If you look at the results from the Formula E season opener in December, youโd be forgiven for thinking it was a horror weekend for Andretti. Two retirements, no points on the board — there was very little to celebrate on paper.
The reality, however, is rather different. Despite the unfavorable race results, the team had a decent weekend overall, and itโs hoping to use that to catapult it back to the front of the field after losing its driversโ title crown last season.
Jake Dennis, who last year was defending his Season 9 title but ultimately missed out on a shot at retaining it after an up-and-down campaign in which he registered just one win early in the campaign, appears to have instantly returned to form.
โI think overall, (it was) pretty positive,โ he tells RACER. โWe’ve obviously not scored any points, but ultimately, we were probably one of the quickest cars there. Overall, I think it was a much better start to how we finished last year. It was obviously just a bit of a shame for the final result with the failure, but I left there feeling pretty confident.
โI sort of found my mojo again, which was obviously a bit of a struggle from last season. I’d be a little bit worried if we were slow and we finished fifth, whereas, at least now, yes, we had the failure, but it seems that we’ve found our pace again, which is the most important thing coming back into the season.โ
Dennis finished in the top three of every session ahead of the race, going fastest in second practice and missing out on the pole position Duel by 0.001s. In the race, however, a prime position in the top 10, where he held an energy and Attack Mode power boost advantage over the cars around him that ought to have guaranteed a podium finish, was derailed after an unknown failure forced him to retire.
โIt was looking good, maybe even the win, but it’s hard to speculate,โ he says. โAnything could have happened. It was such a scrappy race. After my red flag, it seemed like everything went wrong for everyone, apart from, obviously, about the two McLarens and Mitch (Evans, who won after starting 22nd and last on the grid). But the one positive out of it was that generally, the big hitters like Pascal (Wehrlein), me, (Nick) Cassidy, the DSs didn’t score. So it could have been much, much worse, and I could have been the only one not scoring.โ
As for the failure which ended his race, Dennis says Porsche has been coy on the cause, but suggests that the introduction of four-wheel-drive for qualifying Duels, race starts and Attack Mode, could have played a part. Continued issues for the eventual race winner, Jaguar TCS Racing driver Mitch Evans, prior to the race shows that it might not necessarily be something that can only strike down him and the rest of his Porsche-powered cohort.
โIt’s something which we don’t get involved in, being a customer team,โ he admits. โThey obviously keep their cards to their chest. It’s very internal stuff and telling us information wouldn’t really benefit us, to be honest, because we’re never going to design a powertrain.
โSo I fully understand why they just said, โLook, you’ve had the failure, we’re working on it.โ Hopefully it doesn’t happen again. Unfortunately, we lost the powertrain out of it, so we are only down to one more — if we take another one, then I get a penalty. So it is a shame to lose that so early on in the season, but hopefully we can rectify the issue and improve the reliability.
โBut it seems a bit of an issue for everyone. Mitch had one in practice, and then the same issue of qualifying, and obviously we had one in the race, so I guess the four-wheel-drive is creating some stress for the motors and causing some failures.
Putting the failure to one side, team principal Roger Griffiths says that Dennisโ performance up to the race validated the teamโs work in the off-season, but the early finishes for both Dennis and teammate Nico Mueller left some unanswered questions still.
โIf you look on Jake’s side of the garage, we were in the top three in every session, with the exception of the race,โ he says. โ(Dennis) missed out on a front row start by 1,000th of a second, so I think we were pretty pleased with the way the car was performing.
โWe had a strong test in Jarama, and I think we backed that up in Sao Paulo. Obviously a double DNF is not how we’d want to start, but I think what we can take away from the weekend is that all of the work that we’ve done leading into Sao Paulo has proven to be correct.
โWe’ve gotten a good understanding of the new tire, the new four-wheel-drive mode. We didn’t really get to see how our strategy was going to play out, because we didn’t get that far. But I think we came away from it, you know, with a lot more positives and negatives, I would say.
โI think from an operational perspective, we actually had an excellent weekend. You just go into the race, and it’s the racing gods that sort of take over at that point. So I think everyone on the team was pretty positive about it. Obviously disappointed that we didn’t get anything to show for all the hard work that we’d done, but I think generally, we were pretty happy with the execution of it all.โ
Dennis and the Andretti team have to work through the intricacies of being a customer team for Porsche while competing against its works squad. Alastair Staley/Motorsport Images
Andretti is continuing its customer relationship with Porsche this season, and once again the German manufacturer is a front-runner, with Dennis and reigning champion Pascal Wehrlein in winning contention before their respective retirements, and Antonio Felix da Costa in the second works car finishing second. But unlike other brands in the field — namely Nissan and Mahindra which both showed strong pace over the weekend — Porscheโs GEN3 Evo package hasnโt come with wholesale changes.
โThere’s no major revolution, it’s just incremental improvements across all aspects of the powertrain, and I think software has been a big, big part of it,โ Griffiths says. โThere was an opportunity to re-homologate the powertrain going into Season 11, they’ve taken advantage of that, but it’s not a complete tear up and an all new powertrain. I think they knew that they had a strong package, so they’ve just sort of optimized every last little bit of it.โ
Dennis adds that the car โgenerally does feel quite similarโ to the one that won the last two championships in his and Wehrleins hands, and with their closest rivals Jaguar adopting a similar approach, it helps understand the competitive picture early on.
