Formula E

Winners and losers from Formula E's thrilling London finale

by Sam Smith, Josh Suttill
11 min read

Formula E's title-deciding London E-Prix provided a fittingly dramatic end to one of the closest title fights in the championship's 10-year history. 

The weekend-long drama produced some obvious winners and losers but there were plenty of others who ended the season on a notable low or high.

Below are Sam Smith and Josh Suttill's picks from the 2024 season finale:

Winner: Pascal Wehrlein

It was interesting how the three real title protagonists handled the championship pressure cooker at the ExCeL. 

Wehrlein was at the cooler end of the spectrum, seemingly immersed in a calm ice bath of psychological strength. And it showed on the track.

Both of his races were moulded by calm communication with his team and elements of his own decision-making (overtaking Mitch Evans on-track on Saturday and taking his tow on Sunday). 

The way Wehrlein executed Saturday’s race to gain the title momentum was crucial, and he never looked like getting flustered, managing his own energy as efficiently as he did his Porsche 99X Electric.

“We had some tough fights, sometimes fairer, sometimes less, that's how it goes but I think overall it has been a very cool season,” said Wehrlein after he'd been crowned champion.

“A lot of drivers were in contention, a lot of different winners as we see very often but again this year it was more than last season.

“I think last season it was a bit more obvious who is quick. And the cool thing is, three drivers pretty close in the last race and we knew whoever would finish in front would win the championship.”

Loser: Jaguar

Photo credit: Emma Ridgeway

Seldom has there been a more confusing scene than witnessing Jaguar attempting to initially celebrate its first world title for 33 years on Sunday evening. 

A mass of emotions couldn't be fused into one appraisal of a season in which the team enjoyed statistically its best-ever campaign. It was rewarded with the teams' title and the manufacturers' trophy, both of which it thoroughly deserved, yet that won’t be the primary memory from London 2024.
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Instead, it will be a picture of strategic confusion and two quietly raging drivers struggling to comprehend how they both missed out on the drivers' title after running 1-2 in the early stages of the final race. 

Ultimately Jaguar got this wrong, which in an overall picture of the 2024 championship is a shame because more often than not it has got it right - until the crunch time of the title fight.

The recriminations may linger for a while on this one, especially via Nick Cassidy and team-mate Evans.

They each have claims of being let down by their team. Yet at the same time that has to be measured in the context of the pressure of the drivers’ title fight, and the intricacies of managing two drivers in the middle of that while ensuring you still take the teams' title.  

On the whole though Jaguar lost out in London from a position of strength when it should have been in charge of its own destiny - or at the very least able to provide a strong and fair platform for two responsible and fair drivers to race it out between themselves.

Was this ultimately a lack of trust in its own drivers playing out in real-time to make sure of the teams' title?

That is open to debate. But the clumsy attempts to choreograph things in the Docklands ended with Jaguar metaphorically slapping itself in the face, leaving the door wide open for Wehrlein to gracefully walk through and stash the big prize for himself.

On the way out of the ExCeL, late on Sunday, several of Jaguar's troops were lugging a case of well-deserved beer back to their hotel. They were justifiably celebrating a brilliant season, but it’ll be one that its drivers will need a good chunk of time to toast readily themselves.

From the team’s perspective, it really should savour the title-winning accomplishment because of the ground-up build of the operation and the fact that Jaguar’s only involvement in motorsport is now through its Formula E set-up.

“We built from a blank sheet of paper, it seemed, to win an incredibly competitive world championship and this is a testament to every single person on the team,” team principal James Barclay told The Race.

“It’s been a really incredible year for us. If you look every season, the points we scored would have won the world championship some time ago, and Porsche have given us a really hard fight.

“I’m so proud of what this team has achieved this year; the car has been phenomenal, the teamwork has been phenomenal, when it comes down to the last race of the season it’s always a bit of jeopardy and we saw that.”

Winner: Oliver Rowland

How tempting it must be for Oliver Rowland to be in a mental wonderland of ‘what ifs’ this Monday.

Finishing 49 points off Wehrlein after missing two races through illness and also losing at least 18 points at Misano back in April (when he suddenly ground to a halt after an energy management disaster) has to tempt the soul into thinking where he might actually have ended up had those two circumstances not occurred.

The London weekend gave us the best and worst of the Nissan driver. A clumsy and needless tete-a-tete with occasional 2024 nemesis Antonio Felix da Costa on Saturday finally knocked him out of a long-shot title crack.

A day later there was the best of 2024-spec Rowland, a driver who looks as if his time in Formula E has at last arrived. Taking attack mode twice early on and forcefully ensuring he lost minimal track time, Rowland became the title protagonists' stalking horse, picking off the leaders and heading for a memorable home win.

He also had time to see the bigger picture of the safety car overtake on Wehrlein too, giving the position back and so avoiding the ire of the stewards.

Two wins in his first season back at Nissan and fourth place in the final standings, contributing all but 26 of the 182 points gained by the team, is way beyond any pre-season expectations.

In appraisal, Rowland rationalised how different his second era at Nissan is, telling The Race: “There's a handful of guys who were here the first time but there's a lot of new people; I don't want to say inexperienced, because they're very experienced in other things, but inexperienced in Formula E.

“It takes time for everybody to gel together and that's what we've done as a team. The future is pretty bright for Nissan.”

Loser: Andretti and Jake Dennis

While Andretti's supplier Porsche romped to drivers' title success, last year's drivers' champion and his team were only really notable in London for the multitude of incidents they were involved in.

It all started with an opening-lap clash with Robin Frijns on Saturday, an incident that was followed by up two further collisions that left Dennis with three penalties.

The only effective use of the rest of Dennis's race was to back up the pack to ensure maximum damage was done to Sacha Fenestraz, who was hoping to nullify a penalty that was going to cost Nissan, Andretti's rival for third in the points. 

