The dark horse to stop Mercedes’ Formula E opener domination
Mercedes walked away with a crushingly dominant one-two finish in Formula E’s 2022 season-opener. But its customer Venturi team is keen to ensure Mercedes can’t repeat that on Saturday in Diriyah
Lucas di Grassi says there is much more to come from the ROKiT Venturi Formula E team this year after starting his 2022 solidly with a fifth place finish in the Diriyah season-opener on Friday night.
The Brazilian fought for most of the race with Sam Bird for a then fifth position but when Porsche’s Andre Lotterer held up the chasing pack in the mid-phase of the race, he told The Race that despite “okay pace” he had already “lost a bit on the strategy to Bird” with the second attack mode choices.
“I took a little bit more time for me to overtake Andre, I lost a little bit of energy there,” added di Grassi.
“We have fought with Jake for P3, but yes realistically it was P4 maybe, P5 was not that far away in the end so a good 10 points for us.”
Di Grassi eventually cleared his former Audi sportscar stablemate Lotterer in what was arguably the move of the race into Turn 1 but by that time Bird had opened a decisive and unassailable gap in fourth place.
After joining the Monegasque team last summer di Grassi has been adapting to the different working practices of the Venturi team. This he said was a deciding factor in not ultimately being able to challenge for a podium.
“There’s a lot of work to do and there’s a lot of things to improve still, but we can see that this season we’re going to be competitive, we’re going to be quick,” he said.
“There’s a lot of things I can change on the settings. In the simulator, you can learn a lot, but you still need to understand how the car feels to what you need to change and in the simulator you don’t have this feel, you have to do it in real-time.
“So, at the moment, I am not confident enough to know how I feel with the car and which settings I need to change. This will come, so there is a lot for me in the races still to improve.
Di Grassi reckoned that team-mate Edoardo Mortara, who finished in a hard-fought sixth position after recovering from his self-inflicted qualifying accident (pictured below) that left him 12th on the grid, had some of the best race pace in the field.
The Swiss-Italian overtook Envision Racing’s Cassidy on the final lap to secure the position but was the fastest car on track in large portions of the final half of the event and set the second quickest lap of the race.
“I think Edo had one of the fastest pace of the race on average, so yeah, the car is there,” said Di Grassi.
“We just need to qualify slightly better. I was just 0.15s from (polesitter) Stoffel (Vandoorne) this morning, so it’s not that it’s a big difference.
“But still, we need to make sure that we are there, and in consistency too.
“Whenever we can, we have to do like we did today, (where) we are qualifying not that great, but we finished with 10 points and when we have the chances we will win the race and like this we are going to manage the championship.”
