until Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League
Nick Cassidy’s radio anger directed at Envision team-mate Sebastien Buemi during the Berlin double-header weekend was caused by track etiquette in car positioning in the crucial group session.
Cassidy vented in a surreal exchange during Sunday morning practice that saw him message his engineer Robert Sattler, describing Buemi sardonically as “what a good team-mate.”
Cassidy continued to rant, adding: “What is he doing, man? Seriously. The guy, since yesterday, he’s been on drugs.”
“The guy in front of me in the debrief will go ‘ah, yes, Stoffel (Vandoorne), I would be P1 but I got traffic “if my mom was a man, blah-blah-blah, [bleeped out].”
Sattler countered “let’s focus, OK? We can speak about it later.” To which Cassidy retorted “I don’t even want to talk in the debrief. It’ll be one way, and then the report, it’ll be completely one way again.”
The needle started in FP3 this morning when the pair almost tripped over each other during the 30-minute session.
“A bit of driver frustration we’ve seen that before,” Envision managing director Sylvain Filippi said after the incident.
“In a way, when you have the car to win races and championships, the stakes are higher. There’s a bit of frustration sometimes.
“We’ve had it before, it’s our job to calm things down and make sure they are focused on the job. I would much rather that and a quick car than the other way around. So we’ll manage it.
When asked whether it was a long-standing disagreement, Filippi replied: “No not at all the boys get on famously, it’s really all good but when the prize is so near and you can see something really exciting, emotions are a bit higher, it’s normal, you see it in any other sport.
“But it’s our job to make sure it doesn’t harm our performance at the end of the day.”
Ironically the duo were then matched against each other in the final quarter final duel, a contest that Cassidy initially won by 0.050s.
However, this was overturned when Cassidy hit his 350kW mode at the wrong time for his push lap.
“He activated too late,” Filippi confirmed to The Race.
The specific regulation states that ‘the switch to maximum power (350 kW) must be activated during the last sector of the out lap.’
“It was a shame but we are still in a strong position with both cars for the race,” added Filippi.
Cassidy had radioed through to his team on his slowing down lap complaining of an issue he experienced ahead of the lap, saying: “all my controls switched off in Turn 1.
“So maybe I overlapped or did something wrong but all my controls switched off. Halfway through the lap I did a standard and it was a disaster.”
