While the headlines of Formula E intra-manufacturer/customer conflict in Rome were taken hands down by the unfortunate tumbling crash in which Jaguar’s 2024 works team-mates all but ended the works Jaguar team and its customer Envision’s 2023 drivers’ title hopes, there was another axis of discord burning away.
Tensions between Porsche and its customer team Andretti have increased in recent months after several heated incidents as Pascal Wehrlein chased the title for the factory and Jake Dennis took command of the championship race for Andretti.
Needle between the two began in last month’s first Jakarta race when Dennis felt he was unfairly blocked by Wehrlein as the Porsche defended a move at a time when Wehrlein’s title prospects were far healthier than now.
Dennis felt then that Wehrlein moved too late for a fair defence of the lead and then said post-race “we can’t protest against them because they also have a Porsche powertrain so yeah…bit ridiculous”.
Wehrlein hit back at those comments at Portland a few weeks later, telling The Race that “in general, I think Andretti and us we definitely have a good collaboration”, but he added that “comments [about whether], ‘we protest our sister team’ doesn’t help”.
“I think it’s not the right approach and not the right attitude,” he added.
While there is no evidence to suggest there is any ‘no protests’ policy formally in place between Porsche and Andretti, Dennis’s comments are known to have raised the hackles of several senior Porsche figures.
Last Sunday’s second Rome E-Prix featured another fraught Andretti vs Porsche episode, although it was initially well hidden within the midfield battles.
It featured Dennis’s team-mate Andre Lotterer holding off both Porsches of Wehrlein and Antonio Felix da Costa, and ended in contact between da Costa and Lotterer.
Lotterer qualified behind both Wehrlein and da Costa but emerged ahead of both after the Porsches took two relatively early attack modes.
The Andretti car then spent six laps ahead of Wehrlein before getting vaulted by the Porsche but Lotterer’s defence against da Costa was much more vigorous.
Lotterer’s final four minutes of 350kW running began on lap 14 and he rejoined from the attack mode activation loop ahead of da Costa.
It was three laps later, just after Lotterer’s boost ended, that da Costa touched Lotterer at Turn 10 and made it through into what was then 10th position, while Lotterer dropped to 12th. The Porsche driver received a reprimand for the contact.
Porsche is known to have been unhappy after the race, feeling that without getting stuck behind Lotterer both its cars could have finished within the top six.
Wehrlein ended up seventh and da Costa 12th with a penalty for a separate clash with Lucas di Grassi, while Lotterer crashed out in a tangle with Nick Cassidy on the last lap.
The Race has listened to both Lotterer and da Costa’s radio transmissions from the race and the conversation between the Andretti driver and his engineer Fabrice Roussel, who like Lotterer is employed by Porsche and seconded to the customer team, is focused upon Wehrlein and da Costa for the majority of the E-Prix.
Andretti team principal Roger Griffiths played down the tension between his team and Porsche, telling The Race last Sunday evening that “in the end we let Pascal go”.
“We were in communication with the Porsche team,” he added.
“We had hoped to let him go a bit earlier but we were also looking at what would that mean for Andre and for a while we would have lost too many spots and we weren’t really prepared to do that.
“We were trying to see if we could let him go on the straight or through the attack zone. An opportunity opened up and we took it as quickly as we could.
“As far as Antonio goes, we felt that was fair game to race.
“We didn’t want to get in the way of Pascal and see what he could do to recover his championship. It was a strong fight.”
Griffiths has often previously argued that it is hard to orchestrate manoeuvres between different teams and reiterated that point of view by saying “as much as you want to do it, you’ve got to be super careful you don’t overly hurt yourself at the same time”.
“We’re also very mindful that we’ve got one car in the lead of the race and we didn’t want to have too much distraction in what we were trying to do mid-pack,” he added.
“I was ever hopeful that we were going to score four or so points with Andre because we got up to eighth and the idea was to sit on Pascal’s gearbox and follow him to the finish but it didn’t work out that way.”
Porsche’s Florian Modlinger described the partnership between Porsche and Andretti as having a “full open transfer incorporation set-up with Andretti, this means everything that we have and they see everything; their race set-ups, their data and so on”.
“For us it’s clear that if Jake wins the championship, we are proud; it’s our 99X Electric who wins the world championship, clearly for the customer team, but it’s our package we developed and we can be proud of,” he said.
Talking specifically about the pressure of the title run-in, Griffiths said that strain has clearly been brewing between the two camps, saying “pressure builds, it depends if you allow it to affect you or not”.
“We try to keep a pretty calm atmosphere in the garage, we have one or two excitable individuals but that’s all part of the fun of being part of an independent team,” he added.
“We’re extremely grateful for the opportunity we have with Porsche. Even though, as we approach the end of the season and potentially we’re trading blows in a title fight, we’ve kept the cooperation up, we still share exactly as we did at the beginning of the season.
“We’re maybe paying even more attention to what each other is doing just to ensure that we’re not missing a trick in either direction, but at the end of the day both cars have got that Porsche emblem on the nose and we’re representing their brand.
“We would hope that they’re as pleased for us as we are for them when they get a good result.”
