There's still two races to go, but an implosion by Porsche handed the Formula E title to Oliver Rowland one weekend early. And that was just one of the big storylines from the Berlin double-header.
Of course, the title winner has made the headlines, but Sam Smith is on hand to pick out more winners and losers from the penultimate round of the season.
Loser: Porsche
Porsche won’t like ‘losing’ on home ground and in many senses it actually really didn’t in Berlin. A pole and podium (second on Saturday) and an extended teams' and manufacturers' points lead in those title races would suggest a positive weekend.
But that is barely half the story. The rest would be barely believable, unless you were aware of the antipathy between its two star drivers Antonio Felix da Costa and Pascal Wehrlein.
The fractious nature of that relationship was revealed earlier this season by The Race and it has not gotten any better. In fact, it had festered to the point where something cataclysmic happening felt inevitable.
That all played out in the final knockings of free practice on Friday afternoon when Wehrlein pitched da Costa into the wall. For embarrassment levels, this was off the scale, and it underlined the now borderline toxic relationship between the two, which clearly on so many levels can’t continue.
In truth, the team recovered well from this with a second and a third (on the road for da Costa before a penalty for his shunting of Jake Hughes) on Saturday.
A day later, Wehrlein looked like a true man on a mission. His qualifying efforts had his own team purring. His entire range of laps in qualifying and the duels were of the highest quality, one of the real domineering performances in recent Formula E history. It boded very well for the race.
But that turned into foreboding when the team realised that being at the front of the energy-sensitive race was not where they needed to be, even if they had rallying troops as kind of high-speed nightclub bouncers in David Beckmann and Dan Ticktum for protection and strategic tools.
“We prepared the strategy already in advance before the race weekend, if we did not qualify well to sit also in the back and save energy,” Porsche Formula E chief Florian Modlinger told The Race on Sunday evening.
“But when you have four cars in the top five, you try something from the front and you are not risking the fights and the contacts in the midfield. That's it. We tried something, we tried to maybe overdo it and it did not work out. We paid for that; we learned our lesson.”
With some higher than anticipated tyre degradation in the dry, which was exacerbated with such little dry winning prior to Sunday’s race, Wehrlein drifted off into obscurity and cut a very dour figure afterwards.
“I think we were on a different strategy compared to the others, which made us lose a lot of positions during the first attack mode cycle,” Wehrlein told The Race.
“We took the first attack mode of two minutes and I was told that something would happen, which didn't happen. The two minutes then resulted in losing a lot of positions, while the others were in four minutes, so dropping down outside of the points.
“Then in the end the pace was just not good enough to make all the positions up again. It was just a bad race in terms of pace and execution.”
Porsche knew it missed a major chance to put the team's title almost out of Nissan’s reach at its home race. Now it has the renowned mad-house London ExCeL races as needless jeopardy.
Winner: Jaguar
If there has been a bigger or more spectacular turnaround in the course of a Formula E season then we need to see documentary evidence.
Leaving Tokyo less than two months ago, the ‘Big Cat’ looked like it had been in an almighty alley scrap. Bruised and battered, it was eighth in the teams’ standings and had accrued 33 points in eight races, or an average of just four points a race.
Worse still, there were reliability issues, with a serious inverter problem, which triggered a tactical decision to replace the components on both cars, necessitating grid penalties.
Five races on from that nadir of Tokyo, Jaguar has scored 104 points and risen from eighth to fourth in the standings. All of a sudden, it has DS Penske well in its sights for what had looked like a highly unlikely third place.
In Berlin both of its drivers were excellent with Mitch Evans completing his mission to salvage something from an otherwise write-off of a season, points-wise at least. He completed a dominant win in the wet on Saturday and then followed it up with a solid fifth on Sunday.
Nick Cassidy had arguably his best overall Formula E weekend. And that’s some accolade, with a stellar rise from dead last (with the emphasis on the dead after a 10-second stop/go penalty for the inverter-related post Jakarta penalty) to fifth place on Saturday. Yes it required some safety car fortune, but if anyone deserved a slice of luck this season it was he.
His second win of the season on Sunday was classic Cassidy and it sparkled in its authoritativeness. Sensing a burn-from-the-stern opportunity, Cassidy himself said that “experience mattered” to “read the race and know when to make your moves, when to save, how aggressive to be”.
