It was a mixed weekend for Nissan, as one side, Nato scored the team’s first-ever podium finish in Formula E, a P2 achieved in spite of having a broken front wing and Sam Bird‘s toughest efforts.
On the other hand, his teammate Sacha Fenestraz, who had led Saturday’s race, suffered from a number of technical issues throughout the day. The French-Argentinian driver didn’t manage to complete any qualifying or FP3 lap but was able to race for a short while before having to retire the car.
Pit Debrief talked with Fenestraz after the end of his race, as he explained the reasons behind his really tough Sunday:
“It wasn’t a race full Sunday for me. Nothing, we had a lot of issues: in FP3 I cannot drive, in Qualifying I cannot drive, I just had some electrical problems, and then in the race we had some braking issues, basically the front motor wasn’t working, it was like turned off.”
Photo credits: Nissan NISMO
“Basically I was recharging half the energy in every braking, so we had to box and restart everything, and that was race over for me unfortunately.”
Fenestraz was still rather upbeat as he went on to praise his teammate and his very positive finish: “But in the meantime I’m extremely extremely happy for the team, we knew the performance and the potential for that result was there, so I’m extremely happy for the team also.”
Asked if the battery and electrical issues were to blame for him dropping out of the race lead to end the Saturday race in P8, the Nissan driver denied it, adding that the reason behind the fallout was a miscommunication between him and the team, which caused him to use up too much energy after the restart:
“No, yesterday it was purely, let’s say, a strategy mistake. Basically, after the red flag, the team forgot to tell me to add some laps on the steering wheel, and basically the car thought we had only 25 laps, when in reality we had 27 laps.”
“I did many laps consuming too much because of that, and when they told me to change, my lap times went down and it was over for me,” he went on to explain.
