One of the biggest mysteries and surprises of the current Formula E season is how and why reigning teams’ champions Envision Racing, quite frankly, have disappeared.
An average of four points per race, a total of 49 from 12 races, and only two podiums is a very poor move. For a team that uses one of the best technical packages on the grid via its customer relationship with Jaguar, it’s a glaring anomaly.
To put his 2024 into perspective, compared to the same time last season, Envision has scored 176 fewer points. It sits eighth out of 11 teams and is 28 clear of Maserati MSG, which, by running a rookie in Jehan Daruvala, is effectively a one-driver team from a major points-scoring perspective thanks to Maximilian Guenther.
Envision hasn’t done a worse job across the board this season. It is more a combination of three key factors that have hurt it and may continue to do so.
Losing Cassidy
“Obviously, Nick is going from our team to Jaguar and he’s doing an excellent job there, so we lost an asset there,” is Envision managing director and team principal Sylvain Filippi’s honest assessment when asked by The Race why it hasn’t been able to run races that it did in 2023.
Envision’s loss is Cassidy and Jaguar’s gain as he leads the drivers’ championship with two races remaining.
Cassidy was clearly the master at working with his side of the garage to pull off the early peloton races last year which took second place in Sao Paulo and wins in Berlin and Portland to add to his more traditional street fighting wins in Monaco and London.
But Buemi scored 105 points on his own last season, not including the 15 he should have got after taking what appeared to be a perfectly legitimate podium finish in Hyderabad before he was deemed to have exceeded the series’ power limit.
Buemi contributed significantly to Envision’s title triumph. This season he has 24 points, one more than teammate Robin Frijns, although both drivers missed two races through a WEC clash over the Berlin round.
No matter how you slice it, Cassidy’s stock only rises when you lay out these facts and analyze them. But the exodus of Kiwis to Jaguar is actually only a small part of a much more complex picture.
Second album syndrome
The second season of the Gen3 ruleset has seen every manufacturer bar Mahindra beat their customer team pretty decisively so far on points.
Porsche has 73 points on Andretti, who finished first. Nissan’s haul dwarfs McLaren’s by 68 points and DS Penske has 77 more than Maserati MSG.
But the biggest discrepancy comes with Jaguar having a barely believable 250 more points than the team running basically the same package – Envision.
That, whatever official lines come out of the team, is not just down to incidents and occasional poor performances. This is much more basic.
Envision and Jaguar are known to have a strong relationship. They have an engineer stationed for races and some degree of data sharing that goes on race to race and between events as well.
As a difficult follow-up album to an international best-selling rock song, Envision’s 2024 effort has been a stupid follow-up and the roots of that may well lie in a combination of manufacturers saving a little for themselves on certain elements and the area of ​​both closing and understanding pack racing much more .
“Obviously the manufacturer didn’t like it [being beaten by its customer teams]says Philip.
“And obviously they’re trying to find ways to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
– It can take different shapes and forms. In the end, they are doing nothing wrong. But they have test days that we don’t have.
“So we are starting to feel the effects of not being a manufacturer. For example, the tires this year are behaving differently than last year, but without test days it is very difficult to figure that out. And there are many other things.”
Some of those things will just be the fact that the manufacturers have more resources and more budget via the manufacturers cost rate allocation as well. It will not invest so much and hand everything over to a rival even if it is its IP and its know-how.
Last season was the customers’ time to shine as the manufacturers were compromised from the start by having to troubleshoot through Gen3’s initial problems. So the playing field was even, if not a little biased against the customers because they didn’t go down a dead end because of the problems.
Look at Envision. Heading into the season opener in Mexico City there was hardly any driving at all with both drivers having, in Cassidy’s case a major heart-stopping problem with no brakes in Valencia, and Buemi with the same albeit with chassis cracking consequences.
But it had immediate parity with the Jaguar. And when that worked out, Envision went on a remarkable run of results that saw me beat Jaguar to the team’s crown.
That won’t happen this year, however, with evidence suggesting that a combination of the manufacturer’s control and understanding of the cars it has built is ultimately too strong for customers to handle.
