Oliver Rowland left Berlin's Tempelhof airfield with a points haul that has reshaped the 2026 Formula E championship table, the reigning world champion's Nissan team scoring podiums on both days of the German double-header and clawing their way back to the front of the title fight.
The Berlin E-Prix double-header had begun with Porsche on top. Antonio Felix da Costa won Round 7 for the German manufacturer, but as The Race reported, the Stuttgart squad's home race ended with the team having lost the championship lead despite the win. The reason for that swing was Nissan and Rowland.
Rowland's Round 7 podium came in chaotic conditions, with the British driver leading much of the race after coming through from a deep grid slot. "Two cars straight through there for Oliver Rowland. Got significantly more energy, about 3 or 4 percent more than some of the other drivers," Formula E's race commentary noted as the Nissan driver moved up the order. He defended the line at the end against Norman Nato to take the final podium place. Round 7's headline finish, however, came from Rowland's team-mate Nato, who climbed onto the rostrum after a strong run from outside the top 10.
Round 8 then belonged to Mitch Evans, with the Jaguar driver crossing the line to take a record-extending Formula E victory, but Rowland scored points again in a race that was dominated by energy-management questions and a controversial finish. Rowland and the Nissan crew, in clear control of their pit-wall strategy across both Berlin rounds, came away with two podiums in two days, finishing top three on both Saturday and Sunday in their home livery on Tempelhof's polished concrete.
For Nissan, this is a return-to-form moment after a quieter start to the 2026 season than expected from the reigning champion's outfit. Round 7 was, in commentary terms, "a great drive from Dortmund," and the doubleheader as a whole was the cleanest weekend the Nissan technical group has had since the team's title-clinching Berlin win in mid-2025. Rowland's rear-axle traction work in the slow first sector at Tempelhof has been the difference between the Nissan e-4ORCE 06 winning races and finishing fifth all season, and the team's strategists have begun to feel they have understood the car's energy use across the latest software pack.
The 2026 championship picture going into the next round is now intricate. Porsche's da Costa won at home but drops out of the lead. Nissan, with Rowland and Nato, is lifted by a rare double podium. Mitch Evans, with the new Berlin Round 8 win added to his all-time record, is the most efficient races-to-points driver on the grid. McLaren's Sam Bird, Andretti's Jake Dennis, and the Lola-Yamaha-powered ABT-Cupra crew, sitting just outside the top three teams, will arrive at the next round in striking distance.
Rowland himself has been playing the championship long game since the season opener. Nissan kept his car upright in the early rounds when the field had multiple drivers retired, and the team has since pushed an aggressive aero package to extract more single-lap pace without compromising the in-race energy budget that wins races in Formula E.
The next round of the 2026 Formula E season is the next test, with the Tempelhof doubleheader's outcome having confirmed something Nissan has been telling its sponsors for weeks: the e-4ORCE 06 is at last where it should have been at the start of the season, and the man inside the cockpit is once again pulling on the championship rope at the front of the field.
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