Formula E's highly touted 2025-26 rookie has scored six points in his nascent electric racing career, but none of them have come in his six races so far with his new team Andretti.

The points Felipe Drugovich has notched up are the six gathered on his first weekend in the series, in Berlin last July, as a stand-in at Mahindra. It was that performance that convinced Andretti team principal Roger Griffiths to go for a new line of attack and pick a rookie, the first time he and the team had taken that path since Oliver Askew's improving but unspectacular 2022 campaign.

This season's six point-less races so far have produced plenty of promise but, crucially, no end result of note. As a consequence, Drugovich is being held up against fellow rookie Pepe Marti at Cupra Kiro, who has taken four top-10 finishes and 19 points in total so far. So, are the alarm bells beginning to ring?

In a way they are and that is probably being scrutinised through the lens of Drugovich having gone three seasons without a full racing programme after his Formula 2 title success in 2022. That's not to say that Drugovich is rusty, far from it, it's just that getting clean races where he can build momentum has been blindsided by errors.

He has been sporadically quick this season, although he is 5-1 down on team-mate Jake Dennis in qualifying. In Miami in January, he'd led the race confidently and seemed well-positioned for a podium at least. But a mistake sent him careering into Antonio Felix da Costa and out of contention with a breakthrough result in sight. Was the Andretti second-seat curse raising its gnarly head again?

That hex has affected Askew, Andre Lotterer, Norman Nato and Nico Mueller in the last four seasons to a greater or lesser extent. Including Drugovich's point-less first six races this season, their collective points tally stands at 142 points across four seasons - at an average of just over two points per race. Across the garage, Dennis has delivered 570 points in that time, at an average of nine points per race.

Those stats just cannot be a complete coincidence and a lopsided team from a results perspective has flummoxed Andretti's senior personnel greatly. Is Dennis that good? Is there an engineering resource issue? Or could it be that circumstance and year-by-year deals are having an adverse effect on drivers of varying experience?

Perhaps the answers are still being found this season because Drugovich ought to have at least 15-20 points on the board by now. Yet mistakes have cost him: in qualifying in Sao Paulo with a self-administered shunt; at Mexico City, failing to hit his attack mode transponder loops; and the aforementioned ramming of da Costa's Jaguar at Miami. If you were being really harsh you'd also say his mistake in sector one at Miami cost him a pole position, which a grateful Mueller instead accepted and capitalised upon.

There has been poor luck in-between these incidents too. Notably in Jeddah, where his race was compromised through debris in his radiator, and then also at Jarama, when he was put on the wrong set of tyres for qualifying, anchoring him down at the back of the grid where he was pushed into an early attack mode strategy gamble.

Still, more has been expected of Drugovich other than occasional flashes that have flickered. Did he underestimate Formula E? Unlikely. He knew from his tests and his fleeting appearance at Berlin with Mahindra last summer that this would be an immense challenge and so it has proved.

The races ahead, at tracks he knows - Berlin Tempelhof and Monaco - are important, then, and he has a double go at them, something which appeared to work for him in Berlin, a track he had tested at before as well with Maserati in 2024.

More positively for Drugovich are the signs that he definitely has the pace to challenge: witness topping FP2 at Jarama last month, and the comfortable way in which he raced in Miami too.

"P1 in FP2 [in Jarama] and driving through the field in a very confident manner was good," Griffiths tells The Race.

"We're starting to see these things more frequently and that's encouraging. Hopefully we just give it another race or two and he puts it all together. Maybe when we go to the Monaco track, where he lives and he's raced there so many times, it could all be a very different story.”

Although no one outside of the team is privy to his actual contract terms with Andretti, Drugovich is believed to have a two-year deal. That will give an element of security and in a sense that's why the internal pressure hasn't come yet. But personal pressure and an element of doubt may start to creep in if the barren streak of points continues into the second half of the campaign.

"What we're starting to see more frequently is what we anticipated when we got him and we hired him," concludes Griffiths.

The sparkles though need to become brighter pretty soon if Drugovich is to add to the milestones of leading a race and qualifying on the front row. It won't be until then that the notion of Andretti's supposed second-car curse is properly put to bed as nothing other than a weird, frustrating and unexplainable anomaly.