12 points nice to take !

I was pretty optimistic at the time of landing at Long Beach. Our car works pretty well, my edams RENAULT team is probably the best in this Formula E championship : I had all reasons to hope for a very good result.

During the qualifying session, I signed the fastest lap. I should have started from pole, and, if everything went according to plan, I should also have won that race. Unfortunately, for a reason yet to find out, I used too much energy during my fastest lap. A little nothing, actually, as we can spend 200 kilowatts, and I « burned » 200.1 KW, or something like that.

In theory, that sort of problem should never happen. Our engineers are really very careful on that topic, and they use to take a sort of security margin to make sure we don’t run over the limit. But this time, for a yet unknown reason, I went slightly over it, and the marshals cancelled my fastest lap. With the previous one, when the tyres were not warmed up yet, I started ninth on the grid.

During the race, I managed to catch up to the fourth place, but then I had a little issue with the electronic contact between the steering wheel and the car. On the bumps, the steering wheel disconnected, in which case a security device cut automatically the power, one can’t accelerate anymore. This prevented me to try to pass Luca di Grassi, just ahead of me.

Ok, I finish fourth despite all those little issues, and I score 12 points which make me climb the championship classification up to the fourth position.

That’s what is the up side of this week-end : as I just said, my car is really excellent, and my team is the best. There remains five races to go, therefore 125 points to score, and nothing is lost to try to win this first Formula E championship !