Nick Cassidy has won the ePrix in Portland in the US state of Oregon. In the twelfth of 16 Formula E races of the season, the Envision Racing driver drove from tenth on the grid to the very top and secured victory ahead of Jake Dennis (Andretti-Porsche) and Antonio Felix da Costa (Porsche).
This year’s US Formula E race did not occur on the familiar street circuit in New York City, but was in Portland for the first time, instead of on a typical Formula E street circuit. The permanent race track, which is usually used by the US Indycar racing series, had a completely different profile than a narrow track through the city centre with right-angled bends and small run-off zones. With the high full-throttle portions, the Portland International Raceway provided special challenges in terms of energy management.
Nick Cassidy in the customer Jaguar from Envision Racing managed this best: The driver from New Zealand celebrated his third victory of the season at the Portland premiere after Berlin and Monaco. However, he was not able to control the race from the front. In qualifying, Cassidy had missed the knock-out phase for the first eight grid positions and had to start the race in tenth place – and thus had to overtake a correspondingly large number of cars.
Despite the special track in Portland, the US race again showed that Jaguar and Porsche have developed the best powertrains for the first season with the Gen3 race cars. For pole position in qualifying went to Jake Dennis in the Andretti Porsche. At the Andretti team’s US home race, the Briton finished second behind Cassidy – ahead of Antonio Felix da Costa in the works Porsche.
Porsche driver Wehrlein loses championship lead
For a long time, it looked as if Dennis was the fastest driver in the leading trio. Cassidy, Dennis and da Costa were able to pull away from the rest of the field after the second safety car phase (after an accident by Nico Müller). After several overtaking manoeuvres, however, Cassidy took over first place shortly before the end. In the last lap of the race, however, Dennis could not attack Cassidy anymore, as the latter still had more energy in the battery – instead, Dennis had to fight back against da Costa.
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For Jake Dennis it paid off to defend second place against da Costa: With P2 and the extra points for pole position, the Briton has now taken the lead in the drivers’ standings with 154 points. And it’s a very close call, because race winner Cassidy has 153 points with the 25 points. Porsche works driver Pascal Wehrlein, who had regained the lead in the championship after a victory and a sixth place in the two races in Jakarta, only finished in eighth place in Portland. With 138 points, Wehrlein is now only third.
Thanks to da Costa’s podium, the Porsche works team managed to keep ahead of Envision Racing (225 points) in the team standings with 231 points. Behind them follow the Jaguar works team (184 points) and Andretti-Porsche with 177 points. DS Penske, in fifth place in the team standings, was unable to score any points in Portland – for a curious reason: the team had installed RFID sensors in the pit lane in Portland, which record which set of tyres all the passing cars of the competition are running on. This is important information in order to be able to better assess the lap times in practice – whether they were driven on a worn or fresh set of tyres. But such sensors are expressly forbidden by the regulations. Therefore, both Jean-Eric Vergne and the current world champion Stoffel Vandoorne had to start the race from the pit lane. Although both DS race cars were able to catch up well, they failed to score points, finishing eleventh and twelfth.
The season continues on 15 and 16 July with two races in Rome, before the season finale with two races in London on 29 and 30 July.
fiaformulae.com (race report), fiaformulae.com (race results), fiaformulae.com (driver results), fiaformulae.com (team ratings)
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