Sebastien Buemi has lost his best finish of his miserable 2020/21 Formula E campaign after both Nissan e.dams drivers were disqualified from the first London E-Prix of the weekend for energy overuse.
The 2015/16 champion and 13-time E-Prix winner Buemi is currently sitting down in 20th place in the championship standings, without a race victory or pole position for two years.
He narrowly lost out on a maiden podium finish of the year in the first of two races in London this weekend when Nyck de Vries passed him down the inside of the right-hand Turn 10 hairpin.
Despite pressure from the chasing pack, Buemi was able to hold onto to secure fourth place – what would have been his best result since the final race of last season.
His team-mate Oliver Rowland, who will leave the team at the end of the year, initially finished in 10th place but both drivers were disqualified shortly after the race for exceeding the allocated 47kWh of usable energy.
The usable energy was cut from 52kWh to 48kWh prior to the race due to fears that the race would be flat-out and a further reduction of 1kWh was made following the full course yellow on the opening lap for Alexander Sims’ stricken Mahindra.
“Unfortunately we made a mistake in recalibrating the system for the different energy limit for this race, and this compromised the great race result,” Nissan global motorsport director Tommaso Volpe told The Race.
The Nissan e.dams drivers weren’t the only drivers to exceed their energy use, with Venturi’s Norman Nato dropping out of the points-paying positions on the final lap of the race as he ran out of available energy.