โWe’ve only bought small updates here, and there really hasn’t been any significant big upgrades,โ he says. โSo we’ve just tried to improve on the things that were a little bit weak last year.
โI think Jaguar is in roughly the same boat. They bought some small updates, I think it was only really Nissan who were quite vocal about the update they brought — theyโre a much more efficient package.
โWe’d be pretty naive to say that Nissan is on our level. Qualifying has always been a strong suit for them, and maybe the racing was a little bit more tough. But from my understanding, they’ve got on top of their efficiency, and now it should be a pretty straight fight between the three of us. DS is unknown — they did have a pretty difficult Sao Paulo, but I’m sure they’ll be straight back in it with some really good drivers they’ve got.โ
One major change, though, has been the addition of Mueller in place of Norman Nato on the other side of the Andretti garage. The Swiss driver moved over from Abt in the off-season, and has already asserted a positive impression on the team, as well as bringing the added benefit of coming from within the Porsche camp itself.
โObviously, one of the things that I think has let us down overall as a team has been the sort of revolving doors that we’ve had on that other side of the garage to Jake,โ Griffiths says. โWe’ve always found that continuity โ whether it’s in engineering staff or drivers or whatever it is that you do โ generally, leads to better results.
โWith Nico, he certainly knows Formula E really well, having had a couple of seasons already with the Abt team, he’s now a factory Porsche driver, so he’s got full access to everything that Antonio and Pascal have. He’s in close contact with the manufacturing group within Porsche, not just the race team, so, hopefully he can bring a little bit of additional knowledge than perhaps if we had a sort of an independent Andretti driver on that side, we might miss out on and certainly that’s how we benefited with Andre (Lotterer) in Season 9. So there are certainly a lot of positives about having Nico on board.โ
Griffiths also feels that the wider team wonโt just benefit from the addition of Mueller, but Dennis — already undisputedly one of Formula Eโs top stars — can also gain from working alongside him.
โYou can tell that Nico has come from a manufacturer environment,โ he says. โIn his past career in DTM, he was heavily involved in manufacturer racing programs there, so you see that discipline that sometimes the independent drivers don’t have because they haven’t, sort of been groomed, if you like, by a manufacturer, into that way of working. But Nico has that, and I think that will only make Jake a better driver.โ
Muellerโs first race for Andretti ended in disaster on just the second lap where he, as he puts it, was in the โwrong place (at the) wrong timeโ as he collided with Jake Hughes after being clipped by David Beckmann. But like the rest of the team, he was buoyed by what he saw over the course of the weekend.
โSo far, all good,โ he says. “Obviously itโs always an interesting phase when you’re settling into a new team, getting to know everybody, getting used to slightly different procedures here and there, but especially a different car, and so far, (Iโm) pretty, pretty happy with the integration process.
โI think we’ve clearly seen that the package is strong, the team has done a good job in extracting the most of the potential from it, and that’s definitely a very important kind of baseline for the season ahead.
โObviously, we would have loved to have a cleaner weekend and managed to put it together to bring home some good points, but I think it was nearly more important to see that the package is competitive and going to be a good foundation for the rest of the season.โ
The Formula E season resumes this weekend in Mexico City, a place that has been a happy hunting ground for Andretti in the past, with Dennis taking pole, the win, and the lap record there two years ago.
That previous form, and the Sao Paulo showing has left the team confident. Dennis said after Sao Paulo that he wanted points on the board this weekend, but ultimately, heโs hoping for even more.
โI would obviously be pretty, pretty disappointed if we showed us the same pace as Sao Paulo, and we come away with a seventh or something like that,โ he says. โThen I would be asking questions like, โWhat did we do wrong?โ โWhere do we improve on that?โโ
โObviously I want to go into Mexico trying to win the race, but you never know where you’re at until it comes to qualifying. If we qualify 10th, then we’re simply not going to win the race. We need to be qualifying on the front two rows, front three rows to win this race this weekend. But I’m confident that the team can give me a good enough car and I can deliver on the qualifying lap. If we can do those two things, then we should have a good weekend, if the reliability is where it should be.
โWe were probably the quickest car in performance running, so there’s no reason why (the other teams) shouldn’t be worried about us. They know what powertrain we have in the back of our car, they know what me and Nico are capable of, so they’d be pretty naive to already discard us. We are champions from only Season 9, and nothing has changed all that much from those days.โ
Mueller’s expectations are a little more modest. After his own early retirement last time out โ which followed a delayed program in the build-up to the race after a brush with a wall in the opening practice session โ he’s aiming to put a first clean weekend together that will allow him to extract the most from the Andretti-Porsche package, allowing the results to follow.
โI think that’s exactly what, what we missed in Sao Paulo with that compromised session, starting off the weekend on the back foot was anything but optimal,โ he concedes. โWe all have seen that absolute pace is there. It’s about when it comes to that race weekend rhythm, that you can put it together there, and build the speed progressively. Obviously, points are being made in the race, so that’s always going to be the main focus.
โSao Paulo, obviously, was the first taste of things, but probably has always been very, very tight in terms of, you know, the competition being super close together, and I think this year it’s even more so the case.
โWe have a strong car underneath us, and the team has proven many, many times that it’s very, very good at exploiting all that potential. So I definitely think that the foundation we have is very good.โ
