean-Paul Driot and his then partner at the DAMS team Eric Boullier, he made the decision to fully commit to motor racing and moved into the Spanish F3 championship.
He took one win and fourth in the series during his maiden season and was in the mix for the title in the second before missing out at the final round. During this time he also became part of the Team France set-up in A1GP, which DAMS was running.
The car in that series was based on the old F3000 design that was being used in the Euro 3000 championship. So rather than take the traditional route to F1 by advancing to GP2 (now rebranded as F2), he chose a less obvious option that would also double as a learning experience ahead of a career in A1GP.
He duly won the championship, but his dreams of forging a career in A1GP ended when the championship collapsed on the eve of its fifth season. With no obvious options in single-seaters, Prost accepted an offer to join Speedy Racing in the LMP1 class of the World Endurance Championship. The team would eventual evolve into Rebellion Racing, with whom Prost continues to compete to this day.
However, a return to single seaters was waiting in the wings. When Boullier left DAMS to take up a role at the Lotus Formula 1 team, he invited Prost to take part in a test, which led to a full-time role as a development driver. Eventually Renault took more interest in the team, creating the relationship that ultimately led to Prost being offered the seat when it announced an entry into the FIA Formula E Championship.
However, this wasn’t the only link back to the French manufacturer… In 2009, Prost followed in his father’s wheeltracks and competed in the Andros Trophy ice racing championship. The following season, the Renault-owned Dacia squad paired father and son together and Prost duly won its inaugural all-electric championship.
“I was becoming more and more of a Renault driver,” he says. “I did Ice Racing with them, I did Formula 1 which went very well in 2012/13, and to be honest at my age we were not really looking at Formula 1. But then Renault wanted to do a team and Jean-Paul wanted to do a team and then everything came together very quickly and they asked me if I wanted to drive in Formula E, which was something I was really looking forward to it. Although I must say I was a bit nervous at the time because I hadn’t been racing single seaters for a long time and I wasn’t sure, you know the level of the drivers and the teams, and you know it’s going to be a tough fight. I knew it was going to be hard work but I should go for it.”
It proved to be a great move. Prost was on pole for the first-ever race and was leading heading into the final corner when he and his team-mate at Rebellion, Nick Heidfeld, collided, triggering an enormous crash that went viral around the world.
“[Looking back at it now] I feel sh*t,” he says. “But to be honest I moved, I didn’t see him, if you look everybody has a tendency to move because there is a bump. I think I am one of the only drivers who has ever apologised for doing something wrong, so yeah fortunately in the end it was not bad for Nick, but I apologised and I cannot spend the rest of my life apologising.”
The 10-place penalty he picked up for that incident meant despite scoring back-to-back poles, he started the next race from 11th. During that first season, Prost tended to be a match for his team-mate Buemi. However, since the powertrain technology was opened up for Season 2, he admits he’s not been able to get the cars to work for him.
“I think the first year we were obviously really good, I think the new car didn’t suit my driving style so easily,” he says. “To be honest I had a very difficult start to Season 2, and with reliability problems and I think you can always say if, but if you look at the championship, if I don’t have the car breaking down in the first two races then I am champion!
“I think Seb is much more flamboyant than me and driving races that I would probably never be able to do, but in the end I am always there scoring points. The end of Season 2 was really good with two wins in London and the start to Season 3 has been really good especially in terms of race pace. I think that more and more it’s going to become a series like DTM where it’s the guy that scores all the time who is going to be champion. Being ahead in one race is one thing but being top five in all of them is going to be very difficult.”
A top-10 finish in every race so far in Season 3 has taken Prost to third in points and helped Renault e.dams to amass a very healthy lead in the teams’ championship. A sixth Formula E podium or a fourth career win has eluded him, but with quality of the team, technology and knowledge behind him, surely it’s only a matter of time before this run is ended.