Formula E's final season under the Gen3 Evo ruleset kicked off in typically frantic style - even though, driver-wise, the podium took on a familiar look in the end.
But behind Jake Dennis's win and Citroen's first podium there was a wild nature to the race, encapsulated by a massive shunt for one of its debutants.
Jake Dennis
Dennis’ seventh Formula E win was especially satisfying as it was his first genuine pack-racing win, something he acknowledged by joking to The Race that he “usually comes second behind Nick [Cassidy]”.
He was especially impressive in qualifying where he lost out to Pascal Wehrlein but claimed the top start position due to Wehrlein’s three-place grid drop for being the first driver to fall foul of the new Article 23.18 regulation of not wheelspinning or completing ‘burnouts’ in pitlane.
Dennis and his team made good calls in the race and they also made the best of a bit of good fortune with the first safety car deployment for Mortara’s shunted Mahindra. He then kept cool on the restarts to neuter any challenges from Oliver Rowland or the aforementioned Cassidy after the red flag.
“We had a strategy that we wanted to stay out front,” Andretti team boss Roger Griffiths told The Race.
“We didn't want to get swamped into the pack. We could see with the way the attack modes were happening and we had to be a bit careful.
“He [Dennis] was a bit nervous and I think we were all a bit nervous on the restart. But it was perfect. He tucked in behind the safety car and he was really on it.”
Nick Cassidy
Cassidy, Gen3’s acknowledged race-whisperer, left the Valencia test last month confident but tried to “keep a lid on it” because “we had some stuff post-Valencia arriving here where we can really be in the game".
That was validated by a strong free practice session but qualifying saw the momentum unrealised for Cassidy as he a complex brake issue saw “45 bars of brake pressure” meaning that he had “the most sensitive thing you can ever imagine”.
He didn’t take it well and let his team know vehemently over the radio, which in a way seemed to galvanise renewed tenacity in a typically brilliant Cassidy race.
He came through expertly and picked his fights well to grab a debut podium for a delighted Citroen Racing team.
“I think that we can get stronger and stronger but I also don't think that we quite had what the others had,” Cassidy also told The Race.
“Yet we could still put ourselves in the fight for the win. And if we've got the speed and quality, we should be okay.”
Oliver Rowland
The reigning champion was fuming after qualifying when, he told The Race, “we had a bit of a procedural issue on scenarios and legality things, which was just a bit of a mess".
"Obviously, only having one free practice forced us into having to do something that we didn't really want to do, which is something that we've been working on, so we kind of went backwards there," added Rowland.
Rowland also took some blame, too, by saying that “my [qualifying] lap wasn't anything special, so I think I probably deserved fifth. Then, obviously, compounding that with the penalty [for a shunt with Nico Mueller in London in July] is not ideal”. He started the race 13th.
But he then showed more than just flashes of his title year brilliance in the race by steaming through and taking a hard-earned second place via a bit of cunning and lots of good judgement.
His race was also patient before it got sparkier, including contact with team-mate Norman Nato, in which the clearly hacked-off Frenchman came off very much second-best.
“I haven't seen it, and I don't really want to make too much of a comment before I watch it again,” Rowland told The Race.
“My feeling was, I was there, and his car didn't allow me to be there, if that makes sense. But I need to watch it with him, and we need to discuss it with the team and understand what happened.
“I'm not here to fall out with someone.
“It's OK for me, I got the result, but I'm also disappointed for him, nobody wants that.
“We'll analyse it and see what we think afterwards, but from my perspective, I was trying to behave.”
“We want to look at the details because you can read it both ways,” was team principal Tommaso Volpe’s judgement of the incident - which was much more physical than the pair's Shanghai tete-a-tete last May.
“Of course, there will be occasions to discuss at the workshop more in general the way to maximise points together on track.”
Joel Eriksson
Quietly effective.
That’s Joel Eriksson, who was unfancied by many heading into his first full season in Formula E after a few cameo performances for Dragon Racing and Envision prior to his new full-time gig.
