Formula E kicks off with Saudi drama
Banned cars, hospitalised drivers and reports of an attempted missile strike stole the headlines from Nyck de Vries after a dramatic season opener
Formula E called its delayed 2021 curtain-raiser the ‘Diriyah E-prix’. But labelling the doubleheader night races on the Riyadh Street Circuit as ‘Motorsport’s Greatest Hits: Volume One’ better reflects events. Mercedes domination, an already vintage overtake, a victorious Sam Bird extending a record, champion team-mates clashing, two terrifying crashes, attempted fisticuffs and a heap of sporting and political controversy all played out in Saudi Arabia. The series employed its usual razzmatazz to emphasise the unpredictability that looks set to ensue this term, with 10 teams eminently capable of winning a race. But come the bitterly cold mediapen session on Friday night, drivers were already batting away premature questions asking if Mercedes’ recent grip on F1 was ready to be transposed to FE.
The group qualifying format, which has the top six drivers in the points head out first on to a green and slippery circuit, goes a long way to preventing a monopoly from any one team or driver. And yet, from the way Nyck de Vries cleaned up in every session aboard his Silver Arrow 02, perhaps those reporters had a point – as well as a headline – to chase. Never before in FE had one driver topped both practice sessions, headed group qualifying and the superpole shootout before never being overtaken in the race to win at a canter.
Tuning into his team radio, the 2019 FIA F2 champion was utterly composed on the way to his maiden series spoils. He was happy with car balance, and keeping on top of a fluctuation between under and overconsuming useable energy. That left plenty of time for the cool Dutch racer to
utter an array of bewildering codes as he relayed frequent sit reps to race engineer Albert Lau: “Kilo-alpha-eight-novembergolf… Kilo-five-alpha-quebec-charlie.”
His impeccable 4.1-second triumph over the customer Mercedes of Venturi Racing ace Edoardo Mortara meant the works team secured back-to-back wins, with teammate Stoffel Vandoorne having scored the manufacturer’s first triumph in the final race of last season.
Technical and operational errors in 2019-20 had hidden the depths of de Vries’s talent, and he was classified an entirely unrepresentative 11th in the final standings. Vandoorne ended up a fortunate and distant second to runaway champion Antonio Felix da Costa. But under the renewable-energypowered LED lights in Saudi, de Vries’s pace and ability shone bright. Team principal
Ian James reckoned his driver was “on fire” when he spoke to Autosport, which wouldn’t be our only chat of the weekend…
In truth, the bulk of the opening 32-lap contest was little better than processional. By FE standards, the elevation changes over the 1.5-mile lap are dramatic. But the fast and flowing sweeps from left to right, combined with dust piling up off line, meant spectacular lunges for position were the preserve of the heavy-braking zone into Turn 18. That was except for Mortara, who executed a breathtaking and millimetre-perfect double overtake.
With the pace of Porsche front-row starter Pascal Wehrlein ailing, Jaguar Racing pilot Mitch Evans was in pursuit down the back straight. Then, in stormed Mortara, sitting on the 35kw power boost provided by one of two four-minute attack-mode activations. He surged past Evans on the right and then darted across, bound for the disappearing gap that split the rear of Wehrlein’s car and Evans’s nosecone. Mortara sliced it to perfection, bagging second place at the flag. Comparisons to the Mika Hakkinen-ricardo Zonta-michael Schumacher sandwich from the 2000 Belgian Grand Prix were well founded.
There was another Spa similarity waiting in the wings. Alex Lynn turned in noticeably early at the first corner as he attempted to defend sixth from Bird, now at Jaguar in the highest-profile FE driver move to date. Bird was left with nowhere to go in most people’s
“IT WAS DONE DELIBERATELY TO SCREW US, WHICH IS NOT ON. HE CAME OUT IN FRONT OF US. HE WAS GOING SLOW”
eyes, not least the stewards’. The pair collided and spun, ending up nose to nose so that Lynn could see exactly what a gesticulating Bird made of his driving.
Suspension busted, Lynn was out on the spot. Bird continued, radioing in that strange noises were coming from his car. Seven laps later he retired in the pits, jumped out of his I-type 5 and stormed down the pitlane to confront Lynn. Choice words were exchanged, but team members were there to intervene and prevent a fully blown copy of the Schumacher-versus-david Coulthard garage tussle from the 1998 Belgian GP.
Bird’s red mist did make way for a cloud with a silver lining. A non-score placed him in group four for qualifying ahead of race two. He would set his first flying lap on asphalt that was nicely rubbered in and ready to offer up lap time. What’s more, with Bird expected to go the distance this season, several of his potential key title rivals were plonked right to the back of the grid. One of them was team-mate Evans.
The stylish Kiwi was every bit da Costa’s main rival for the crown last year, but Jaguar largely rolled over in Berlin without a whimper. Combined with too great a reliance on one driver to do the heavy points lifting, the team finished way down in seventh. To put it another way, its garage was towards the wrong end of the pitlane. So in Diriyah, when Evans emerged for the group one contest, Nissan e.dams had plenty of time to ready Oliver Rowland and release him immediately in front of the Big Cat. The Brit then put in a fairly leisurely preparation lap, premeditated or otherwise, and barely scraped across the line to post a flier in time. Evans, joined by Rene Rast, were victims of fine margins and failed to set a representative effort.
