AUDI COMPLETES INCREDIBLE COMEBACK

Things looked ugly for Audi in Santiago back in February. Reigning Formula E champion Lucas di Grassi had been forced to retire with an inverter problem, and the team had taken just 12 points from the first four races. It had won once on the road with Daniel Abt in

Hong Kong, but lost that triumph due to a technical passport mistake.

Those figures made for grim reading.

But following an inverter fix for the Mexico City round in March, Audi turned it all around.

“Just looking at the numbers from where we were and where we got to – when you see it on a graph, it’s flat for four races, and then it just goes up at a 45-degree angle consistently,” said Audi team principal Allan Mcnish.

But even in Mexico, had anyone told the former F1 and Le Mans star he’d end his first season as a team principal with the FE teams’ title, he’d “have said you were mad”.

“It feels a bit surreal,” he said after clinching the teams’ championship following race two in New York. “It feels very enjoyable, a huge relief, but also very proud because we’ve been able to have probably one of the best fightbacks that I’ve experienced within Audi.

“The best way for me to describe it is it’s like my first karting victory, my first championship – because then you know you can do it, but you realise as well that you know the areas you can improve.

“Definitely it was a big learning curve in a lot of ways for me this year. I had some brilliant people around me at the end of the day, and I had very good role models in Dr Wolfgang Ullrich in the past and then with Dieter Gass [former and current heads of Audi motorsport]. It’s now just a huge feeling of pride that we’ve actually done it.

“As my Dad would say, ‘It’s not the good shots that make the good golfers, it’s the good recoveries’, and that was one of the best recoveries. That was one that Bertie boy

[the late Mcnish Sr] would be proud of.”