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Andrew Forrest has bought the Formula E operation of Penske Autosport, the team Jay Penske founded in 2007 and ran in every season since the electric championship began.
Fortescue, the iron ore company Forrest founded and chairs, will race as Fortescue Zero Racing from the 2026-27 season in partnership with Jaguar. It will be the first team to enter Formula E under an Australian licence.
Penske's position had become difficult. Its manufacturer partner DS Automobiles left after the 2025-26 season, which put the team's future in doubt, and manufacturer backing is what pays for a Formula E entry.
Forrest is not buying a sponsorship. He already supplies much of the championship's technology.
Fortescue bought Williams Advanced Engineering in 2022, the engineering arm of the Williams Formula One team, as part of a commitment to make the mining group carbon neutral by 2030. That business supplies the batteries Formula E runs on, and it was renamed Fortescue Zero in 2024.
Agustin Pichot, who runs Fortescue's growth and energy division, framed the purchase as moving from the pit lane to the grid. Fortescue Zero has been the brains behind some of the technologies powering electric racing for more than a decade, he said, and the company now wants to show it can compete as well.
He was explicit about the purpose. Motorsport is more than a chance to take home a trophy, Pichot said, and is a platform to develop, test and refine technologies that will transform industries beyond racing.
That is the argument for a mining company owning a racing team. Formula E runs to strict energy limits and forces manufacturers to extract more from less, which produces battery and power management technology that transfers to heavy industry, and Forrest has committed Fortescue to eliminating fossil fuels from its own operations.
Nobody knows who will drive. Taylor Barnard, the youngest race winner in the championship's history, has not had his future confirmed, and his teammate Maximilian Gunther has already left for the British team Envision.
The series is changing underneath them. Formula E's new GEN4 car reaches 335 kilometres an hour and accelerates from a standstill to 100 in 1.8 seconds, and qualifying laps are expected to run about ten seconds faster than the outgoing GEN3 Evo.
The 2026-27 championship opens with the Jeddah ePrix on Dec. 18 and 19. Formula E has confirmed it intends to keep starting its season in the Middle East, while several other series have moved events out of the region.
Forrest built Fortescue into one of the largest iron ore producers in the world and has spent the past several years redirecting it toward green energy.
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