It took Sebastien Buemi just one race to match his Season 9 podium tally, as the Envision Racing driver secured second place in front of a buzzing Mexican crowd for the first E-Prix of the season.
Although he made a mistake around the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez when hunting down the eventual winner, TAG Heuer Porsche’s Pascal Wehrlein, it’s still his best result since Round 7 of Formula E’s sixth season.
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“I think it was quite a smooth race, to be honest,” the Swiss driver said after his second-place finish. “I mean, the idea was to try to stay behind Pascal and save a bit of energy. I think I was a little bit unlucky with the ATTACK MODE. He managed to take both very quickly, and then with the Safety Car the gap came back to zero. Then I had to spend energy to make sure I could build a bit of a gap to Maximilian Guenther [Maserati MSG Racing] and make sure that I wouldn’t lose position.
“After that I was trying to be as efficient as I could. I made a pretty big mistake, and obviously lost a bit of time. But towards the end, I kept on under-consuming. I felt like I had the pace to catch Pascal, but it was so hard to pass. I would have needed to take so much risk that I was not really willing to do that. At the same time, they told me that he was under investigation. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to try to bring home P2 and then see what happens.”
Wehrlein’s victory was in jeopardy after the race, as the FIA were investigating the Porsche team for not respecting the homologated primary throttle pedal map, but it was deemed there was no further action and the German was allowed to keep his win.
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“We knew that overtaking was going to be difficult,” the Season 2 champion continued. “The target was a little bit lower to start with, but qualifying was extremely important. Then you could maybe make a position with the ATTACK MODE, and that was more or less it. We knew before the race that qualifying was going to be really important, and much more than on different tracks. We did the job in quali and scoring good points in the race was good.”
Envision will be hoping to retrain their title of Teams’ Champions in Season 10. The outfit, which have been in Formula E since the very start, welcomed back Robin Frijns for the new year, although his race ended in the barriers. Reporting issues with the handling, Frijns passed Mahindra Racing’s Edoardo Mortara when he was taking ATTACK MODE, before suddenly losing the rear end of the car and making contact with the Tecpro. The hit took him out of the race instantly - his second consecutive DNF at this circuit.