Robin Frijns cut a much more relaxed and affable figure in the Valencia paddock last week compared to the tired and dejected figure we saw in the second half of the 2022 Formula E season.
A fractious end to his four-season stint at Envision played out amid estranged relationships and a slightly bitter ending of what was generally a fruitful partnership – right to the end of their time together.
One of the reasons for that was Frijns’ disappointment on his side of the garage changes part way through the campaign. This unbalanced the Dutch ace who had a good thing going for the majority of his career with the Chinese-owned squad.
Now, he’s with the returning ABT operation, a collection of people he knows intimately from his time with them in DTM that spanned three seasons.
Frijns is candid when he talks to The Race about his new direction, which he chose over a renewed contract with Envision last May.
While he might be more comfortable in the close-knit environs of ABT Cupra, he’s also aware that it won’t be until the second half of the season that the big results are likely to be achievable.
“For sure it’s going to be tough but as we saw, especially last year, you are only as good as the team is, and knowing ABT I came here, I know the mechanics, I know the engineers,” he says.
He knows them very well as his performance engineer, Marc Russouw, also worked with Frijns in DTM.
“If you lose your engineers, especially performance and system engineer, you’re gone,” says Frijns.
“That’s what I saw at Envision last year. My performance engineer left, and then I was struggling a lot.”
Struggling looked to be the order of the day for Frijns, a two-time Formula E winner, last week. But a breakthrough came once he and his ABT Cupra crew got clear laps in after the inevitable bedding-in process that was required after the team came straight from its Kempten base to Spain without even a roll-out run.
“I’m not saying that Mahindra is the best car, far away from that at the moment, and I still think that DS looks very strong, but if we get a half decent package we can do good things through the year,” adds Frijns
“For sure we will struggle at the beginning of the season, for sure we will be off the pace, especially in the race I believe we’ll be off the pace, but at least we have the good brains to get things turned around through the year.”
Frijns and team-mate Nico Mueller barely got any running prior to the pre-season Valencia test, even though they attended manufacturer test days with Mahindra, Abt’s ‘mothership’ supplier.
“I did three test days, but in two of them we broke down. So about 20 laps or so,” he rued.
In Valencia, Frijns proved to be one of the quickest in 300kw mode, but “in the background, we still had a lot of issues to sort out.
“We’re far away from race ready. We can do a lap time, probably in Mexico, but in the race, we will struggle a lot because we’re just not on point,” he added.
Gen2 was all about keeping the minimum speed as high as possible, with Gen3 it’s very different.
Frijns describes it as “a bit of a mix of start-stop cornering” and “it veers a lot, but it’s all about the systems which are not really working for us 100% yet”.
Braking is a huge topic for Frijns. Typically, he’s a driver who relies on feeling and reflex. That’s why he has a strong dislike for simulators and if he doesn’t know the brakes and how to naturally feel them the whole corner is gone for him.
“We’ve been working on the brakes for two days now and I get the feel of it, I get the hang of it, I understand a bit more but I’m far away to say we’ve got it sorted. But that’s also related to systems.
“The better the systems the better I can control the car in a way, so we’ll for sure see some cars, I think DS will be one of the first ones that have a very smooth way of driving it.
“We are not far away from that point yet. In Gen2, the drivers can have their input, good drivers can change something and the team can change maybe the bigger part.
“Now it’s a bit of a different kind of mix. It’s more systems related for me. If you don’t get the systems on point, you’re way off.
“You can drive as good as you want, you’re still a second off. I mean that’s what I had on day one of Valencia; I did what I thought was a good lap, and it was a second off and I was ‘what the?’
“Now, we’re improving a lot of things in the car and we’re understanding better, now I wouldn’t say we’re one of the quickest but I really felt competitive from Thursday onwards.”
