If harnessed correctly and if his team ensures he has an effective energy strategy, Jake Dennis could go from dark horse to dead cert for a potential third Formula E race victory in Monaco this Saturday.
The combination of second-year FE racer Dennis, the Avalanche Andretti team and its ex-BMW package has little to show for how rapid it’s been in 2022 so far.
Despite two front row starts and having been – alongside Mercedes customer Venturi – a big thorn in the sides of the works teams, Andretti is only seventh in the teams’ standings and Dennis is down in 10th in the drivers’ points.
Dennis’ pace was largely masked last time out in the two Rome E-Prixs by a combination of slow reaction to Mitch Evans’ pace dictating the lap count and a wrong profile of energy management deployed in the second race.
The Avalanche Andretti team had arrived in the Italian capital having banished the memory of a deflating Mexico City race where it was led down the wrong path from a set-up perspective.
That all came after a spectacular start for Dennis who was arguably the most consistent frontrunner in the opening two races at Diriyah. He took third and fifth places but was a star of qualifying in the first round by claiming a place on the front-row next to polesitter Stoffel Vandoorne.
Similar pace was witnessed in Rome where he recorded the fastest time of the first day in the semi-final duel before again taking the second-placed grid spot.
Now, the team is determined to ensure that it can reap the rewards of these lessons learned to banish the stinging realisation it has scored just one point in the last three races despite having been a frontrunner all year on sheer pace.
“I think, the way the energy deployment profile of how we raced on Sunday at Rome left us exposed to being passed, particularly in the braking zone into Turn 4 and Turn 7,” team principal Roger Griffiths told The Race.
“It was actually very efficient, but it wasn’t the right profile to be in that pack of cars and that time, and it just left us open.
“So, it’s something that we’ve worked on really hard coming out of Rome and identified some things that we need to be focused on and not just to look at what is efficient, but what is raceable too.”
The Rome situation “smarts” according to Griffiths will be useful for this weekend’s Monaco round, where Griffiths is convinced that the team has the potential to fight at the front, considering it had a strong showing with its former charger Maximilian Guenther last season.
A fifth place finish for the German may not have looked too spectacular a result but he was unlucky not to be in the mix for the overall victory battle between Antonio Felix da Costa, Robin Frijns and Mitch Evans who finished 1-2-3 after partaking in thrilling duels.
Guenther ran in third position during the race but was compromised by contact from first Jean-Eric Vergne and then Oliver Rowland’s Nissan.
“Everybody thinks of Monaco, certainly from a Formula 1 perspective, as a slow street circuit, but compared to some of the Formula E tracks it’s actually quite quick,” says Griffiths.
“The super smooth surface puts it almost in a similar category to Valencia, and we’ve seen how strong our car has been there over the last two or three seasons, either in testing or in racing where Jake won last April.
“From our perspective, it does suit our set-up and the way the car behaves. So, I think that’s something which will be really encouraging for us.”
