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Formula E’s 2023 title battle took a likely decisive twist during a frenetic double-header weekend in Rome.
That came after one of the biggest incidents in the championship’s history on Saturday where thankfully all drivers involved walked away without injury.
That in itself is a victory for everyone but beyond that, there were some clear winners and losers among the field as well within the wider picture this past weekend. Sam Smith makes his picks:
Winners
Jake Dennis
Such has been Dennis’s class in the majority of the 2023 season, the lanky Nuneaton man always felt like the slight title favourite as he arrived in Rome last week.
It could barely have played out much better for Dennis on Sunday with the messy intra-Kiwi collision between Mitch Evans and Nick Cassidy removing his only real competition.
A few seconds after that point Dennis’ slight title favourite moniker glowed red hot and was instantly elevated to strong favourite, and he wasn’t going to pass up on the opportunity of the racing equivalent of an open goal.
But he and the Avalanche Andretti team worked hard for it, negotiating the major bump of a large lap count error on Saturday. That was quickly forgotten and some honed set-up work ahead of and during the final free practice session on Sunday morning bore instant fruit.
His drive to pole position and the win was flawless, and after the race Dennis’s mind wandered a little to the position he will be in next week as he gets ready for his home event at London ExCeL
“This definitely doesn’t change the preparation [for London], we just keep working hard and doing the two sim days like we always do and tick over. Do FP1, FP2, try and qualify at the front,” he told The Race.
That ticking over is only part of his likely title season. The other part is consistently excellent application and execution from driver and team which in all likelihood now will deliver a thoroughly well-deserved world championship.
Nissan
Nissan’s best result in Formula E for almost two years (since Berlin 2021) was ample justification for considering the generally underperforming team of recent seasons to be winners in Rome.
Both Sacha Fenestraz and Norman Nato have proved that they have a fast car over one lap in 2023. Over a race distance has proved to be a very different matter, however.
But the stars aligned on Sunday for Nato, who drove through an excellent strategy to maximise a result that felt it had been coming for a while. Nato was certainly aided by the fact it was a flat-out race but the way he held off a clearly quicker Sam Bird’s Jaguar was solid and impressive.
“The plan was not to take the lead at any point,” Nato told The Race after sealing his best result since his Berlin 2021 victory for Venturi, which was followed by a year without an FE drive before his Nissan deal.
“We were trying to be honest with ourselves and saying that a top five would be a strong result because we know that in the race we don’t have the efficiency to fight with them normally.
“Honestly, I was behind Jake and feeling really comfortable, and I was like, ‘maybe it’s my chance to try to take the lead’ to open a gap, take the attack mode and be in a good position.
“I saw he was lifting really early in this corner to save some energy, so I tried to surprise him, and I decided to go. I saw that he turned a bit tight in a way that my front wing got damaged.
“It was a bit of a scary moment for two laps where the wing was in the air, but in the end it was all good; he got no puncture, I got no more damage than that.”
While there was joy for Nato, there was dejection for Fenestraz, whose Sunday was ruined with a persistent battery-related issue that meant he missed qualifying and then had a dispiriting 16th place.
That came off the back of an equally frustrating Saturday when a possible crack at a podium became wasted when an error was made on the race lap count.
“The FIA added a few laps on and, on the strategy side of our garage, maybe it was misunderstood or miscommunication, purely a mistake. They kind of forgot to tell us, the drivers, to add that lap,” Fenestraz told The Race.
“So of course, that is a game changer in Formula E because the car thinks that you can spend x amount of energy for 25 laps but then you put one extra lap in the system and everything changes.”
Nico Mueller
Mueller scored Abt Cupra’s best result since its troubled return to Formula E earlier this season with a pair of Mahindra-provided Gen3 cars.
Mired in a software issue which wrecked his FP1 session, the start of the Rome weekend seemed like it would be the same sorry 2023 story all over again. But then things changed for Mueller who took a double points score which essentially felt like a double victory for the German team.
Mueller, who had his Portland-damaged tub returned to his pitbox via Dallara just before the race weekend commenced, qualified brilliantly on Saturday morning to start 14th.