“It was done deliberately to screw us behind, which is not on,” Evans said. “He came out right in front of us. He was going slow in the pits, exiting the pits slow. By the time we got to Turn 5 on the out-lap, we were already behind schedule.”
With Andre Lotterer benched for qualifying after wrecking his Porsche in final practice, the odds for Bird getting pole kept being slashed. Then there was the absence of all Mercedes-propelled cars. In what was, very regrettably, the first of two hideous impacts that left drivers needing precautionary hospital visits, Mortara found himself buried in the Tecpro barrier placed well beyond the runoff for Turn 1. After his smart run to sixth in FP3, he lined up for a practice start. His car never slowed for the corner and he ploughed straight on. The pedal was fully depressed, and yet brake pressure registered zero. “I thought it was pretty much the end for me,” he later said.
As former Audi and NIO 333 driver
Daniel Abt noted on Twitter, it was uncomfortably similar to his Mexico
City crash, when he too needed medical assessment. Fortunately, reports that Mortara was conscious, talking and could
move all his digits arrived before the ambulance had left the paddock.
To his great credit, James was remarkably open. “There are two issues at stake here,” he said. “One is the failure of the frontbrake system for whatever reason that might be. [Two], should the front system go into a failure mode, then a back-up system takes over. What we saw on
Edo’s car is that didn’t happen.”
It was a software issue, and so Mercedes engineers immediately isolated the problem and made the adjustments as necessary. In the meantime, according to the FIA, “the competitor cannot prove to the FIA technical delegate that the car is safe”. The four Mercs (including Venturi’s) were booted out of qualifying. The domination was on ice, and the first major political and sporting spats of the season were now well under way.
The muted upshot was that de Vries, Mortara and Vandoorne weren’t there to breathe down Bird’s neck in qualifying. That said, Envision Virgin Racing’s Robin Frijns picked up the mantle. His Saudi outing had started miserably with a free practice two crash, which tripped a G-sensor and forced Mclaren Applied’s hand to change his car battery. Frijns had to miss qualifying for race one as a result, and then cut his way from last to 17th.
Due to a slash in personnel passes to lower costs and boost travel efficiency in FE, the team’s technical director Chris Gorne was reporting in from the Silverstone base. As has so often been the case over the past 12 months, a videocall came to the rescue.
“We had a Zoom-slash-debrief for two hours together with the team at home in Silverstone to discuss because we needed to change something,” said Frijns. “We couldn’t have another day like we had [on Friday]. It was a drastic change that we did. We went completely in the other [set-up] direction.”
The fix worked devastatingly. Frijns romped to pole by 0.289s, beating the surprising Sergio Sette Camara effort in the outgoing Dragon Penske Autosport machine. Bird, team-mate to Frijns for the previous two seasons, lined up third.
Much like de Vries had done, Frijns contended with energy-management issues but would prove powerless to resist an incisive Bird. Mirroring his results at the venue last term, Bird crashed out of one round and triumphed in the other to extend his record: he is the only FE driver to win a race in each season.
Not too far behind, DS Techeetah again proved the difficultly in managing its potent driver pairing of Jean-eric Vergne and da Costa. They clattered in their scrap for an eventual final spot on the podium, with da Costa the aggressor in this case, pushing his stablemate close to the wall. Although the Portuguese lost out on track and came home fourth, he gained an artificial spot on the podium. Vergne was farcically penalised 24s for not using his second attack-mode boost. How was he meant to, when the race was red-flagged three minutes early?
That is a question that FE and the FIA must answer but, in context, it’s little more
than a detail. As Lynn diced with Evans, the Mahindra Racing driver was pincered against the wall and, unfortunately, did his very best impression of Mark Webber in the 2010 European GP. He launched upside down, crashed back to earth and skidded along the track, with the halo yet again proving invaluable for the tall London-based Essex man. The episode only came to a rest when the Tecpro barriers once more acted as a solid buffer. Evans pulled up immediately to check up on Lynn, who was later discharged from hospital without injury.
An evidently sombre Evans said:
“He clipped my rear wheel and had an aeroplane crash. It was really nasty. At one point I could see him above me. I saw him go into the wall and I jumped out to make sure he was OK.”
And among the exhausting and exhaustive motorsport ensemble, might there have been one last ‘greatest hit’? A Saudi-led military coalition intercepted a missile attack over Riyadh. This we know. It was blamed on Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and reports tentatively suggested the presence of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on the grid had made FE a target. This we don’t know. But its very happening and the snowballing of conjecture in the desert paddock – with many retroactively misrelating overhead bangs from the firework celebrations – meant a panicked and disconcerting end to a week that will go down as a ‘Very Best of Racing’ album that left a bitter aftertaste.