Richard Alvin’s four-page report from the London E-Prix captures a finale that squeezed a season’s worth of drama into two days: a crushing pole-to-flag win, a title settled by a mid-pack collision, the youngest race winner the series has ever seen and a Teams’ crown reclaimed.
The arithmetic going in was delicious. Just five points covered Jake Dennis, Mitch Evans and Pascal Wehrlein at the top of the standings, with Jaguar leading Porsche in the Teams’ table and two races left in the Gen3 era.
Porsche opened Saturday with team orders that bordered on the theatrical, Nico Müller backing off in qualifying to hand Wehrlein pole before riding shotgun in the race itself, his robust defending branded “dodgy” by an increasingly irritated Evans. The Jaguar driver’s bold PIT BOOST gamble briefly put him second, only for a well-timed caution to hand Wehrlein and most of the field a cheap stop and undo it all. Up front, the Porsche driver simply cruised to a six-second win from Dennis, and Sunday became a straight fight between the pair.
It was anything but a formality. Wehrlein spent a worrying chunk of the deciding race going backwards, and when Dennis climbed to eighth, the Briton was, for a brief and fraught spell, the virtual champion. Then came the moment that settled it: contact between Wehrlein and Envision’s Joel Eriksson on lap 31 left Dennis, who was scrapping with Wehrlein for position, with race-ending damage and a broken title challenge.
“What we did this weekend was outstanding again, delivered when we had to deliver, under pressure,” said Wehrlein, a two-time World Champion at the venue where he won his first crown. “We love the pressure, we embrace it, and we get even better with pressure.”
The race itself belonged to a 22-year-old Briton. In DS Automobiles’ final Formula E outing, Taylor Barnard deployed his last ATTACK MODE to perfection and lunged down the inside of Nyck de Vries at the final corner with two laps to go, a nailbiting move that stuck. At 22 years and 76 days old, he is the youngest race winner in the championship’s history, sending DS out a winner ahead of a Mahindra two-three.
“That’s the first time I’ve cried for a long time,” Barnard admitted. “To be the youngest race winner feels amazing and to do it in front of the home crowd, it feels unbelievable.”
There was silverware for Britain too, as Jaguar TCS Racing prised the Teams’ World Championship back from Porsche, which had already sealed the Manufacturers’ title in Tokyo. Evans, needing victory to steal the drivers’ crown, could manage only fourth, no fairytale for the Kiwi but precisely what his team required.
The ExCeL signed off in suitably starry fashion, with Damon Hill trackside alongside Emily in Paris stars Lucien Laviscount and Lucas Bravo, boxer Viddal Riley and rapper AJ Tracey. And there’s plenty to look forward to: the London E-Prix now heads to Brands Hatch for the Gen4 era, with Porsche’s new 975 RSE, a Jaguar squad defending its title and a double champion promising to make life even harder for everyone else.
The full report has every twist, from Dan Ticktum’s messy scrap for the minor places to the team radio calls that shaped the title fight.
To read the full article go to page 30 of the page-flip September issue.
