Buemi makes Formula E history at Buenos Aires ePrix

Three races into the 2016-17 Formula E season and no one can touch the reigning champion, Sébastien Buemi.

His victory at the Buenos Aires ePrix makes him the first driver to complete a hat-trick of wins in Formula E and he can already afford to stay in bed for the next race and still be the championship leader, such is his points advantage.

So what else did we learn from Formula E’s Argentinian chapter?

Boom-boom-boom Buemi

Sticking with Buemi, his hat-trick of wins this season already has fans asking if the Swiss driver and his Renault e.dams is going to ‘do a Mercedes’ in the championship, dominating it like Merc and their drivers have dominated Formula 1.

In post-race interviews, Buemi was careful to emphasise that his luck is bound to change at some point but the Renault e.dams package has looked solid – indeed, the second-placed Techeetah car of Jean-Éric Vergne shared Renault’s powertrain.

When Buemi is relaxed, there’s little chance of catching him on present form, so pressuring him into mistakes is crucial for anyone hoping to take points off him.
But there was precious little evidence of that happening in Buenos Aires.

He started third but wasted little time in passing Lucas di Grassi and Vergne and, by the end of lap 6, was back at the front and cruising.

Renault e.dams were concerned about one of Buemi’s batteries overheating in the Argentinian heat but his energy usage figures gave no hint of a problem.

In the closing stages of the race, Vergne did start to reel Buemi in – quite possibly because Buemi was managing his batteries – and the leader made a rare mistake at turn 1, locking up and tantalising the crowd with the prospect of a neck-and-neck race to the finish for victory.

But it wasn’t to be. Three wins from three races, and no sign that anyone can do anything to slow this man down before the next race, in Mexico.

Di Grassi makes his own (rather surprising) bit of history

After an action-packed morning of qualifying, di Grassi was celebrating pole position.
Remarkably, for a driver who has been at the business end of so many races and almost won last season’s championship, this was his first Formula E pole.

He got through the opening lap without any drama and it looked like we might have a proper challenge for Buemi but…

By the end of lap 3, di Grassi had gone backwards, slipping behind both Buemi and Vergne as the race settled down.

The di Grassi-ABT Schaeffler Audi Sport combination is not yet strong enough to translate pole into top of the podium this season.

Given how exciting di Grassi’s end-of-season tussles with Buemi were last year, fingers crossed that he is able to find a few tenths of a second per lap to keep things interesting at the front.

A good day for the newbies

Second place went to Vergne in the Techeetah, the Chinese team racing in its first Formula E season. It was Vergne’s fifth podium in the sport, helped hugely by Techeetah’s decision to fit their cars with the same Renault power unit that has propelled Buemi to his dominant start this season.

But it’s not enough simply to have a great power unit – full credit to Techeetah for putting together a very competitive team from the remnants of the Team Aguri operation.

As an aside, Techeetah doesn’t refer to a fast cat in Chinese. Rather, it translates very roughly as ‘titanium kylin’ – a kylin being a fire-spitting mythical, horned Chinese animal, with a scaled body and ox tail. It’s pronounced ‘Ta-chi-ta’.

Another new team which definitely have the potential to be a fast cat are Panasonic Jaguar Racing. They’ve had a poor start to the season but an 11th place from New Zealander Mitch Evans will have lifted their spirits, even on a day when their other driver, Brit Adam Carroll, was in the wars and came home in 17th, having failed to make it off the grid as the rest of the field headed off on the first lap.

A flightless Bird

It’s been a frustrating start to the season for Sam Bird in the DS Virgin Racing machine.

Despite looking like contenders for a win in the opening races, results haven’t gone the Virgin team’s way. With Buemi grabbing all the silverware, even before the Buenos Aires ePrix Bird said the season was already 19 drivers battling for second place.

He started a disappointing tenth here, plummeted down to 19th by lap 5 before mechanical woes finally broke his car on lap 8 and he limped into the pits.

The chance of a point for fastest lap still remained though and he managed to post a time that stood as fastest until even that small reward was snatched from him by Felix Rosenqvist, the only other driver to post a sub-70 second lap.

Ouch.

And then, as the race drew to a close, Bird finished with an unfortunate bang, hitting a wall and bringing out yellow flags.

Double ouch.

His team-mate, Jose Maria Lopez, had a slightly better day, much to the relief of the crowd who had come to cheer on Formula E’s Argentinian driver.

The spectators may have been on their feet every time Lopez did anything but it wasn’t a classic performance and he was fortunate to grab a point in tenth, as other cars slowed to preserve energy in the closing laps.

It’s not about the winning…

For those spectators who aren’t obsessed only with who finishes first, there was plenty to cheer over the entire day.

An action-packed qualifying session was just reward for those who’d turned up early and there was no shortage of action further down the field as the race progressed.

A special shout-out to the Faraday Future Dragon Racing pair, Jerome D’Ambrosio and Loic Duval, who again reminded us that the best battles in motorsport are so often the battles between team-mates.

One lap from the end, they were still squabbling and even appeared to bump into one another as they duked it out for points and in-team glory, Duval’s sixth place edging D’Ambrosio’s eighth.

Talking of bumps, di Grassi was lucky not to take Nelson Piquet Jr out in the pitlane, after his mechanic waved him out into the path of the NextEV NIO.

And Nico Prost was tempting fate with a bit of ‘elbows out’ defending .

In the end, though, this race will be remembered not for the unpredictable, but for the predictable, and Buemi’s impressive third straight win.