With it he's moved into the top six points positions in the points standing. Barely believable, considering his first six races brought 10 points. He even has a real crack at second position behind champion Rowland now.
Winner: Oliver Rowland
Oliver Rowland, world champion.
That has felt possible if not likely for a few months now. Yet the fear was real that an awkward stumble over the line, instead of a skip and a flourish, might be on the cards.
It seemed especially so on Saturday evening as Rowland clumsily lurched into Stoffel Vandoorne’s Maserati and abseiled down the order amid a time penalty, with a grid sanction for Sunday’s action to boot.
Was this the dreaded YIPS, the syndrome golfers get when a routine putt becomes a wobbly under-hit or over-hit into a gaping bunker?
The Race detailed this bluntly, something that Rowland digested himself on Saturday night, saying that on the way to sealing the title on Sunday that he knew he had “more energy than most of the people around me, so I decided to bolt to the front, knowing that the guys with a lot more energy would probably come anyway, but at least I was out of the trouble at that point. Like you wrote yesterday! I was thinking about that in the race".
Always one for having multiple channels playing in his head, like some highly programmed human remote control, he was able to tune in to a bit of mild criticism, not only stoke his fire but also make sure it didn’t rage out of control.
When it mattered, the early-season Rowland was back and he was glowing red hot. Assertive, precise and clinical, he made his moves as sharp as his elbows and moved forward into fourth position.
With nearest rival Wehrlein floundering, the 12 points was four more than he needed to ringfence the title and the many accolades that were rightly bestowed upon him.
Loser: Kiro
Berlin was a bit of a slap in the face for Formula E’s recently most upwardly mobile team.
Two points for Dan Ticktum’s ninth on Saturday was a poor return for a car that was usually very handy around the quirky airport venue. How they got there was what Ticktum described as a "series of unfortunate events”.
The nub of these was a general traction struggle in the drying conditions and also Ticktum losing momentum when he had to take avoiding action for other incidents. His ninth place was embellished with da Costa’s post-race penalty but in light of his and the Kiro team's recent heroics it all felt a bit flat.
Ticktum should have notched up some big points on Sunday after another stellar qualifying performance meant he pushed Wehrlen all the way in the only duel final of the weekend.
That boded well for the race but, according to Ticktum “we collectively got our strategy wrong, and we went backwards towards the end”.
Ultimately, like Wehrlein’s Porsche they suffered by being at the front for so long and they became cannon-fodder for competitors that were in the energy-saving league behind them.
Beckmann meanwhile was shunted out by Sette Camara while in a decent position on Saturday and then despite a brief period in the lead via his aggressive Guinea-Pig early attack mode strategy, he dropped away with spent energy and finished a lacklustre 17th.
Winner: Jean-Eric Vergne
Vergne has looked a bit out of sorts in some races recently, which is most unlike the usually ultra-reliable and ultra-productive DS Penske ace.
But in classic JEV fashion, just when you start to doubt him, he delivers something special. Hence his recent run of two consecutive retirements was volleyed back with an epic drive from the lower reaches of the grid to his second podium of the season and a fighting third.
Saturday produced more reliability woes for DS Penske when his car suffered a upright king pin failure when he was running third. But bouncing back quickly, Vergne shrugged off some bad luck with the red flag in qualifying to push through from 18th on the grid to third, carving some effortless moves to mirror Cassidy’s run and get track position when he needed after banking big energy in the first phase of the contest.
Winner: Felipe Drugovich
It went relatively under the radar but Drugovich - standing in for Nyck de Vries who was racing in WEC at Interlagos - pulled himself clear from a difficult start to his debut to score some valuable points for Mahindra in its battle for a fourth place finish in this year’s team standings.
The Aston Martin F1 reserve had a team-derived legacy penalty (including a 10-second stop/go) carried over for a gearbox change that exceeded the season allowance.
That dropped Drugovich to the rear of the Saturday grid whatever he did in qualifying, which was cancelled anyway due to the inclement weather.
In the race - his first in a single-seater since 2022 - Drugovich’s stop/go penalty was exacerbated by speeding in the pitlane when he did take it and he then dropped a lap down and was unable to take any benefit from the safety car in the race and ended up a frustrated 17th.