Add to that the fact that teams now understand more how to handle the pack racing peloton aspect of E-Prix and Envision’s advantage last season further diminishes.
“These peloton races are really not the same as last year,” says Filippi.
“We call them the same. But now all the teams have understood them more and we were the first to strategically play well against them.
“Now obviously every team knows how to do it and we’re all much closer to each other in terms of strategy. Also, the level of risk has increased dramatically compared to last year.”
He’s right about all that. Some drivers are willing to take monumental risks in intra-pack battles. It’s what has most made Oliver Rowland’s season and possibly what has helped define Envision’s woes.
Also, the narrowing of the gaps between the grids makes a top eight start (going into the duels) now dictated by hundredths if not thousandths of a second. A prime example was when Frijns missed the top eight by 0.002si Monaco.
And here lies the problem. In the midfield, the risks of injuries and missed goals or retirement are now enormous. Frijns found this to his cost in Misano and Monaco. Buemi in Tokyo, Misano and Monaco.
“There have been some changes at Jaguar and things have changed since last year but the car has been quick for the most part, when you look at the data,” said Filippi.
“It’s mostly been qualifying in certain places, and occasionally putting it down to race management. Overall, that’s been the biggest problem.
“So it’s something we have to dial in without fail and in the second race in Shanghai we absolutely nailed the strategy from the back.”
Driver’s dissatisfaction
Don’t underestimate the psychological factor of the drivers and how much they loathe the pack racing structure in at least half of the races in Formula E this season.
Sebastien Buemi and Robin Frijns are very different personalities and drivers. But they share the same trait of hating the way these races are run. They are far from the only ones with probably 80% of the net – at least – detesting what they represent.
On Frijn’s part, part of it is that he still has the psychological aftereffects of his hand-breaking shunt in Mexico City last season. His was a very nasty injury and one that a decade ago would likely have been career-threatening.
The risk of injuring hands in wheel-to-wheel or wheel-to-barrier contact is well known in Formula E and has accounted for several injuries.
Frijns confided to The Race after Misano in April that he let go of the wheel after being hit by another car and there have been other occasions when he has also worried about the effects of another injury.
Also in the mix for the drivers has been the occasional lost session this season where they have been well off the pace. Shanghai Sunday was one such example as the pair brought up the rear of the qualifying groups nowhere near the pace.
But it hasn’t been all bad. A podium each for Buemi and Frijns in Mexico City and Riyadh respectively and decent pace proven in several races this season has shown that Envision has combined potential.
But with the gaps reduced from last year, the grid is now covered by less than half a second in most races. If you miss the fractional duels, as Frijns did with the aforementioned 0.002s in Monaco, you’re closer to race day chaos.
Filippi nodded to the racing style and his drivers were not used to it.
“My drivers have really caught on to it, and if you talk to them directly they’ll tell you it’s not the type of race they’re used to,” he says.
“They are very good racers. But this is different and obviously some drivers this year have embraced that type of racing better than others around the grid. That’s for sure.”
It sounds like a little dig at his driver and maybe Filippi is right about that. But he needs to prepare his team in the best possible way for this type of racing to continue, because whether or not fast-charging pit stops come in next season, there will likely be at least 50% of the races structured to extreme energy saving in parts of races and the subsequent pack-racing hallmarks.
These facts and the clash between the Berlin E-Prix and the Interlagos round of the WEC next July do not bode well at this stage for Buemi and Frijn’s future plans.
The Race understands Buemi has a contract for next season but within that it is likely to have standard performance clauses in it. Frijns will likely have something similar in his deal, but of course performance both ways also sometimes works with drivers and teams.
“No one doubts Seb and Robin’s ability to compete,” adds Filippi.
“In fact, I think if you look at all the races, clearly some drivers, from several different teams, have come to terms with, ‘I enjoy this type of race a lot more than others.’
“It’s not just my drivers, other people really dislike it or like it and it has an impact on the results as well.
“So there’s a lot to think about.”
#Formula #title #defense #badly