Sebastien Buemi, winner of the inaugural HKT Hong Kong ePrix, has admitted that his seventh win in the all-electric city street racing series owed a little bit to good fortune.
After qualifying sixth, Buemi was running third when DS Virgin Racing’s Jose Maria Lopez crashed, forcing race leader Nelson Piquet Jr to take evasive action and bringing out the Qualcomm Safety Car.
The decision by the Renault e.dams team to pit for the mandatory car swap at this point, while DS Virgin opted to keep Bird out, ultimately decided the race in the reigning champion’s favour.
“To be honest, I felt like we were not on it, a little bit like Paris last year,” he admitted. “We didn’t really have a good set-up and we were a bit lucky you know. Qualifying didn’t go amazingly but then in the race we had the right calls. The win really goes to the strategy, it goes out to the strategist. So all the credit to my team for that. Yeah I felt like with the second car we made some adjustment to the first and second car and the second car was a lot quicker, so we kind of found our way in the last few laps of the race.”
With his team-mate Nico Prost finishing fourth, Renault e.dams – which has won both of the teams’ championships over the first two seasons of Formula E – has resumed its place at the top of the standings.