The flurry of incidents in a crash-filled Saturday at the Rome E-Prix led to some long nights and bizarre lottery-decided decisions ahead of Sunday’s action.
Jakes Hughes lost control of his McLaren-run Nissan in qualifying on the undulating and fast stretch of the street circuit from Turn 4 to Turn 7 and clattered the concrete barriers twice, damaging the monocoque.
After evaluation by his team Hughes’ survival cell was deemed too badly damaged to be used for the present weekend and will return to nearby Dallara for repairs.
McLaren shared spare tub was taken by its manufacturer mothership Nissan on Friday evening after Norman Nato glanced the Turn 7 wall at the very end of the first free practice session.
This meant that McLaren had no viable alternative for Hughes to race. But after negotiations with the FIA and with all fellow manufacturers carrying a spare monocoque for themselves and a customer team, it was agreed to conduct a lottery to select one from Mahindra, Jaguar, DS and Porsche.
The Race understands that the process was literally conducted via manufacturer names written on paper and pulled from a hat.
The reason why not every team in Formula E has a ready-to-go spare car, according to Formula E Teams and Manufacturers Association chairman Ian James, is that the teams are “bearing in mind the cost side of things, but also from a sustainability side with the perspective of flying these things around the world”.
James added that because there’s almost an even number of customer teams and manufacturers in the all-electric world championship “it seemed that one way of managing that was effectively to have partially built chassis, so six in total, that were built with a number of the manufacturer spec components”.
According to James this policy was designed to give teams “the best chance of being able to react if you had a shunt in one of the sessions and try and come back in the next session, so from qualifying to race for argument’s sake”.
This is because the cars are ‘dressed’ in wiring looms and other key components, meaning that it cuts several hours off rebuild times.
In the case of McLaren taking Porsche’s spare however, several provisos were included in the agreement for Porsche to loan NEOM McLaren the survival cell, including that if either Porsche or Andretti required their spare then it would be returned to them as quickly as possible after today’s race. Although that wasn’t required after either Andre Lotterer or Antonio Felix da Costa’s race-ending shunts on Saturday.
Changing back to a Porsche from the built-up McLaren is unlikely to be achieved in the requisite time after all.
The rebuild for McLaren using the Porsche spare was complicated further by having to de-dress it due to the fact it has to fit its own front MGU and brake-by-wire components.
Conservative estimates indicate that the complete build from start to finish will take at least eight hours meaning that it was never possible to get Hughes on the grid for Saturday’s race.
As of 8pm on Saturday evening McLaren was close to completing the build and was not expected to break the pre-designated curfew of 9pm which runs through until 6am Sunday morning.
However, Maserati, Jaguar, Porsche and Envision all worked beyond the 9pm mark to get their new cars ready for FP3 on Sunday morning.
James added that discussions had already taken place “between teams and manufacturers and with FEO and the FIA” to assess if the present solution is suitable going forward or “do we actually need to maybe take a different course and I think over the next few days once we get out of here, we’ll make sure that we’ll analyse that and make the right call for Season 10″.
Multiple Survival Cell Changes After Race Chaos
The catastrophic lap nine accident triggered by Sam Bird’s Jaguar crashing at the Turn 6 kink saw four cars needing monocoque changes before the second phase of the Rome E-Prix.
Bird has been forced into the team’s spare tub that is shared with Envision, who will revert to a general spare that the team acquired through chassis and spares provider Spark Racing Technologies to get Sebastien Buemi ready.
Porsche has taken NIO 333’s spare tub after it agreed to allow McLaren access to its designated spare that it shares with customer team Avalanche Andretti.
Maserati meanwhile was busy building up a new car for Edoardo Mortara who hit Bird broadside in the incident. The shared spare car between Maserati and fellow Stellantis Motorsport brand DS Automobiles will be used by Mortara on Sunday.
This is the same monocoque that was used by Stoffel Vandoorne for the second Berlin, Monaco, Jakarta and Portland rounds. Vandoorne reverted back to the repaired tub that was damaged in the Dan Ticktum-triggered accident in the first Berlin Tempelhof race in late April.