The Swiss told The Race that “we didn’t miss the duels by much and were a bit unlucky with the mess of cancelled laps and yellow flags etc, but it was OK actually”.
Mueller managed to keep it clean in the race and made strong progress into the top 10 after the field depleting, red flag-inducing mega-shunt.
Although he got fortunate in firstly avoiding the melee and then inheriting some positions, Mueller’s race strategy was strong and he latched onto the tail of Jean-Eric Vergne and an energy recalibrating Dennis in the final laps.
Despite several moves to clear Vergne, including one spirited attempt at the Marconi Hairpin, Mueller ultimately had to settle for sixth.
“I think pace was actually pretty good, I was surprised, because we didn’t do any real race prep with the missed FP1,” said Mueller.
“It felt OK, honestly I was quite happy with how the car felt in terms of how we compare to the competition usually. We did another step, got a bit closer again, I managed to stay with JEV for pretty much the whole race.
“It would have been nice to get past Jake, for sure, but I think in the end P6 is well deserved.”
Maserati MSG
“For such a disappointing and difficult year, it feels good, finally, to come in the top five,” Edoardo Mortara concluded to The Race after coming in fourth on Sunday afternoon.
The relief was almost palpable for the Swiss/Italian and his Maserati MSG team which has often seemed perplexed, although still always supportive, over its 2022 star driver’s miserable and consistently poor form in 2023.
It was far from a clean weekend for Mortara who made a mistake in free practice but then pulled it together to make the quarter final duels. He was ultimately beaten by a flying Mitch Evans but sixth on the grid was a good start to the day.
Yet it could hardly have ended worse when Mortara T-boned Bird after the Jaguar crashed while in third place. It was an ugly reverse of the Cape Town incident in which Maserati MSG lost its second chassis of the season, now a third was trashed and Mortara’s momentum appeared to have been extinguished.
More exceptional work by Maserati MSG to get Mortara’s spare ready for Sunday was instantly rewarded when Mortara made strong progress through the field after qualifying 10th, which in itself was impressive as he went into the session essentially blind with the newly built-up Maserati Tipo Folgore.
Running ahead of his team-mate Max Guenther, Mortara was able to undercut Sebastien Buemi’s Envision to secure a hard-earned and well-executed fourth.
“I think that it’s a result that should have come before but many things happened in the past races,” reflected Mortara.
“You could see that we were getting more and more competitive, especially from my side of the garage, from Monaco.
“It’s coming at the right time.”
Team-mate Guenther was fast all weekend and took a strong second third place of his season and a fighting sixth on Sunday.
The German again outqualified Mortara both days and despite Mortara’s resurgence on Sunday, he’s currently outscoring his counterpart 101 points to 29.
Dallara/Formula E Spares Department
It cannot be overemphasised just how fortunate Bird, Buemi, Antonio Felix da Costa and Edoardo Mortara were to walk out of their wrecked cars on Saturday afternoon.
Formula E’s biggest-ever shunt played out in appalling violence and while there were elements of luck at play, especially in the Mortara to Bird impact and where the Maserati hit the Jaguar, ultimately the safety standards, crash testing and cockpit protection work by the FIA and its suppliers’ saved drivers from injuries and worse.
The ramifications of that accident will be studied and analysed by the FIA and the manufacturers. Its dynamics might be felt in 2024 and beyond as some circuits may come under the spotlight as the Gen3 cars get quicker, especially if a racier tyre is introduced for the second homologation in 2025.
For now, Dallara, which designs and manufactures the survival cells, and the FIA safety team deserve special credit for ensuring that the accident did not turn into something much more serious.
Losers
Non-Partisan Title Fight Fans
On the second lap of Sunday’s Rome E-Prix the title fight was brewing into a mouth-watering three-way title epic in London in two weeks’ time.
In the blink of an eye that all changed and you could almost hear the groan from the posh seats of Formula E’s executive lounge as Evans made himself a rank outsider and Cassidy’s title quest just slightly less plausible.
