Tag Heuer Porsche’s Pascal Wehrlein has spoken to Motorsport Week about his own form, Porsche’s GEN4 commitment and that omnipresent peloton talk ahead of what is a crucial weekend in the FIA Formula E World Championship
The German approaches this weekend’s inaugural Shanghai E-Prix just 16 points adrift of the lead in the Drivers’ standings, and with the final three race weekends in the calendar all double-headers, there are still plenty of points up for grabs.
Season 10 has been a season of improvement for Wehrlein, who lost ground on his rivals in Season 9 due to poor one-lap pace from the works Porsche car in qualifying, but with much of these issues resolved, the team are one of the strongest and most consistent on the Formula E grid this year, and ahead of this interview, Porsche announced a further commitment to Formula E until the end of its GEN4 era, a decision that Wehrlein is delighted with.
“Obviously everyone is Is happy here with within the team,” he says.
“It’s great news I think that the whole project is giving everyone here a big motivation and a big boost.”
The word on the lips of virtually everyone in Formula E since the beginning of the spell of European rounds on the calendar has been ‘peloton’ – the much-maligned style of racing that has divided opinion amongst drivers, teams and fans alike. Both this weekend and the following one in Portland are, due to the nature of the circuits involved, set to feature more peloton style racing once again. With a win in Misano for Wehrlein and one for Antonio Felix da Costa in Berlin [as well as a then-disqualified victory for da Costa, also in Misano] Porsche have looked continuously strong in many of these races, and their rivals have deemed them the best in these conditions, but Wehrlein is quick to quash any such notion, and deems his competitors just as adept to it.
“Yeah, it’s always nice to hear assumptions!” he says with a grin.
“I think we’ve we’ve seen many other teams actually winning the peloton races so I feel like the peloton races are just super chaotic; it’s even more unpredictable than the usual races, which we don’t have very often this year to be fair.
“So much is happening – first of all, it’s difficult to keep yourself out of trouble to still have all the parts on the car, like the front wing.
“You know, very often going four cars wide into a corner, that’s the first difficulty and then it’s just it’s a waiting game and and finding the right moment to move to the front and and try to stay in the lead.
“It’s depending on many situations, race situations. If it goes well or not, I think Cassidy and Rowland often take more risks going to the front and trying to stay there and so far it has paid off.
“We have an efficient package but I can see others being really good at those kind of races and us also understanding, or let’s say getting better, with it.
“I mean, I’ve won in Misano, Antonio’s won in Berlin, both have been a peloton style race.”
Since Berlin, da Costa and Season 9 title-winner Jake Dennis – with whom Wehrlein duelled ferociously in Berlin – have praised the FE grid for their skill in handling peloton races. It raises a question that FE drivers may deserve more credit than they get from the wider motorsport community, but Wehrlein is not concerned about praise from others.
“For me, let’s say credit is nothing important to me.
“I think we all know what what we do and we all know how tricky it is; maybe yes, it looks more easy than it actually is because it is very difficult to keep your car together, not very often in other categories you both four car wide into a corner multiple times in a race and still manage to to make the corner. So, yeah, it’s a different kind of style of racing but also, there’s the risk for us to to get it wrong, not always we’ll get it right.
“I had the issue in Misano where I lost my front wing an I think almost every driver now has lost his front wing once in this kind of races, which I guess is normal.
“In terms of credit, I don’t know, I don’t mind.”
Post-Berlin, I put the question to da Costa whether the possibility of a Formula E Drivers’ Association would be a productive step forward for discussing styles of races and how both the drivers and fans can be happy with the show that is put on. Asked the same question, Wehrlein seems happy with the communication between the drivers already, but is personally unhappy with what he feels is a slant towards more peloton races.
“I think the talks are already [ongoing] and I think we are missing the mix at the moment because it feels like 80 percent of the races are peloton races this year.
“There are just really a few exceptions but most of the races are like this and I feel like there [should] be a better mix of tracks that they’ve always been and there would always be tracks where it’s difficult to overtake. There should be like a good base of Formula E where it is not super easy but it’s also not very difficult to overtake – just something in the middle and then on the other extreme and you have the peloton style racing; if you have two or three races a year where it’s difficult to overtake, then you have two or three races where you know, it’s peloton style racing and then you have a majority of kind of normal races.
“Then I think it would be very interesting and all of us drivers would be happy because as it is right now, most of the races are just those peloton races where 90 percent of the race is not even a race because you just try to survive and you try to keep the car clean and try to progress to the front at the right time.
“Also, if you look at Cassidy’s race in Berlin, which he won, most of the time he was driving in the back and just trying to save energy and progress at the right time.
“It was a good call from from him and from his team to do that and it worked but that’s not how we grew up and how we’ve raised our whole life, doing those kind of things.”
Wehrlein shares the concern of many drivers that peloton reduces the importance of qualifying, and cites his main title rival Cassidy’s stunning Berlin victory as a primary example. He takes the view of his team-mate da Costa that a balanced mixture of different styles of circuit, proportioned correctly, could offer the solution that many are craving.
“I still believe that qualifying should have an importance; sometimes it’s a bit less important but as it is right now.
“We don’t even need to do a qualifying because you could be like how Cassidy’s just showing in the last race: you can just start last, save energy and then move to the front at the right time.
“So, yeah, it needs to be a better mix and and hopefully there will be good solutions for the future and I think if there’s a good mix, everyone is OK.”
Looking ahead to the weekend at hand, Wehrlein could end it back in the lead of the championship if things go well, and he is confident of such an eventuality, as well as looking forward to the return of FE in China after five years away, partly due to the Covid 19 pandemic.
“Hopefully, we have a good weekend; I think there is a lot possible this weekend.
“I feel like we have a good car and we have a good strategy team so we have everything in our hands to be successful.
“We just need to maximise our package and that’s very important that we always have to go home from a race day or from a day at the track saying: ‘We did everything we could do and we left nothing on the table’, so yeah, that would be very important and then I think we can have a very successful weekend.
“On the other side, I hope that it’s a nice comeback for China, I know that we have a lot of fans here in China, so I hope that racing here in Shanghai will be followed with a lot of interest from from the fans here.”
Finally, many fans and pundits have opined that Season 10 has been the greatest showing from Wehrlein, a man whose talented has never been doubted. A man of great care and consideration in his answers, Wehrlein ponders the question of whether he is in the greatest form of his career to date.
“That’s always difficult to say. I feel, compared to last season, I’ve made progress.
“I’ve worked on the areas I can improve together with the team, we just try to make the overall package better which is the car setup, systems operations, driver – it’s everything and yes, I believe that I learned a lot from last season which also made me a better driver this year.
“It’s always difficult to say ‘it’s my best year in Formula E so far’ or ‘it has been my best race’, because I feel like sometimes I do, for example a lap in qualifying, and it feels like there was nothing left and it feels like a P10 and sometimes I do a lap and I say for this that lap ‘actually, I still have a tenth in my pocket’, and I do pole position! So, you ask yourself ‘are you now happy because you are in pole position’ or you think it was not the best lap of your life?
“It is a very tricky question to answer but certainly I’m better this year than I’ve been last year just because I never stopped learning, I always keep working on myself.”
