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analysis nico mueller Andretti

Andretti's Mueller and Fermine the dream team in Miami's ABB Engineered to Outrun

Analyse 17 Apr. 2025 3 Min

Nico Mueller and his Andretti Formula E team race engineer Bertrand Fermine jumped to the top of the ABB Engineered To Outrun leaderboard at the 2025 Miami E-Prix.

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analysis nico mueller Andretti

The fifth round of the 2024/2025 ABB FIA Formula E World Championship season offered Mueller a timely boost after a tricky start to the campaign for the Andretti driver.

And though Mueller’s leap to fourth was largely down to being a big beneficiary of a host of post-race penalties, it had been a strong recovery race before that anyway.

Miami hadn’t been the smoothest weekend for Mueller, with a wall glance in practice causing damage and a difficult qualifying leaving him 18th on the grid. But when it came to the race itself, Mueller raced well and put sharp strategy choices to good use.

Conscious of how energy restricted the race could be, and starting near the back anyway, Mueller was among the most cautious at the start - even losing a place to Zane Maloney’s Lola-Yamaha on the run to Turn 1. But there would be no prizes for being aggressive at this point, the plan was to save as much energy as possible and attack late on. This also guided the team’s ATTACK MODE strategy, and the judgement of risk vs reward was perfect.

Most opted to leave a single ATTACK MODE activation to the end of the race, but some got too greedy. Mueller and Fermine opted for a simple split of two four-minute activations - using the first to gain ground and get into points contention, without leaving too much to do at the very end. And the way the race played out rewarded that handsomely because a late red flag meant those with too much ATTACK MODE left, couldn’t use all of it.

But before Mueller’s first ATTACK MODE usage came on lap 11 and it really emphasised ‘attack’ as he used the extra power to charge from 19th to the lead of the E-Prix - it was only for a lap, but it was a grand peak, and even though he inevitably slipped back thereafter as the respective strategies played out, he still settled down into points contention at the foot of the top 10 (despite getting smacked into by Jean-Eric Vergne’s DS Penske at the chicane at one stage).

Mueller was 10th by the time the race-changing red flag was thrown on lap 20. When the race resumed, he was part of a train of cars that activated ATTACK MODE immediately. This dropped him to 11th, but the combination of extra power and good energy management meant Mueller was in position to fight competitively with the cars around.

He passed Edoardo Mortara on the last lap and although he succumbed to Taylor Barnard’s chasing McLaren soon after, that was one of SIX places Mueller gained after the flag because of various infractions. Mueller crossed the line 10th but was promoted to fourth as Norman Nato, Robin Frijns, Oliver Rowland, Sam Bird and Barnard all received 10-second penalties for Attack Mode misuse while Nick Cassidy got pinged five seconds for exceeding track limits.

There was a degree of fortune here, but Mueller had legitimately put himself into strong points contention - and maybe even had a shot at an unlikely podium at one stage - because their judgement of the risk and reward of how to split the ATTACK MODE usage paid off.
And although Mueller admitted “we struggled a bit for pure pace which would have made that extra bit of difference at the end”, this was more than offset by making the right calls to take advantage of “the usual chaos that Formula E brings”.

SCHEDULE: Where, when and how to watch or stream the 2025 Monaco E-Prix Rounds 6 and 7

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