Jean-Éric Vergne is not happy with the way the FIA has been policing the Formula E drivers. The Frenchman admits that there’s currently too much happening on track, which makes it impossible for the stewards to keep an eye on everything.
If you’re looking for one single word to describe the 2023/2024 Formula E season, it’s undoubtedly the word ‘chaos’. Over the past few months, many drivers have complained about the chaotic racing style we seem to have adopted in Formula E. Although the Gen3 cars are partly to blame, we should also be looking at the drivers and the stewards. After all, most of the incidents have a clear guilty party.
The stewards waited until London, the last race weekend of the season, to finally introduce a stricter policing policy. Jake Dennis was handed three 5-second time penalties, before being shown the black-and-white flag for dangerous driving. An interesting decision, according to Vergne. “Jake got three penalties and then he got a warning flag”, the Frenchman said to Pit Debrief in London. “Normally a warning flag comes before the penalty, it doesn’t make any sense.”
Asked if he thinks it’s a good thing that the FIA are now stricter towards drivers, he said: “Yeah. I think it’s probably not even hard enough. I mean, so many drivers are moving under braking, that is unacceptable. I think that the reality is that the stewards are lost. There’s too much happening in the championship, there are way too many things that they are not able to see. I hope that their monitoring system can be highly upgraded for next year, because we need that in Formula E.”
“We are racing very hard, all the teams are putting in a lot of effort into trying to be the best. I think on the FIA side, they should also try and do a better job in terms of the consistency of the penalty’s. I don’t blame them”, Vergne emphasised.
“When I see the material that they have to review the incidents and with so much going on… I mean, there are not enough people to monitor and to police what’s happening. For sure, many things would be missing. And the drivers that do something bad, they say: ‘Oh, I got away with it, so let me do it a second time, a third time…’ That’s the reality of the racing at the moment.”