He drove a highly mature and efficient race, was strong on energy and got his elbows out to make decisive overtakes when he needed to.
It pleased his team enormously that their new charge came through from a disappointing qualifying, after which he started 18th, to claim six points and his best-ever finish in seventh.
As a means to build towards settling into the Gen3 Evo package, of which the Swede has little practical experience, this was an impressive display and exactly what he needed.
While the only genuine rookie, Pepe Marti, hit the headlines and Andretti’s Felipe Drugovich rode a rollercoaster of a weekend, Eriksson had a clean race in which he led home team-mate Sebastien Buemi to ensure Envision gathered in a solid 10 points to start a campaign in which not many fancy them as outright challengers.
Losers
Mahindra
Photo: Andreas Beil
Mahindra was the talk of the town coming into the season, with many predicting that it would be right at the front and challenging for wins. The first part of that bargain was true in Sao Paulo but the second part evaporated at the first corner in a gnarly fashion.
While Nyck de Vries got away without a penalty for the mess and rejoined, his team-mate Edoardo Mortara, who he hit, didn’t and took an initial 5-second sanction - which was then rescinded later. That wasn’t particularly useful for him though as by that time he’d been unceremoniously shunted into a wall by the wayward Lola of Lucas di Grassi.
De Vries got a puncture from contact and fell to the back of the field. Saving his attack modes the safety car allowed the possibility of getting back in the game, only for the red flag for Marti’s aerobatics to consign him to 10th place and a mere point.
“On the execution level, definitely on Nyck's side too many mistakes this weekend,” Mahindra team boss Frederic Bertrand told The Race about de Vries' error at T1.
“He saw an opportunity at the start taking a position which is a bit better but was not necessary - because we know that in such a race taking so much risk at the beginning is just opening more problems.”
Bertrand added that the only “good thing” was that “it's only the first race of the championship”.
“The bad thing is that we would have loved to start with something a bit more impactful. It's part of the game we are learning every day, but definitely that's a ‘joker’ that we have burned here and we don't have so many if we want to stay able to perform properly on the championship level.”
Cupra Kiro
There was more than just a flat feeling after the race when Marti’s wrecked car was brought back to the pits, and Dan Ticktum picked through the bones of a disastrous race that was ruined by being hit by De Vries at the first corner while in a comfortable second place.
The subsequent puncture for Ticktum and then two penalties for pit infractions ended any hope of a result - and constituted a false start to his fifth Formula E season.
It was a huge shame for him because following an enforced front powertrain change after free practice he rewarded his team's hard work with an excellent P2 on the grid.
While Ticktum was largely the innocent victim, his teammate Marti had largely only himself to blame for the terrifying shunt that he thankfully walked away from.
A chastened Marti told The Race that “as driver coming from F3, F2, even in the virtual safety car, you're 0.0 [on the time delta] or aiming for 0.1 at the end of it. So, you're pushing the limits a lot".
There was some duff information flowing through the paddock and media centre yesterday in relation what drivers are stipulated to achieve when an FCY is deployed. Here are the facts.
As per the drivers' briefing documents signed by all 20 competitors on Friday evening, drivers must adhere to the following, as per event notes 3.1.
‘There will be 3 to 0 countdown by radio from Race Control to Drivers and teams. When the countdown is at 0, the boards and flags will be shown on the track. The maximum time to reduce speed to 50 kph is 5 seconds.’
“What I practised in Valencia and what I practiced in the sim was trying to win the actual full-course yellow kick-in. Obviously, the conditions start before but in the rulebook it says you have to be 50 kph after the countdown. And on my side, I was on course to make it.”
That would have been the case - had two cars not been immediately in front of him. In short, Marti, on course to finish sixth otherwise, was still in F2 mode and not assimilated to his new challenge.
“If there wasn't anyone ahead of me, I wouldn't have crashed, and it would have been legal,” he added.
“So, that's a bit of an unfortunate situation where, obviously, Antonio knows the championship a lot better than I do. He knows there's probably very little gain in pushing that FCY and it was slightly earlier than I anticipated.
