Jaguar’s Mitch Evans has revealed his delight at scoring his unlikely victory in the Sao Paulo Formula E-Prix, confirming issues with his car almost prevented him from winning the race.
Evans’s prospects at Formula E’s season 11 opener looked bleak after disastrous qualifying saw him start last on the grid for Saturday’s race, the chances of points unrealistic at best.
Instead, he became the first driver in FE history to win a race from the back of the grid after a storming drive through the field, overtaking multiple cars in the first three laps.
Capitalising on two red flags in a chaotic race, Evans led after an incident involving team-mate Nick Cassidy and reigning champion Pascal Wehrlein led to the second Jaguar retiring.
Seeing off the Tag Heuer Porsche of Antonio Felix Da Costa in the tense final laps, Evans won the race by just three-tenths of a second to seal an unlikely and well-deserved victory.
When asked by Motorsport Week if he is proud to have become the first winner starting from last place after his nadir of qualifying, he confirmed his delight at the achievement while also revealing car issues.
“Massively”, Evans confirmed. “Look, the result was definitely unexpected, so that always is a nice feeling. We had a tough couple of days with reliability, once in practice, then again in qualifying, so definitely some things to work on with that.
“But there was definitely some concerns going into the race, whether I would actually finish or not, off the back of those two kind of mishaps in qualifying and practice. And also just based off previous events, even though it’s kind of what we call a peloton-ish race, I’m not allowed to say that, but it’s kind of like one of those races at the front or on the top ten,” he joked.
A race to progress
Evans also explained he expected a challenging afternoon but said his lightning-fast progression through his rivals transformed his race, citing attack mode as his secret weapon:
“Traditionally, it’s not really been at the back. It’s been very hard to progress from kind of outside the top 12. So I was expecting a tough race. I mean, it was tough. But I guess, the attack mode stuff really opened up things massively, as we saw.. also really helped, I had a strong few laps opening the race.
I made up, I think, ten places within three laps or two laps, so that really changed the dynamic of my race. So obviously pretty amazing to come through from the back like that in a really strategic race, very hard to manage.
Evans acknowledged the stoppages that gave him opportunities to progress, taking advantage of the chaos around him the restarts to move up the order en route to his victory.
He credited his engineer for updating him on the attack mode deployment of his rivals, admitting he improvised as the chaos unfolded around him, while also defending from da Costa.
“Obviously, we had a few stoppages as well. So just trying to think on my feet a lot throughout the race with the attack modes and trying to learn as everyone was going through them and trying to get an understanding of the race.
“I had good comments from my engineer to kind of give me an understanding of where everyone was at in terms of energies and attack modes. So yeah, to get the victory was, one, unexpected, and two, pretty special considering the circumstance that we had throughout the weekend,” he concluded.
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