For the fans too this was a blow. Such has been the closeness of the racing in 2023 we probably deserved a no-holds-barred battle between 2023’s stand-out performers Cassidy, Dennis and Evans.
That has pretty much been denied now, and while there are still some elements of jeopardy for Dennis, the feeling is that he will reprise Stoffel Vandoorne’s similar position from last summer when he played the percentage game in Seoul to comfortably seal the deal.
Jaguar
How can a race-winning team that won its fourth Rome E-Prix in four years and its third of the 2023 season be considered a loser?
There is some distortion there for sure. But for a team that won on Saturday and got a podium on Sunday, the fact remains that both the drivers and teams’ title fights are now, in all reality, out of reach.
The Rome weekend was almost a perfect microcosm of Jaguar’s season. Impressive pace, mostly the class of the field, just, but then incidents meant the team didn’t maximise the package it had.
Jaguar TCS Racing should not be third in the teams’ standings 35 points adrift of its customer team Envision right now. The points it has lost have mostly been self-inflicted and that will hurt.
Bird’s race one shunt and Evans’ rare misjudgement on Sunday probably cost the Big Cat at least 33 points and a crack at both titles.
In that sense Saturday’s winners are overall Rome weekend losers, and while that may feel harsh, it’s a fair synopsis of Jaguar’s huge ambitions in 2023, which have resulted in it being the ultimate pacesetter more often than not but also a team that can just as easily haemorrhage points.
Porsche
Porsche never really mastered Rome last weekend and the stark upshot of it was more ground lost in the teams’ standings, a 20-point swing and realistically, the final nail hammered into Pascal Wehrlein’s title quest coffin.
A ninth on Saturday and a seventh one day later seemed indicative of Wehrlein’s season, in that he was catching up from generally lacklustre qualifying sessions and then getting caught out by other people’s shunts in the race.
There were elements of bad luck for Wehrlein, particularly on Sunday when he tweaked his hand in the accordion aftermath of the Cassidy and Evans shunt, but ultimately as a title protagonist, Wehrlein shouldn’t have been in the midfield maelstrom in the first place.
Team-mate da Costa got wiped out by an aerobatic Buemi in the red flag-inducing shunt on Saturday and then had brawny bare-knuckle fights with Lucas di Grassi and Andre Lotterer on Sunday, both of which gained him penalties (for di Grassi) and a reprimand (for Lotterer). It marked the second no-score double-header for the 2019-20 champion this season.
McLaren
What happened at McLaren this weekend?
It is a question being asked as much internally as it is externally but the reality is that McLaren seems to be simply treading water at the moment but it is doing so without scoring any points.
The team knows that one point from five races via Jake Hughes and Rene Rast is simply not good enough, especially when held up to the light of supplier Nissan delivering 49 points in that same space of time.
It is far from a good look for the team that showed so much early-season promise with a pole position and a podium. That all seems like a very distant memory right now.
Another moribund performance from McLaren was headlined by technical issues, race incidents and a cloying realisation that there is little to actually fight for, other than bragging rights against its manufacturer supplier Nissan, as it heads to its home race in London.
Mahindra
Mahindra had some really bad weekends in 2023 but Rome was on a different level entirely.
Word was that even one of its manufacturer test days prior to Rome had ended in a catastrophic technical failure, so it came into the weekend in a poor frame of mind to start with.
Forlorn behind the garage meetings between its senior staff, its customer team Abt Cupra and tech partner ZF were a regular feature of the meeting.
There was a false start in the rookie and first free practice sessions when a software issue stopped all four cars from setting representative times. While that was cured and Abt Cupra was able to make progress and collate some points via Mueller, the factory Mahindra team struggled badly.
Further stoppages for both di Grassi and Roberto Merhi were not explained fully to The Race on Sunday but didn’t really have to be as the team notched up its 10th non-score race of the season.
While Merhi parked his car, di Grassi was fed into the barriers by da Costa at Turn 8 on the same lap. It signalled a truly miserable weekend for Mahindra which slipped behind NIO 333 in the teams’ standings.
