NIO have announced that they have parted company with Luca Filippi after just one season at the team.
The Italian was a surprise choice for their line-up last season and failed to impress, only scoring one point throughout the year on his debut in Hong Kong.
While the NIO car wasn’t competitive, Filippi failed to get close to team-mate Oliver Turvey, being comfortably outperformed in qualifying and in the race.
Speaking about the decision Team Principal Gerry Hughes mentioned the challenging season Filippi endured, but said that the team decided to drop him as they had ‘bold ambitions’.
Hughes said, “Firstly I would like to take this opportunity to thank Luca for his commitment to the role of race driver with the NIO Formula E Team, something that he undertook with immense dedication and pride, in what proved to be the most competitive season in the championship’s history.
“Whilst it was a challenging inaugural season for Luca, he remained focused and energised and this has certainly helped the team with the initial development of the NIO 004 car over the summer months, whilst Oliver has continued to recover from his hand injury sustained in the penultimate race of Season 4 in NYC.
“However, with Season 5 firmly in our sights and having bold ambitions as NIO’s racing operation, we have decided to make changes to our race driver line-up and as a result we have to say goodbye and good luck to Luca.”
The news comes as a surprise after Filippi had previously indicated that he had a contract in place for the 2018-19 season.
This clearly proved not to be the case however, and NIO will announce their new driver line-up in the coming days.
