Maserati's EV Future Gets a Quick Charge at Formula E Opener in Mexico City

• Drivers Edoardo Mortara and Maximilian Günther ready for Saturday’s Hankook Mexico City E-Prix that begins Season 9.

• Maserati GT Folgore Gen3 entry expects to live up to its name, as “folgore” means “lightning” in Italian.

• Team to take “Racing Beyond” motto step farther with tech transfer.

Maserati MSG Racing’s Giovanni Tommaso Sgro orchestrated Thursday’s photo shoot in the paddock at Mexico City’s Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. On the left sat the iconic Italian luxury automaker’s shiny, new Formula E Gen3 race car. On the right shimmered the Gran Turismo Folgore, its soon-to-launch 2024 ground-breaking all-electric street car that’s priced at around $250,000.

As his drivers Edoardo Mortara and Maximilian Günther prepared for Saturday’s Hankook Mexico City E-Prix that kicks off Season 9, Sgro presented a visual capture of “what ‘Race Beyond’ means to us. We've used the term ‘Race Beyond’ because we've always been racing beyond the checkered flag. And I think the electric fleet, the Folgore fleet, is an indication of how we always push the boundaries and we're racing beyond from what we do on track to what we do off-track.”

It's what the other 11 teams set to pursue the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship are trying to do, as well. But for Maserati, the first Italian brand to compete in Formula E, this return to the racetrack for the first time in a dozen years renews the racing spirit that undeniably is in Maserati’s DNA.

Davide Grasso, Maserati’s CEO, looked at it as being “back where we belong as protagonists in the world of racing. We are powered by passion and innovative by nature. We have a long history of world-class excellence in competition, and we are ready to drive performance in the future.”

Srgo said, “For me that is incredible. I don't deny that there's tons of emotion, too. For me sometimes it's also very visible that people get choked up when they work for Maserati, when they talk about Maserati. It's infectious how much this brand really represents for all of us. I won't be able to sleep tonight, because tomorrow will be the first time we're back on track. And that's just going to be a day full of new firsts: when it's the first time the car will come out of the garage to go into the grid the first time, the drivers will get into the car the first time, we’ll complete a race tomorrow as a team. So it's a very exciting moment for all of us. It's going to be an exciting and an emotional day, for sure. For Maserati to be back to racing after so much time with such a rich racing heritage and history, I think we're all very lucky to have this moment happen tomorrow.

“Regardless of one thing I've learned and in testing in Valencia [Spain, late last fall on the Circuit Ricardo Tormo], whether you are a fan of Formula E or you're a fan of Maserati or you even know about Maserati's long racing history, it has left a mark over the last 100 years. So everyone's kind of looking at what it's going to do in Formula E,” he said. “Everyone's going to be interested. Italians, in particular, are interested in the fact that there's an Italian brand, an Italian luxury-automobile brand in the space. So I think that everyone's going to have their eyes on Mexico tomorrow when we race.”

Maserati’s racing debut 96 years ago, in 1926, saw company co-founder Alfieri Maserati drive the Tipo 26 to victory in the Targa Florio, the fabled open-road endurance race in the mountains of Sicily. Thirty-one years later, the iconic Juan Manuel Fangio won the F1 World Championship with Maserati in 1957, capped by his German Grand Prix victory, the last of his career.

The last time Maserati fielded a single-seater was with the 250F of Maria Teresa De Filippis, the first woman to qualify for a Formula 1 Grand Prix. The brand’s most recent appearance on track was with the MC12 limited-production sports car, which won 22 races (including three victories at Belgium’s 24 Hours of Spa) and 14 FIA GT trophies from 2004-2010.

But this leap ahead to the present actually is two leaps, into the future.

Sgro said, “When you're the first in a space, people look at you with a lot of expectations. And we're ready for that. But I think this is the exciting place—we get to race, we get to compete, but we also get to learn and apply innovative technology to what it is that we're doing for the future. We've made our mission to really move with the times, be a leader in the space of electric mobility. And I think it'll be fantastic for audiences in the U.S. and across the globe when they get into an electric car.”