With six races remaining before he calls time on his Formula One career, Williams F1 driver Felipe Massa has already started looking beyond the end of the 2016 season with an eye to new motor racing opportunities.
The chief executive of Formula E, Alejandro Agag, said that the FIA's electric-powered championship was just one of the options being considered by the 35-year-old Brazilian, who will have made 250 Grand Prix starts by the time he retires.
"I'd love him to come to Formula E," said Agag, who revealed that he'd contacted Massa on social media about the prospect. "I sent him a WhatsApp message and told him we should see other."
But as Agag told Spain's El Confidencial newspaper, it's not up to him to actually put a driver on the starting grid any more than Bernie Ecclestone can directly control who gets a seat in Formula One.
"In fact, the teams themselves choose their own drivers, but I would love it if they called up someone with such obvious quality," he said, adding that Massa was virtually a former world champion after the epically close finish to the 2008 world championship.
But Agag confirmed that Formula E was just one of the options that Massa was currently looking at for next season.
"He said that he's also looking at something in DTM and WEC, but the fact that a driver like him says that he wants to come to Formula E shows that it is a real alternative to the 'big boys.'"
The mention of the possibility of switching to DTM has also attracted interest from that championship, although the Head of DTM for Audi Sport said that any such considerations would have to wait until the current season was over.
“For now, we remain focussed on winning the championship," Dieter Goss told TouringCarTimes.com. "We will then see what we decide for the future, but we won’t make any announcements before the end of the year."
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