Nissan Formula E Team has retained Sam Bird and Abbi Pulling in its support-driver roster for Formula E Season 13, maintaining continuity as the championship moves to GEN4 machinery.
Nissan announced the appointments on 29 October. Bird will continue as reserve and development driver, while Pulling remains the team's rookie and simulator driver. The pair will support the race line-up of Oliver Rowland and Zane Maloney through simulator sessions, car-development work and event preparation.
Bird brings extensive Formula E race experience to a programme that must translate the new generation's technical package into repeatable track performance. His reserve designation also gives Nissan an experienced replacement option if one of its race drivers becomes unavailable. Pulling's role provides a separate development channel and retains a driver who already understands the team's simulator processes.
The appointments are organisational rather than a change to Nissan's two-car race line-up. MRI has therefore not presented either driver as taking a competition seat. The official release also did not disclose contract lengths, compensation or a guaranteed number of test outings, so those points remain unspecified.
Retaining both drivers reduces the need to rebuild the team's off-track feedback group during a major regulations transition. It also preserves working relationships with Rowland and the wider engineering organisation while Maloney settles into the race operation. Those are practical consequences of the confirmed roles, not claims that Nissan has disclosed a particular performance target for the pair.
The release was identified in a later source sweep but remained within MRI's seven-day publication window. Comparison against existing MRI headlines, source URLs, named entities and event dates found no prior article covering the retained Bird-Pulling support roster.
The article is linked to the exact Nissan Formula E Team MRI profile. That profile does not currently hold an approved official logo. MRI found no explicit permission to reuse a first-party feature image, so no logo or image has been invented or substituted.