Abbi Pulling topped the timesheets at Circuito del Jarama during the first-ever all-women’s Formula E test in November 2024. On March 22, the 22-year-old Brit goes back to the same track, this time sharing Nissan’s garage with Formula 2 race winner Victor Martins in the FIA Formula E Rookie Test following the inaugural Madrid E-Prix.
This will be Pulling’s fifth time behind the wheel of the Nissan e-4ORCE 05 and her second outing of the current 2025/26 campaign. She completed the Miami Rookie Free Practice session in January. Between Formula E duties, she’s still racing in the GB3 Championship, entering her second full season after picking up a podium at Brands Hatch in her debut year.
Nissan is the reigning Formula E champion. Oliver Rowland delivered the team’s first Drivers’ World Championship in Season 11, wrapping up the title with two races to spare. The squad Pulling is developing inside is not some midfield project—it’s the operation everyone else is chasing.
That context matters when you look at how team principal Tommaso Volpe frames her trajectory. “Abbi is developing strongly,” he said. “Her impact in preparation for each race event is constantly growing. She is getting more and more comfortable and improving as a Formula E driver.”
Comfortable is a carefully chosen word. It signals consistent seat time, growing trust, and the kind of relationship between driver and team that precedes bigger opportunities. Pulling herself acknowledged she wants to measure her progress against her own Jarama benchmark from 2024.
Martins, 24, brings a different profile entirely. The Frenchman lands in Madrid through Nissan’s collaboration with Alpine Racing, where he’s now an official endurance driver embarking on his maiden World Endurance Championship season. His Formula E pedigree is thin but impressive—he posted the second-fastest time at the Season 9 Rookie Test around Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport Street Circuit back in 2023.
Three seasons of Formula 2 since then have sharpened him considerably: 16 podiums, three victories. He hasn’t driven a Formula E car since Berlin, and he’s never experienced the all-wheel-drive GEN3 Evo machine. “It’s been a while,” Martins admitted, “but I’ll still look to build on my previous time with the team.”
The test day itself is straightforward—two three-hour sessions, morning and afternoon, at the Jarama circuit outside Madrid. But the subtext is anything but routine.
Nissan is the first manufacturer committed to Formula E’s GEN4 era, which runs through 2030. That long-term bet means the team’s development pipeline matters enormously. Every rookie test is an audition, a data-gathering exercise, and a talent evaluation rolled into one. Volpe called it “a great opportunity to keep developing the GEN3 Evo technology since Valencia in pre-season.”
For Martins, this is likely a one-off—a useful day that deepens the Nissan-Alpine relationship while giving him a taste of a different electric racing discipline. His future runs through Le Mans and the WEC grid.
Pulling’s story reads differently. She’s embedded in the team’s simulator program. She’s accumulating real-world laps at an accelerating rate. And she’s doing it inside a championship-winning organization that has already planted its flag years into the future of this series.
The GB3 Championship doesn’t carry the prestige of Formula 2, and Pulling’s single-seater résumé is still building. But Formula E has always operated on a different logic than the traditional open-wheel ladder. Energy management, regenerative braking, and racecraft on tight circuits reward a specific kind of intelligence.
Seat time in the actual car and the simulator can compress timelines that would take years in other series. Nissan isn’t handing out charity drives. Rowland and Norman Nato hold the race seats for Season 12, but the GEN4 era starts fresh.
The team is evaluating who belongs in its future, and every session Pulling completes adds another data point to that conversation. Sunday at Jarama won’t decide anything on its own. But the gap between “rookie test driver” and “race seat contender” is measured in exactly these kinds of days—quiet ones, far from the podium, where the stopwatch does the talking.
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