Formula E review: Vergne’s giant-killing
The 2017-18 Formula E season was quite possibly as close as the electric championship is ever going to get to its own Leicester City story.
Just like the Foxes back in the 2015-16 Premier League season, this was a tale of a small team that took on the might of much bigger manufacturer squads and won – sort of. With Audi and Renault floundering – as Manchester United and Manchester City did back in Leicester’s celebrated campaign – it was the Techeetah team that rose to prominence.
Much like its football equal, for the purpose of this tortured analogy anyway, this was a smaller operation with a budget deficit to the bigger teams that seized its moment and ran with it. The team was even led by its own rough diamond come good – for Jamie Vardy, read Jean-eric Vergne.
As a customer Renault team, Techeetah had no pre-season televised tournament of 15 private testing days to hone the finer details of its off-the-shelf power-unit package. Instead, it had to make do with the equivalent of friendlies with non-league clubs: simulator prep – although for what it’s worth, Vergne points to the 65 days he spent working on his FE skills in the sim as one of the key reasons behind his success.
Vergne put it on pole for the first race in Hong Kong and, in the opening half of that event, battled the driver who would go on to be his title rival: DS Virgin Racing’s Sam Bird. It was one of the few times the duo fought a sustained scrap on track and it was Bird who emerged victorious driving for a team that you could describe as FE’S Arsenal – there or thereabouts, but not taking the biggest prizes in recent years, and with a French driving force (Arsene Wenger equals DS Automobiles) that would depart at the end of the season.
In fact, considering the season Techeetah would go on to have, its opening races were pretty scrappy. Vergne followed his Hong Kong podium with a fourth in the second race and fifth in Marrakech. Team-mate Andre Lotterer’s FE debut in Hong Kong was a disaster, and he retired with mechanical trouble in Morocco.
But FE’S inaugural rookie test, held after the Marrakech race, changed things for our soon-to-be league leaders. It gave Techeetah “33% more testing”, which was “a great boost” according to team principal Mark Preston, whose team had been restricted to just the three days of official pre-season running at Valencia.
“We probably put more effort into that as a test than anybody else,” says Preston. “We probably put more effort into simulation and other things. Not having to worry about the powertrain helped too and, at the end of the day [spot the football phrase there!], it’s not gone wrong at all. It’s just run like a dream – not having to worry about that is a huge thing.”
Thanks to its testing gains, Techeetah rocked up in Santiago and put FE’S first one-two in the back of the net, with Vergne winning ahead of Lotterer. There could have been a calamitous own goal, though, as they made contact several times, and at
“WE PROBABLY PUT MORE EFFORT INTO THAT TEST THAN ANYBODY ELSE”
one point Lotterer rear-ended his team-mate. Thanks to a late-race communications and timing failure, the team was initially unaware of how feisty it had been, but there was no Kieron Dyer and Lee Bowyer-esque ugliness between the drivers. In fact, Vergne and Lotterer got along famously. Their strong relationship – rare between racing team-mates – is a testament to how much the Parisian had improved as a person and as a driver.
Vergne had flamed out of Formula 1 and rocked up in FE three races into its inaugural season. He took pole in Punta del Este and had a heavy-energy-use race that ended with suspension failure. He was fast, but wild, and furious at the way his grand prix career had been ended by Red Bull. He then had a fractious season at Virgin alongside Bird, before arriving at Techeetah for the 2016-17 campaign, where he began his rise to redemption.
“Coming into Techeetah is what really changed me,” he says. “Being in both sides of the team, also building a team, really taught me to step back and look at what a team really wanted from a driver. And I guess I learned a lot, how to be inside a team with the mechanics, with the engineers, up to which point you can push them, and to always be easy on them when it’s a good time to be. It taught me massively. I’m a lot more settled – private life, professional life.”