In the end it was effective and Fenestraz didn't score but that offered little solace for Dennis, who had to watch on as three other drivers battled over the crown that had now mathematically slipped away from him.

There were plenty of 'Dennis world champion' posters adorning the London ExCeL but he'd have felt anything but that on Sunday when things got even worse with a season-ending crash with Edoardo Mortara.

"Apparently there was some contact made at Turn 2 which then meant Edo couldn’t turn for Turn 3 or something like this," Dennis told The Race. 

"I don’t really know how he picked up front suspension failure, but it was just a bit of an incident, a bit of a strange one, and unfortunately took me out of the race."

The stewards judged it to be Dennis's fault and he accumulated six penalty points for his four London incidents - putting him halfway to a race ban based on one weekend alone.

The fact that Dennis had a clean record pre-London shows how out of character this weekend was.

Perhaps it was simply the unique nature of the track - many other drivers were caught out in dramatic fashion too - but you can't help but feel Dennis and Andretti being in a very different position to 12 months ago played the biggest role in such a wild weekend. Team-mate Norman Nato fared no better with a single point on Saturday after a clash with Fenestraz.

A fresh start when the Gen3 Evo era kicks in can't come soon enough. 

Winner: Mahindra and Abt

A strong end to the season for what had been pretty conclusively Formula E’s most recalcitrant car meant Mahindra deservedly and finally translated a better understanding of its package into solid results.

Nyck de Vries’ fourth and Mortara’s fifth on Saturday was Mahindra’s best combined points haul since the Marrakesh E-Prix in January 2018. In truth, it had been coming with each driver showing on occasion that the pace and efficiency of the Mahindra M10Electro could bring home strong points.

A clean run by both De Vries and Mortara was exactly what was needed for the team, which now says a not-so-fond farewell to its first Gen3 offering before it knuckles down to make the next iteration a car that can get it back into at least podium contention.

It also comes at a critical time as Mahindra board members get ready to make a crucial decision on whether it will go for an extended stay in Formula E beyond 2026.

Abt Cupra was hands down the biggest surprise of the season in the teams' championship, finishing ninth ahead of Mahindra and ERT.

Not a surprise in the sense that it could achieve that because it is a title-winning team with a tight, committed squad of real racers. But more so that it was able to get some extraordinary giant-killing results on such a consistent basis via Nico Mueller.
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The Swiss has to feature in any given top 10 drivers analysis of this season, which is precisely why he has had multiple offers of interest in his services and why he will eventually end up as a Porsche Formula E driver in the near future. 

Again, he was brilliant in London grabbing two well-crafted sixth places to finish a superb season 12th in the points and underline his overachieving two-season stint at Abt, which will now continue its test and development of the Lola-Yamaha package with Lucas di Grassi throughout the summer and autumn periods.

Loser: Antonio Felix da Costa

The momentum that da Costa had bulldozed into his own rollercoaster season ended in London, although to be fair to him his Saturday dismissal into the wall had little to do with his own faltering after Rowland tipped him straight to the scene of the accident.

But on Sunday he just failed to make it into the duels, where he was badly needed by Porsche to both keep it realistically in the teams' title hunt and to aid Wehrlein's successful bid for the drivers' title against the Jaguars.

Da Costa though did have a role to play - although not in the way anyone would have wanted, himself included - when he clipped Nick Cassidy’s tyre and sent his occasional golf buddy out of title contention. 

A tearful da Costa apologised wholeheartedly for the incident afterwards, saying: “The one thing that is breaking my heart at the moment is that I did have a huge influence on Nick’s race, on his outcome.

“The minimal touch that resulted in heartbreak for him when, in that moment, as the race was standing, he was in the best position to take everything. So, I feel horrible.”

Winner: Envision

Envision has recovered some dignity from the last four races of the season after an otherwise difficult campaign underpinned by a damp squib of a title defence. 

Sebastien Buemi and Frijns' efforts in the Portland and London races helped the Jaguar-supplied team leap up the teams' table from eighth to sixth, vaulting McLaren and Maserati MSG. 

It was still a disappointing campaign but the way it concluded might contribute added stability as the team now looks likely to stick with its drivers and strengthen in other areas for next season.

Buemi had a strong weekend with third and fourth, although he was a bit disappointed with his second podium of the season given he'd been in the lead fight earlier in the Saturday race.

“Taking the lead early, I thought that was going to be OK and it was a mistake,” he told The Race. 

“I feel like I'm still maybe not doing a good enough job on strategically knowing exactly what to do. I think with the [lap/energy] target [for Sunday's race], that would have been fine. The target of today, no.”

Frijns meanwhile had a bruising Saturday when he was caught up in the Dennis-activated shunt.

A good recovery, given the circumstances of his resulting hospitalisation, came on Sunday when he qualified fifth and raced to seventh.

Loser: Maserati

Maserati and Maximilian Gunether's 2024 season started so brightly but the results have fallen away badly since his Tokyo win and Misano podium. 

The potential was there in London though. Guenther had a "heartbreaking" gearbox problem on Saturday that cost him second place and then on Sunday, a mystifying lack of pace meant he backslid from the front row. 

Just as he was getting on top of his pace, Guenther, unaware that da Costa in front had a puncture, steamed into the back of the factory Porsche.

It meant Guenther walked away from a weekend empty-handed for only the second time in 2024 and his stint with Maserati ends on a frustrating note.

A new adventure with DS awaits and based on the way Guenther has spearheaded Maserati this year and demonstrated more consistency than ever, you can why he's an attractive replacement for Stoffel Vandoorne.

Jehan Daruvala's rookie Formula E season also ended on a sour note as incidents squandered some rare points-threatening pace.

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