Rain immediately before the Miami E-Prix sent some Formula E teams and drivers into a headspin over set-up - which didn't just impact Saturday's race order but also had ramifications on the early 2025-26 title fight.
Here's our pick of winners and losers from Formula E's first race visit to the Miami International Autodrome.
Winner: Mitch Evans and Jaguar
After a miserable start to the season, one that resulted in no points from the first two rounds, the need for big performances and big points in Miami was clear. Amid a jungle of challenges, the 'Big Cat' delivered both.
Mitch Evans's awful start to the season was partly recouped with an accomplished win. It was one delivered with such a decisive drive that it was very reminiscent of his 2024 excellence, where he took four wins in a season where he felt he should've been champion.
Evans had scored just two other wins since then. Now this, his first in the US, was a vintage one as he matched patience and assertive moves equally in how he made his way to the front of the field.
The key shining milestone was the fact that Evans secured his 15th Formula E win, taking him top of the pile in terms of career victories. It ensured that Sebastien Buemi's decade-long stint at the top of that totemic hierarchy was over.
Early struggles in free practice had to be smoothed out first. Then Jaguar elected to change Evans's powertrain after the second free practice session.
This was a decisive move, although it was a tight turnaround. But the chance meant Evans felt more comfortable, as it soothed the pain of a car that had Evans complaining of "something weird with the rear axle" that meant "he didn't trust the car" before the change.
Jaguar’s first win of the season not only overturned its poor start, but it also ensured that any doubts about speed were wholly answered.
"The good news is that we know we've got the pace and the performance in the car, which underscores what we've been saying all season," Jaguar team principal Ian James told The Race.
"I'm very pleased overall with what's been achieved, but now there's a long road ahead, so it'll be back to base at the beginning of the week and analysing what we can do to keep improving."
Antonio Felix da Costa was again hard done by, as the faint possibility of a Jaguar 1-2 was ended by Felipe Drugovich's sizeable braking miscalculation at Turn 13.
Da Costa, as philosophical as ever, re-adjusted and came home a battle-scarred eighth, his severely damaged car almost trailing behind his own will to get his first Jaguar points.
"The amount of times I've been in difficult moments like this, I don't let it get me down. But yes, I'm pissed off, I'm angry, I'm sad," da Costa told The Race.
"But life goes on and I try to look at the positives. The team won the race and that was super-important for us."
While da Costa's pragmatic side expressed itself, there was also an earthy realisation that wayward forces have cost him a likely 22 points at least so far this season.
"He [Drugovich] texted me right away and he apologised, and I took it," said da Costa. "I know it's a very easy thing to do, but still we've got to take margins, especially when it's wet like this."
Winner: Felipe Drugovich
The real Drugovich, the one who Andretti was so excited to sign up after his impressive rookie performance in Berlin last summer, truly emerged in Miami.
An excellent series of qualifying laps made him a genuine pole contender and had it not been for a small mistake in the final duel, against Nico Mueller, then he would have comfortably taken his first points for Andretti.
It wasn't to be after a small error, but that seemed insignificant when he immediately pushed through into the lead early in the race. In serious contention for a crack at the win, after a bold early attack put him in an excellent position, Drugovich's superb race reached out for reward.
That it was snatched away - by his own error - was unfortunate. But the reality was that it was all made possible through something "simple" that was discovered in free practice, according to team boss Roger Griffiths.
"It was just a set-up thing that we found, something that wasn't a 'eureka' thing, but it was just a trend that we were following," Griffiths explained.
"It was something that actually worked for him, a relatively minor change, but in the conditions we were running in, it was night and day a difference."
That eventually metamorphosed into a new layer of personal confidence and he wiped the floor with da Costa's Jaguar in the qualifying semi-final. According to Griffiths, "if he would have repeated the lap [in the final] he'd have destroyed Nico" too.
Drugovich's self-confidence is wonderfully potent, but he had to admit his day was "spoiled" by a fourth considerable mistake (his qualifying and race errors in Sao Paulo, and missing his attack mode in Mexico, being the previous ones) in three races...
Loser: also Felipe Drugovich
"I wouldn't call it a stupid mistake from my side, but it was a mistake."
That was Drugovich's slightly cryptic yet candid take on the very public error that wrecked his race and severely compromised da Costa's when in a strong fourth place.
"I just braked a bit later than him, but I didn't outbrake myself. If he wasn't there I would just go really straight," was Drugovich's slightly quirky take on the incident at the Turn 13 hairpin.
"But he was obviously braking a lot earlier and as soon as I got to him, I thought he was going to the inside, so I just aimed to the outside and he just stayed on the outside."
The mistake may have been small, but it had large consequences. That was such a shame, as Drugovich had been one of the stars of the race up to that point.
Griffiths described Drugovich's qualifying as "special" and his race as "very promising" - and was unequivocal in stating that performance was "what we always knew he was capable of".