A day later and the Brazilian had a more level playing field to play on. He made the most of it, posting a qualifying time just a couple of tenths off team-mate Edoardo Mortara.
That was in vain as he was given yet another penalty, this time for activating the 4-wheel-drive function in qualifying, for which his lap times were annulled.
But where Drugovich really excelled was in reading the race on Sunday. Despite his inexperience he was able to save energy and time his attacks on opponents almost to perfection.
It got him into a very useful position where, he told The Race, “I think we had a kind of a sniff of the podium there, it was nice, I really enjoyed it".
That was no hyperbole. Drugovich was a real contender, and while he got shuffled down to seventh from that possible podium attack, this was still a very accomplished performance and maybe brief evidence into a strong chance of a race seat in Formula E for 2027.
“It’s a bit of redemption,” he said.
“I've done a few races after F2, and if you count the big races, all the top-level ones, which would have been Le Mans and Daytona, all of them I had some issue or didn't really finish the race,” he told The Race in summary.
“To come here and do this now, I think it's finally breaking the rhythm of bad results. That’s something that I need to be happy with, and even though it's not even close to what I can do and what I hope to do, it's something I need to enjoy.”
Loser: Maserati
Tokyo apart and a few other flashes of pace and points gathering, this has been a wretched season for Maserati MSG. So much so that it feels now, perhaps inevitably, that its off-season confusion and uncertainty is impacting across all areas of its operations more than ever.
That will be addressed in a postseason shake-up via Stellantis as it is likely to introduce a new brand, licence ownership and certainly at least one new driver (Nick Cassidy).
For now, it feels like a team going through motions, which will be tough, especially for the drivers who feel as though they are bearing the brunt of it with technical failures, accidents and no points scoring.
This was again in evidence at Berlin where Jake Hughes and Stoffel Vandoorne were compromised by shunts. Vandoorne via a tardy Oliver Rowland and Hughes’ by a brake issue on Sunday morning.
While that contributed more damage that the team simply cannot afford, it also lost any kind of momentum for positivity, which saw its recent paucity of points stand at just an average of three from the last six races.
Jake Hughes' solitary point on Sunday was a modicum of consolation but in a sense the London E-Prix later this month will both be a kind of hailmary opportunity to at least try and beat Envision and Kiro in a mini-league battle for eighth position in the points standings.
Winner: Jake Dennis
Like Vergne, Andretti’s Dennis came back from a disastrous Saturday when a powertrain fault stranded him on the starting grid causing him to watch forlornly from his pit as the race played out.
A day later he was starting a disappointed 16th yet knowing that the more energy sensitive race held a decent opportunity to end his own poor run since a fourth place in Tokyo.
He confessed that he “didn't quite have the pace in the middle phase of what Nick (Cassidy) had” and therefore had to “just had to consolidate what we were given".
“I think at the end we went attack mode at the right time, but by this point, Nick was just too far ahead,” he added on his way to second.
In Dennis’s almost five full seasons in Formula E, he has always won a race. In London, the scene of two of his six E-Prix wins (in 2021 and 2022) he has one final chance to keep that record intact.
Loser: Lola Yamaha ABT
A weekend in which Lola Yamaha ABT’s fun Superman livery commercial deal stole the early headlines turned into a bit of a nightmare with no points and a large wreck-bill after Lucas di Grassi’s needless crash in free practice.
The team has always known it would have few points scoring possibilities in its first season together and when opportunities would arise, it would have to take them. In Berlin that was the case and it didn’t.
Zane Maloney again drove well but got zero in return other than some renewed confidence that if there is any justice this season he won’t end it with nothing on the table points-wise.
Saturday was spoiled by a full dry set-up gamble that never looked like coming off for either driver.
Sunday started with a bang, when di Grassi inexplicably shunted, triggering a massive effort from the Lola Yamaha ABT team to replace his tub, which they just did in time to start the race.
Di Grassi channelled his inner Lex Luther, in his Frankenstein car, and was flirting with the points until a late race clash lost him momentum and he came home 12th.
Maloney meanwhile, was unfortunate on Sunday when a strong qualifying was ruined by an MCU issue.
Amid the chaos, many chances were missed in Berlin for Lola Yamaha ABT.
