Lucas di Grassi's second place in the Miami E-Prix had all the hallmarks of a once-a-season, giant-killing, flash-in-the-pan epsiode. But a more substantial and meritorious result could be just around the corner for Lola Yamaha Abt.
Lola wasn't taken seriously when it announced it was entering Formula E last year. It wasn't even taken seriously by the promoter when Till Bechtolsheimer first enquired about racing in the world championship in the final weeks of 2023.
That's all changed now. Lola is back and it has a specific vibrancy that it never had even in its most recent heydays of the Martin Birrane era.
That's because Birrane was vehemently against running factory-based operations and he was well entitled to that viewpoint because the very reason that he took over the ailing company in 1998 was that a year earlier its founder Eric Broadley had been seduced - and undone - by a quick and easy route into Formula 1.
That shambles spat Lola out like industry cannon fodder and the whole sorry episode was a ghoulish case study of how not to undertake a racing programme, even to this day.
Bechtolsheimer acquired Lola in early 2022 and he worked his pragmatic and logical ways immediately. There were to be no snap judgements or emotional spending sprees straight off the bat. He surveyed the racing landscape and picked Formula E after meeting Mark Preston and Keith Smout, who were coming straight off a bruising end to the successful Techeetah/DS Techeetah efforts from 2017-22.
At the same time as Bechtolsheimer was anonymously perusing the New York City paddock in July 2022, Thomas Biermeier was readying his Abt troops for a return to a fertile stomping ground too.
Abt got there first but it was a kind of a false start as a hook up with Mahindra proved to be nothing short of a disaster. In the New Year of 2024, two stars became aligned and the Lola-Abt alliance was agreed for the 2024-25 season.
With that came di Grassi. The popular narrative has been that the 2016-17 champion is a bit washed and in a kind of pension-gathering retirement vibe. A heavy points defeat by team-mate Nico Mueller in the 2024 campaign appeared to underline that notion, so why was Lola so keen to keep him?
In June 2024, at a windswept airfield in Northamptonshire, Lola's first turning of a wheel in its third epoch under Bechtolsheimer was taking place as far off the radar as possible.
But The Race was still there to cast an eye over the historic moment. Just before 9am, with only a handful of Abt and Lola mechanics and engineers in attendance, di Grassi started straightline running.
He did it all day. Time and time again. From a humble awning, and with nothing but tepid instant coffee for company, di Grassi was getting stuck into a new project. That's why he is still in Formula E, because he wants it badly enough to be in the middle of an old airfield when he could, if he wanted, be in Monaco with his wife and kids.
Fast-forward nine months and di Grassi stood, bedecked in the Brazilian flag, and surrounded by his kids, on the second rung of the podium at Homestead. From the dusty airfield to second place in Lola's fifth ever Formula E race. Some story.
"It's a huge milestone and we weren't expecting it obviously," said Bechtolsheimer. "This was the first race that we came into with performance in mind. Every race up until now has been about debugging, reliability, getting the basics right.
"We're just at the very beginning of trying to extract the performance out of the package that we've got. And here we are on the podium, so it's really encouraging, it's a huge boost to the whole team."
One of the keys to that Miami success for Lola Yamaha Abt and di Grassi in particular was the clarity of communication between driver and engineer as the red flag (and penalty) chaos ensued.
Di Grassi has worked with Marcus Mickelberger for years at Abt and it's clearly a relationship that pays dividends, especially when the comms between them was "really worked on in lots of key areas", according to sporting manager Frederic Espinos.
It was something that didn't go unnoticed by Bechtolsheimer either.
"There was actually a big focus by the team coming into this race of kind of driving the process, especially around strategy and communication and getting better at that," he said.
"It was a calm and collected discussion; from my side I thought I was about to black out, but the rest of the team were just very professional and gave Lucas the information he needed.
"He knew which cars he didn't have to fight and that he should leave a wide berth because they were going to get a penalty. And he just managed it from there."
Second place and its first 18 points of the season thrust Lola Yamaha Abt above Cupra Kiro and Envision in the teams' standings.
"It's huge and it's such a massive milestone," added Bechtolsheimer.
But racing being as it is, Bechtolsheimer knows that the objective now shifts to bringing home more points on a consistent basis.
"As soon as you get a milestone under your belt, you look at what's next," he said. "From P2 there's not many places to go, to be honest. We'll go back and kind of review what's next. Where can we go from here?
"But none of these changes the fact that we are looking at this as a multi-year campaign. Development for the Gen4 car is already well under way and we announced the extended partnership with Yamaha this weekend, which is a perfect moment to have a result like this.
"We've got very lofty ambitions. But it's a process, a path. It's not about this season. It's about a couple of seasons from now.
“It doesn't change the fact that you want to keep pushing in the here and now as well."
The heroics, the heritage and the champions of Lola's past are respected completely by its new owner, but at the forefront of this vision is what's next.
It's this that's contributing to a fulsome optimistic arc for one of racing's legendary names right now.
