Formula E’s new points leader earns first win with Jaguar

Nick Cassidy’s flying start to life at Jaguar got even better with a first win for the Big Cat in the second 2024 Diriyah E-Prix.

Cassidy went three-wide with poleman Oliver Rowland and Robin Frijns down to Turn 1, with Frijns braving it down the inside of Rowland to snatch the lead, while Cassidy remained third.

How about that start from @RFrijns?! 🤯

Brilliant reaction off the start to claim the lead of the #DiriyahEPrix 😮‍💨 pic.twitter.com/Rb9iMzBGhm

— Formula E (@FIAFormulaE) January 27, 2024

This didn’t last long though once the top three cleared their active mode activations, it was Cassidy who leapfrogged from third to first.

Frijns pressured him but in a more or less flat-out passing opportunities at the front of the field at least were few and far between.

Despite energy concerns (“I’m struggling a lot. I can’t under consume so I’m going to die,”) Cassidy held onto his lead and claimed his first win for Jaguar – his sixth victory in Formula E – and the points lead.

Frijns came home in second place to earn his first podium since New York 2022. Rowland returned to the podium too for the first time in a year and a half, taking third for Nissan.

Jake Hughes was fourth for McLaren but his team-mate Sam Bird endured a difficult race. He had charged back from a tricky qualifying – where a red flag for Sebastien Buemi’s crash prevented him from finishing his final effort – to run well inside the top 10, only to retire with damage.

DS Penske’s Stoffel Vandoorne completed the top five ahead of Rowland’s team-mate Sacha Fenestraz. Mexico City E-Prix winner Pascal Wehrlein was seventh, he drops to second in the points behind Cassidy.

Jean-Eric Vergne came home eighth ahead of Maximilian Guenther and race one victor Jake Dennis who had a quiet run to 10th at the chequered flag from 15th on the grid.

But Dennis’s day got even worse after the race as a five-second time penalty dropped him from 10th to 12th.

“I was driving possibly the worst car I’ve ever driven in Formula E,” was Dennis’s post-qualifying summary.

“I don’t know how we’ve made it so bad overnight. I wasn’t even up I don’t think, probably a good thing the red flag came out because I was going to get jumped by the guys behind me.

“An absolute disaster for the team. An absolute mess.”

Buemi’s DNS explained

The incident that brought Group B’s Qualifying session to an early end 💥

Thankfully @Sebastien_buemi is out of the car after this heavy contact with the wall.#DiriyahEPrix pic.twitter.com/R61XTAciaN

— Formula E (@FIAFormulaE) January 27, 2024

Buemi didn’t even make the start after his qualifying crash, just over three hours before the start of the race.

“As always, it’s a bit subjective one but we don’t want to take any risks (with the chassis),” Envision team boss Sylvain Filippi told The Race’s Sam Smith.

“As Envision Racing we would never put a car out that we’re not entirely sure of on the track, and the FIA seem to share that opinion. The chassis is not destroyed but there’s a little crack inside.

“They [FIA] make the ultimate call, but obviously I have some points to express from my team so we obviously know, we have a good idea of what is repairable and what is not. It is very possible that the chassis is repairable so let’s see, but for this race we don’t, I would never put a driver in something I’m not 100% sure of.

“There’s no way [of using the Jag spare tub], we’ve tried this before. Between qualy and race there’s no chance. Especially because, by the time the car comes back and you evaluate it to the FIA, you get it stripped apart so you can get a good look at it, you’ve already lost half an hour. Then by the time you get the spares out of the box you have just over two hours. As much as we can work quick and you know it, there’s no way we can build a car in two hours.

“It was a very freak circumstance where the plan was always, for the second phase of the qualy group, to do out prep push in, that was the sequence like everyone else. But we timed the release really well, everyone was good, but actually we saw quite quickly that we would cross the line at the end of the push lap, not taking the flag so you could do another push.

“Because Seb was outside the duels, I guess the temptation is to tell him to do another one, but in hindsight probably not the best idea because it’s a very short straight and it’s so, and he’s expecting, and Seb obviously has no idea about that run plan because it wasn’t expected. By the time he’s thinking ‘ok I’m releasing the throttle here’ and then he has to get back on the throttle.

“Before you, there’s a corner in front of you. It’s definitely one of these freaks of coincidences that happen. We’ll learn from it though.”

Race Results