"He demonstrated it in Berlin [as a stand-in for Mahindra] that he's got the wherewithal to drive a Formula E race."
Drugovich proved this at Miami. The only real tragedy was that his performance was completely annulled by a costly error.
Winner: Porsche
Porsche came to Miami off the back of a poor Mexico City performance, but even after a tricky qualifying for Pascal Wehrlein, one in which he missed the group cut by 0.031s, it was still the works team's single-biggest score since achieving a 41-point haul just down the road at Homestead 10 months ago.
But its 36-point collation, via Mueller's brilliant first Formula E pole position and then a second and third (Mueller from Wehrlein) in the race, helped it surge from fourth to first in the teams' standings. That also comes with a very healthy 27-point lead.
Mueller has fitted in seamlessly at Porsche so far, proving many doubters wrong. Clearly, the more harmonious atmosphere this season with the drivers is paying dividends, even though, remarkably, Porsche has not won a race on the road since Wehrlein took victory in London on his way to the title in July 2024.
Impressive in the way he clawed his way through from the dangers of the midfield, Wehrlein drove a race that extracted the absolute maximum. But it was Mueller who felt like he had really consolidated his standing in the team after a tough Mexico City three weeks ago.
"He was consistent and mentally strong in putting it on pole," team principal Florian Modlinger told The Race.
"How he managed the race was strong. He was not happy in free practice, but we showed that the package was good. But you still need to be spot-on every race day to collect the big points."
Porsche as a collective did this in Miami, showing that, despite a lukewarm start to the season, it is pound-for-pound still a consistently formidable operation.
Loser: Dan Ticktum
You just can't sugar-coat Dan Ticktum's Miami E-Prix.
It was simply horrendous, and one that the man, the enigma and the rent-a-quote himself couldn't mask.
Ticktum's pace was actually strong in both Miami practice sessions. But for qualifying, on a new set of tyres, the grip disappeared seemingly as rapidly as Ticktum's general interest in the whole debacle.
"I've seen discrepancies with Hankook before with this tyre," Ticktum told The Race.
"I had it in Mexico, with no pace in practice. But then it was the other way around with no pace in practice, good in qualifying and then you go from being arguably the fastest car to being half a second off.
"Looking at the data, there's nothing else that can explain it other than tyres with just no pace. That’s not good enough, obviously, from Hankook's side."
Ticktum took the ill-fated gamble in the race that it was going to dry up and gambled on dry-running pressures - a decision that haunted all who took it all afternoon.
"This tyre doesn't work particularly well when it is wet on the right pressures, let alone on the wrong ones. That was it, really. I got lapped around lap 20 and then the race was completely done."
Ticktum added that he "got the risk because obviously with where we were starting, if we just did what everybody else did, I would go back myself".
"I can't blame the team entirely. I have some say in that, but with all the people back at home in mission control and all the radars and everything, I kind of rely on them a bit.
"I did actually ask for more front pressure so I could try and get the fronts in, which they did, but I was still way, way off wet pressures."
This all led to a miserable race. Ticktum's late tyre change was actually peripheral, so his afternoon merely became an extended test session.
It was precisely Cupra Kiro didn't need at its home event, and precisely what Ticktum didn’t need, especially as team-mate Pepe Marti again made the most of his race and brought home a precious two points.
The pressure, therefore, against all expectations, is now clearly on Ticktum. Despite a zero-point tally being largely down to factors outside of his control, he needs big points and he needs them fast.
Ticktum was far from the only one in this race to come unstuck by the conditions and his set-up. But when some decision-making was needed, it appeared he simply wasn't forceful enough to change his own destiny - which, for whatever reason, points to something being fundamentally wrong at Kiro right now.
Winner: Envision
Envision has clearly found a bundle of performance recently, as Sebastien Buemi's Mexico City qualifying and at least part of that race attest.
The fact that Joel Eriksson had by far his strongest Formula E race in Miami as part of an Envision double-points score underlined what a strong start to the season the team has made.
And it was a story framed on an epic scale, especially for Buemi.
Hw was heavily compromised by an eight-place grid penalty for needlessly hitting Edoardo Mortara and then baulking Mortara's team-mate Nyck de Vries in qualifying, as Buemi became a one-man Mahindra wrecking ball. (Although, to be fair to him, his team hardly helped steer him away from such unnecessary misadventures.)
But Buemi's race was very strong, after he and the team elected to use both attack mode hits as late as possible. In fact, Buemi finished the race without using his full allocation because "we misjudged the amount of laps remaining".
That probably cost him a crack at the Mahindras and halted a possible fourth- and fifth-place finish for the two Envision-Jaguars.
Eriksson's Miami banished an insipid Mexico to an archive far, far away. It also marked out the amiable Swede as a dark horse for podiums on occasion this year, something which few in the Formula E paddock though was attainable pre-season.
