It feels a long time ago now, but there was a spell when Pascal Wehrlein’s squeals of derision from the cockpit were just as commonplace as a Mitch Evans machine gun-style F-bomb unloading or a brutalist Oliver Rowland takedown of a Formula E opponent.
Not now. There’s a new Wehrlein on the airwaves, one that gives little earache to his lyrically precise Porsche engineer Fabrice Roussel.
Formula E is partly about energy saving, yet Wehrlein extends those skills to his own percentage countdown going on in his brain and in his reflexology at the wheel.
It was a long time ago, too, when The Race used to write opinions on who the real Wehrlein was. An enigma? A fragile prima donna? A great talent but one needing direction?
Maybe he was once a bit of all of those things. Maybe he wasn’t.
It doesn’t matter anymore because what we see now is much more of the real Wehrlein in every sense. Someone who is happy and content. A family man, a dad, and still of course a fantastic racing driver.
It’s all combined to make him a world champion now, and he deserves it. Three wins this season, two podiums and three poles in only half the story. The other half is how he built his campaign - "the real hard work", Porsche Formula E chief Florian Modlinger tells The Race.
"Look back at some seasons and listen to the radios," says Modlinger. "We worked on it. Therefore, I enjoy working with Pascal a lot.
"I’m very hard and direct, but all the feedback he gets he tackles. Listen to season eight [2022] radios and now, it’s a big difference in his approach."
There were threats to the momentum such as clashes at Misano (he broke his front wing on the back of Jean-Eric Vergne's car) and Shanghai (Sam Bird clipped his Porsche and gave him a puncture), which were the only two non-scores of Wehrlein's season.
But they weren’t overtly his fault. Mistakes were at an absolute minimum and that means he was always one of the title favourites. It wasn’t often spectacular but neither were the last two championship-winning seasons from pillars of consistency Stoffel Vandoorne and Jake Dennis.
Wehrlein is clinical when he needs to be and he’s as resourceful as any worthy champion too. Think of the second race at Portland when, in a state of disrepair with a missing front wing assembly, he stayed in the game and even prospered somehow to finish fourth. Others would have let the damage get to them and allowed themselves to doubt a result could come.
Not Wehrlein. Amid the reputation for precision, there is real grit and determination there, too, and he can scrap with the best of them.
The precision impressed Porsche when it signed him from Mahindra in 2020, a time when he was still a bit bruised from his fractious parting with Mercedes and the realisation that his F1 dream had died.
Wehrlein's F1 legacy
Ben Anderson
Wehrlein’s brief Formula 1 career ultimately ran aground because of Force India’s decision to pick Esteban Ocon over him when offered the choice of Mercedes junior drivers to sign for 2017.
At the time, Ocon and Wehrlein were Manor-Mercedes team-mates. Wehrlein was theoretically ahead in the pecking order - having joined the Mercedes scheme a year ahead of Ocon, become the youngest ever DTM champion, and done more than half a season in F1. Both had tested for Force India in 2015 too.
The team gelled better with Ocon, so chose him to replace Renault-bound Nico Hulkenberg. So that question of character, and how a driver communicates and builds bonds with the team around them, was pivotal in Wehrlein’s F1 career trajectory too.
Wehrlein’s ability in F1 was abundantly clear - some of his qualifying laps to get that 2016 Manor out of Q1 were stunning. But ability is only ever one part of the equation and career momentum is as easily lost as gained.
Mercedes rightly thought Wehrlein was plenty good enough to be in F1, but not so good that he required a clear path to the works team. He and Ocon are similar in that way.
They are also similar - as so many ex-F1 drivers in Formula E are too - in that they couldn’t count on private backing to extend their F1 careers.
Mercedes helped place Wehrlein at Sauber instead, and he did well - but as new team boss Fred Vasseur began forging the alliance with Ferrari that would bring generational talent Charles Leclerc into that team, the fact Marcus Ericsson’s Swedish backers were still heavily invested too meant it was always likely to be Wehrlein making way.
Wehrlein was never a Leclerc-level F1 driver, but he was an Ocon-level one - so in a different world perhaps could have won a grand prix and still been scrapping for his place on the grid to this day.
Such is the life of an F1 driver who belongs, but isn’t considered essential. It's to Wehrlein's credit he has rediscovered that vast motorsport world outside of F1 - and made a success of it too.
"When we took him onboard I was already convinced he was one of the most skilful racing drivers you can get," Porsche motorsport boss Thomas Laudenbach tells The Race.
"If you look at his driving style it’s extremely precise, it’s extremely clean, and I think that’s something that helps him here in Formula E. But maybe he still had to grow, he still had to mature.
"He’s another personality today, and I think that’s a result of how we work together. We always try to give him the support, he gives it back to us, something that probably throughout the last years really also did grow.
"To me, he’s a different personality today than he’s been, and therefore probably a more complete racing driver."
This is all evidenced by Wehrlein’s crucial building blocks that he put in place on Saturday in London when he won his third race of the season and avoided getting sucked into a needless shunt with a defensive Evans.
"He tried to stay out of trouble, he saved energy, and he was guided really well by the engineers, but once it came to the point he had to execute, he did it himself," adds Laudenbach.
"You saw that we were running late in taking the attack mode, and we wanted to get him to take the attack mode and he said, 'No, let me get Evans'.
"So, we said, 'Go for it' and he went for it. If it comes to the point where you have to execute, he’s a lot more spot on than I have seen him years ago, and that’s great to watch."
The pressure, too, doesn’t get to Wehrlein anymore. It used to. It wasn’t outwardly visible - more self-contained - but he used to get tense and sometimes self-doubt appeared to kick in. That’s changed.
"For me, the way he deals with pressure is crucial," says Modlinger.
"But this is what I said also on the grid before he started when German TV asked me if it was too much pressure and I said, 'No, because Pascal now handles the higher pressure so well'.
"The better we perform the less pressure there is and my job is to keep the team calm, he needs to stay calm in the car and it was all perfectly executed.
"We actually look for the challenge. It’s motorsport, so you have to be like this."
Formula E is so much a team game and Wehrlein could not have done what he did without the support of a team that includes some seriously strong and unique characters in the shape of Modlinger, team manager James Lindesay, engineer Roussel, chief race engineer Olivier Champenois and team management director Carlo Wiggers.
The fundamental final say on becoming a champion, though, stops at the driver. And Wehrlein earned his trophy wholeheartedly with some individual brilliance.
"In the end you're the person in the car, you can also take the decisions you think would be best for you," Wehrlein explained after clinching the title, pointing to his overtake on Evans on Saturday.
"We're all performing on a really high level; sometimes it goes your way, sometimes it doesn't. And I think this weekend has been favouring us."
It definitely did. But the judgement far outweighed the luck for Wehrlein and Porsche this season, adding a strong seam of authenticity to their combined achievements, of which they should be rightly very proud.
