Stoffel Vandoorne is looking to bring across his Mercedes experience as he embarks on his fresh challenge with DS Penske.
The Formula E world champion left the Silver Arrows, who become McLaren this year, to take up a new challenge with the French-American outfit. He departs a team that have won successive drivers' and constructors' titles in what was a dominant period.
Prior to that it was the DS outfit who won a hat-trick of titles courtesy of Jean-Eric Vergne and Antonio Felix da Costa. Vandoorne's recent past puts him in an ideal position to assist his new team, who only won one race last term, with his IQ set to compliment the team's brain power.
The Belgian said: "Obviously the whole way of working with Mercedes, when I joined them they really treated the Formula E project as like a small Formula 1 operation so I think I've learned a lot of things in terms of who they operate with the team, but also set-up of the car. These cars are quite similar, yes the powertrains are different, but in terms of general set-up that is quite a lot of similarities.
"So in the end Formula E plays within the small details and having the experience coming from there and discussing with the engineering team here has been very valuable for them to see the operations we were doing, but also for me to understand what this team was doing and take all the good points to put together for the future."
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Motorsport Images / SplashNews.com)Vandoorne's move means that Vergne continues to be teamed up with a fellow world champion having recently working alongside De Costa, who left DS to head to Porsche in the off-season. The world champion only won the one race last term - taking the chequered flag at Monaco.
It was his consistency though that enabled him to hold off Mitch Evans, who stood on the top step of the podium on four occasions, but struggled early in the season and also had reliability issues with his Jaguar.
The ABB FIA Formula E World Championship returns on Saturday 14 January for the Mexico City E-Prix with races across the season live on Channel 4 and Eurosport
