In a week where news broke – via The Race’s story on Thursday – that 2023 Formula E title rivals Mitch Evans and Nick Cassidy will be 2024 Jaguar team-mates, there seemed somehow to be a warped inevitability that something might happen between them in Rome.
And it did. It was spectacular all ends up, quite literally for Evans, whose Jaguar’s lazy half cartwheel broke his car, and Cassidy’s heart.
OH NO!!!!! 🤯
Mitch Evans goes into the back of Nick Cassidy and ends up ON TOP of the Envision Racing driver!
Both drivers escape unhurt – thank goodness for the halo!@Hankook_Sport #RomeEPrix pic.twitter.com/NnvJdmf1l4
— ABB FIA Formula E World Championship (@FIAFormulaE) July 16, 2023
Evans, a driver whose misjudgements in his entire Formula E career can be counted on one hand, realised his error immediately and apologised to his team. He later did the same to his New Zealand countryman and 2024 team-mate.
Cassidy’s heartbreak was very real. He is as emotive a Kiwi as racing has seen and sometimes struggles to keep it all in. After all the success and consistency over the last five months, he was left to scrabble around in midfield in a flat-out race in which he never had a real chance at making up for the time lost down the Turn 7 escape road after Evans clattered over the top of him on lap three.
From one Kiwi’s angst to another and back again. It was plain that this wasn’t a good day for Auckland, nor Jaguar-powered title contenders.
The incident itself was triggered by Cassidy having a hopeful look around the outside of polesitter and leader Jake Dennis into Turn 7. It was speculative but under control. The same couldn’t be said for Evans who locked up his Jaguar I-Type6 just behind them.
Nine times out of 10 that results in some cosmetic front wing damage, which is two a penny in Formula E. This time though Evans rode Cassidy’s wheel and in an instant had some very big air.
“It all happened really quickly,” Evans told The Race.
“I wasn’t trying to do anything stupid. The lap before I had a run on Nick into [Turn] 8 doing something kind of similar and he just was able to chop me.
“I thought with him going to the outside again I could maybe follow Jake, get alongside him in the traction zone to [Turn] 8 and then make the move.
“It was just quite late in the braking zone that he really slowed up a lot, I put more [brake] pressure on and then the rears locked.
“It was just the way I rode his wheel it just shot me up and over him.”
The smallest of mistakes escalated quickly and Evans was done, so too in all likelihood was his outside title quest. The King of Rome’s crown had slipped at the worst possible time – a day after his three straight victory in FE races there had brought him back to within 20 points of then-points-leader Cassidy with three races left.
It was clear Evans’s contrition was genuine. At the same time Evans was equally correct and genuine when he said without any arrogance the fact that “I don’t really make many f**k ups but today it was a very small one but just with a huge consequence. It just feels awful.”
While it would be easy to lambast Evans for the ill-judged move, it was clear that the race was already in an early flat-out stage by then. This meant that track position was totally key because there would be relatively little energy-saving, so moves were worth chasing earlier than is often the case in FE 2023. Portland and Sao Paulo this was not.
“I felt that the race would come to me so I wanted to be a little bit on the aggressive side and try to get that track position as early as possible,” admitted Evans.
“But sometimes the concertina effect with these cars, it can just really catch people out as you see with front wings being damaged and stuff. Once I’d locked the rears, it was very hard to catch.”
While Evans changed into civvies, Cassidy ploughed on with his car showing significant battle scars on the top portion of its bodywork behind the driver’s head.
Post-race Cassidy opened up to The Race, but not in the way expected.
The incident with Evans wasn’t that high on his agenda, it was already gone. He had other things on his mind and they went right back to qualifying, his best of the season.
There was also an irony at play here too. Time and time again this season Cassidy has come through the field to make most of his competitors look a bit pedestrian. From eight, ninth and 10th on the grid he won in Portland, Berlin and Monaco.
Now, from the front row he found himself back in the pack through no fault of his own and fighting layer upon layer of frustration as drivers with no title aspiration at all such as Jake Hughes, Stoffel Vandoorne and Andre Lotterer fought tooth and nail for the merest sniff of a point.
“We work so damn hard to improve our cars and find new directions, find new philosophies, find steps and I feel like I do a good job of it, but sometimes I help others more than myself,” Cassidy told The Race.
“I think that was a bit the case yesterday. Even so I think in quali yesterday I still could have been OK, I looked alright, to be top four, and I just got caught out by the red [flag for Hughes’ crash in group B].
“I didn’t do the business on that first lap when it counted, and so today I just had the attitude of ‘no banker laps’.
“Every lap was a big lap and I think that approach worked, and also I made the right steps overnight; I went to a concept I knew, that I’d developed before, so my car was good.
“I actually made a decent mistake in the semi and the final, my quarter final lap was a 1m37.5s, it was un-f**king-believable, I had such a good pace.”
Cassidy started second amid some mixed emotions because “I had the performance for pole but compared to my last few qualifyings it was pretty good”.
The flat-out race brought “some punchy moves” according to Cassidy and it also meant that it should have been “the easiest podium of the year because it was the only race so far this year that you had to qualify on the front row. That’s why it hurts more.”
That pain has to feel like one that will take a long time to shift. The good news for Cassidy now is that he only has 13 days until he can try some spectacular self-healing in the surreal indoors and outdoors environs of the ExCeL in London.
Arriving at the works Jaguar team as champion next season now looks like a very long shot, though. A man who’s twice led the standings during this epic title fight goes into its decisive weekend 24 points behind Dennis, who looks to have one hand on the trophy.
Cassidy and Evans will be sharing a team next year but they share much more in reality. Grit, determination and a desire to never even conceive capitulation of any kind.
Cassidy told The Race with a piercing look that the Rome race “obviously wasn’t to be, so heartbreaking really” but then added: “I don’t give up, man. I don’t give up. It’s not over until the fat lady sings.”
Keyword: This 2024 team-mates’ clash all but ends 2023 FE title fight