“Therefore, Nico went to the left, and it's a straight track. The walls don’t move if you need them to move. It was either go left into the wall and into Nico, go right into Antonio in the wall or try to make it work and maybe they move around.
“Obviously, that didn't happen. I ended up going to the back of them all. I mean, obviously, it was an avoidable contact. But I think my mentality maybe was wrong going into the FCY rather than the actual procedure doing it.”
Marti was hit with four penalty points for the incident and was ordered to start the next race at Mexico City in January from the rear of the grid.
In terms of mitigating circumstances, the one thing that might be proffered was the fact that several teams reported poor radio clarity of race director Marek Hanaczewski’s full course yellow countdown. Irrespective of that, Marti had enough tools visually to complete the order to slow.
As rookie mistakes go this was a big one. But maturely, Marti by and large owned it. It was a very harsh lesson to learn, one that fortunately he was able to walk away from uninjured.
Felipe Drugovich
Photo: Hugo Morales
Drugovich is a kind of winner and loser after a rollercoaster debut that at various stages went from a bit of despair (a qualifying shunt) to tumultuous hope (at one stage a possible second place to team-mate Dennis).
His qualifying mistake was sloppy and costly but the way he came back from it was impressive in the hot house of his home event.
“I think without the red flag, potentially we were looking at a 1-2,” was Griffiths' view.
That was because both of the Andretti Porsches had attack mode when nobody else had that luxury when Mortara parked his bent Mahindra.
But the red flag for the Marti-pocalypse blew any chance of a debut Andretti podium and then a penalty for overtaking Cassidy under FCY in a similar but less spectacular incident to Marti’s meant Drugovich ended up 12th an outside the points.
“He's bitterly disappointed,” Griffiths understated.
“You don't want to say ‘well, better luck next time’ and all that kind of stuff. Because a driver of his calibre and his level of competitiveness doesn't want to hear that. That’s just an excuse. So, for him, he's super disappointed.
“But he drove a really strong race. He drove the race that we asked him to and he managed his energy and his attack modes well.”
Jaguar
Photo: Andreas Beil
At the venue of two previous wins, the Big Cat got its claws clipped at Sao Paulo but it was through very little fault of its own.
Antonio Felix da Costa deserved so much more from a very strong Jaguar debut, in which he told The Race that he was “very happy with how I raced”.
He was a contender throughout but got compromised by the safety car. Then he looked in his mirrors to see “him coming”.
That was Marti, who inflicted a puncture and sundry other damage on Da Costa's Jaguar I-Type7, which meant the Portuguese was wheeled back into his pit for repairs during the red flag stoppage. Unlike F1 that necessitated him dropping down the re-start order and he came in a slightly dejected 11th.
Overall though Da Costa emphasised to The Race that changing manufacturers from Porsche to Jaguar was a step that needs more time for lots of reasons, including how he is adapting to the 4-wheel drive software changes he has to learn from Porsche 99X Electric to Jaguar I-Type7.
“Just to reiterate, it's even difficult for me to follow the pre-race strategy meeting with how we structure our meeting and all that,” he said.
“So even going into the race, my brain's already overloaded with information. So, I guess here my experience comes into play and I'm trying to simplify things and calm things down for myself.
“I was very happy with how my engineer [Kazuto Shiomitsu] ran the race with me. It's his first time, too - and we did almost everything right. We can argue the attack mode laps were a lap late or early and stuff like that. But once the first safety car comes out, that massively compromises my end goal, which was what I was working towards - but I’m very happy with how we've implemented all of it and how we executed our day.”
Mitch Evans had a tougher overall race, suffering several contacts with Buemi - which compromised him severely.
The last of these saw him skate off into the barriers in a shunt which saw an animated verbal exchange between the two in the post-race media pen.
Buemi said of the incident: “He’s coming on attack mode and it's true I don’t have it but he’s trying to pass me on the outside, I stay on the inside.
“I don’t make it easy for him and I don’t let him by, but I’m not sure I need to do so. He touched the dust and he lost the back [end].”