"[Strategically] we left it a little bit open, to be honest," Eriksson told The Race.
"We were seeing, or reacting a little bit to the guys ahead because it's always a gamble here if you go [attack mode] earlier or after."
Eriksson also had a bit of luck come his way, as a lot of rivals dallied with a second activation, and if there had been a safety car towards the end, it would have exposed him greatly. But there wasn't.
Loser: Stellantis
The Stellantis cars struggled hugely in the damp and never really featured up at the sharp end, other than in free practice.
These were very slim pickings and a rare non-score in Miami meant the Stellantis cars, of Citroën and DS Penske, slumped spectacularly.
That lack of pace, combined with gambles on dry settings for Nick Cassidy and Maximilian Guenther, meant that they were both lapped - the latter in fact a dispiriting twice.
For Cassidy, this was almost a reversal of his winning Mexican weekend in that he was solid in practice and qualifying but much less so in the race - which fell apart alarmingly.
"I was super-happy with my car in qualifying and, to be honest, when I've seen Stellantis's wet performances last year, I was still quite confident for the race," Cassidy, who finished 16th, explained to The Race.
"But as a group, we were pretty shocked, so I just didn't understand it."
The DS Penskes were "never in a sweet spot" in the race, according to deputy team principal Phil Charles.
Taylor Barnard's detached 14th was as good as it got for what has to be considered a candidate for the Stellantis teams' worst-ever combined performance since its had two brands in Formula E, from 2023.
Winner: Mahindra
A second big hit of points for Mahindra in consecutive races, and it was well-deserved.
Boosted up to third position in the teams' standings, this achievement will have been more satisfying in the sense that both drivers actually contributed this time, with De Vries overcoming a tough start to the campaign with a controlled fifth position finish.
Mortara's performance for sixth was as resilient as De Vries's was solid. After Buemi's hit ruined his qualifying, Mortara started only 16th but immediately made his way forward with deft overtaking in the greasy conditions. It was all a gift for his whip-like reflexes.
Mortara looked threatening to De Vries in the closing stages, which no doubt had his team staring at the monitors in angst, fearing a repeat of their opening-corner clash in Sao Paulo that turned stares into grimaces.
"There could have been the possibility to pass Nyck," Mortara told The Race.
"He was the only one that I could realistically overtake and I finished less than one second behind and the others were too far ahead. From there, and because it's the same team, whether we finish fifth or sixth, whether it's me or him, in the end, it doesn’t matter."
Mortara deserves much credit for that attitude and surely will be reimbursed as the season wears on for his foresight and progressive ethics on team work.
Loser: Nissan
What is it with Oliver Rowland and the US? It feels like some kind of hex has been placed upon his broad shoulders.
This is truly a bête noir jurisdiction for the reigning champion, who has not been rewarded with a single point from his seven visits to the country.
By his own admission, Rowland was rubbish at Homestead last season and 2026 offered very little in redress or retribution for that poor form.
Practice was a disaster for Rowland, and he simply never recovered from it. A suspected front tyre issue contributed to him having "zero confidence", meaning that his qualifying laps began "a bit blind", as he acknowledged to The Race.
That resulted in him and the team reaching for the weather radar and not even that was on their side in Miami on Saturday.
"Our radar was looking like it wasn't going to rain much and starting 14th, we don't generally have a good pace in the rain anyway," added Rowland.
"So, it was worth a go for us [to gamble on a dry set-up] because I think in a wet race, even with the right pressures, maybe we'd have finished eighth or ninth, but that would have been it."
Until the track dried a little more in the final laps the pace just wasn’t there, meaning that via misadventure and an inherent lack of pace in slippery conditions, something the Nissan IM02 has always been susceptible to, Rowland and Nissan's day was always doomed.
For Rowland's team-mate, Norman Nato, there was further disappointment after a difficult start to the season. This was despite a good turn of pace in practice and qualifying; he started eighth on the grid, after looking as if he might beat polesitter Mueller in their duel until he out-braked himself at the final corner.
Nato's race prospects went the same way as his team-mate's. That was largely down to a poor weather predictive strategy that majored on poor information that the track would dry much quicker than it did. This led to Nato going for an under-consumption strategy and waiting for the track to come to him. Like any chance of points, it never did.
Nato was far from the only one to be led down this path, and the question after the race was why the team did not split its tyre-pressure gamble a bit.
"Unfortunately, we made the wrong decision and we just paid the price," a dejected Nato told The Race.
Nissan's team boss, Tommaso Volpe, offered more detail: "Regardless of the limitation of the package [in the damp conditions], if we hadn't made operational mistakes we could have scored decent points."
Could was generous. Because at no stage did Nissan actually look like a proposition for anything other than what it got in Miami on Saturday afternoon, which was nothing at all.
Main image: Andreas Biel