After taking fifth in Mexico, he put in a defensive masterclass back at the scene of his dramatic FE debut to score his second win of the season, well on his way to collecting the campaign’s ‘golden boot’ for race wins. That Punta win summed up his improved driving. Lucas di Grassi was back at the front of the grid for the first time after Audi’s early season inverter calamities (see page 22) but had lost pole for a clumsy track-limits infraction. Di Grassi had the faster car, but Vergne, on inherited pole, kept him at bay from start to finish, and arguably had the edge on energy usage.
After another fifth in Rome, Vergne won from pole in Paris – in what he described at his “most emotional” win – keeping Bird and then di Grassi at bay with the help of rear-gunner Lotterer. Then he prevailed in a battle with Sebastien Buemi for third in Berlin behind the dominant Audi duo.
Zurich marked his lowest moment. Vergne wound up 17th on the grid after running first on the road in group one, ending up well adrift of his normal rivals for reasons he still couldn’t explain after analysing the situation ahead of the season finale. But he produced a virtuoso attacking drive on the Swiss streets, finishing 10th after being caught up in the full-course-yellow penalty shenanigans. He charged again in the first New York race after a power-unit software error meant the Techeetah pair were thrown out of qualifying.
“COMING INTO TECHEETAH IS WHAT REALLY CHANGED ME. IT TAUGHT ME MASSIVELY. I’M A LOT MORE SETTLED”
“I’M REALLY PROUD OF WHAT I’VE BEEN ABLE TO ACHIEVE AND WHAT THE TEAM HAS ACHIEVED”
He claimed the crown with fifth from 18th on the grid in that race, after Lotterer let him by – repaying the assistance Vergne had given him to get up to speed earlier in the season – and then took a walk-off win ahead of the Audi drivers in the finale. That triumph came on the same day that France won the World Cup…
Bird was Virgin’s Harry Kane (OK, we know he plays for Tottenham Hotspur in real life) – the team’s talisman leading from the front. He picked up another win in Rome and scored four more podiums. But Bird led Virgin, which was running an undeveloped DS powertrain that was overweight and inefficient compared to its rivals, to a place it by rights should never have been.
“I’m really proud of what I’ve been able to achieve and what the team has achieved,” he says. “If you look back some of the races, we put it up there when nobody really gave us a chance.
It’s been a great year, one that I’ll be very proud of.”
And indeed he should be. This was a great performance from the Briton – he arguably did not deserve to lose second place in the standings to di Grassi at the final race – but he was undone one event before the final: the New York track, which was ill-suited to the Virgin package with its sweeping corners and long straights, proving to be Bird’s semi-final defeat to Croatia.
Of the rest, Renault (Man City here purely due to their shared colour scheme) also competed without making much of an upgrade to what had been the dominant FE package. That it ended up so far adrift of Techeetah demonstrates how much “serenity” it lost, according to team boss Jean-paul Driot, with Buemi’s 2016-17 season defeat to di Grassi and early 2017-18 struggles.
Mahindra and Felix Rosenqvist topped the group stages after Marrakech, but reliability woes while leading in Mexico City and Rome, followed by inconsistent form in the European run-in, meant they were no longer in play as the final whistle approached.
Oliver Turvey was again outstanding for NIO, while Lotterer was a driver transformed come the end of the season. Mitch Evans shone for Jaguar, which (let’s make it Jacksonville, mixing the football metaphor completely with an NFL franchise) was inconsistent – although markedly improved from its debut campaign – but also suffered on the energy-efficiency front.
Vergne may have won the final race in New York, but Lotterer’s jumped-start penalty and Audi’s claiming of second and third on the day meant the German manufacturer pipped Techeetah to the teams’ title. Bearing in mind that ending, we admit that our stretched Leicester metaphor limply falls over at the edge of the box after one final counter-attack…
Techeetah and Vergne were the story of season four, but now lose their Leicester-likeness. For 2018-19 they become Paris Saint-germain thanks to the recently announced DS partnership. Audi will be eyeing the double in season five, but Real Madrid (Mercedes) and Barcelona (Porsche) are coming…