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Confidence is high in the Veloce camp. Image by Dom Romney\/Extreme E<\/p>\nEngland might be reeling from another painful soccer final defeat last weekend, this time at the hands of the Spanish team, but on the race track the result went the other way. Not once, but twice.<\/p>\n
British team E.ON NEXT Veloce Racing came away from the Hydro X Prix with two victories, beating Acciona Sainz on both Saturday and Sunday, making it the first team in a year and five days to win back-to-back Extreme E rounds.<\/p>\n
After going fastest in Friday practice, its drivers Molly Taylor and Kevin Hansen swept the board on Saturday, winning both of their qualifying heats and the final, while also going fastest in the \u2018Continental Traction Challenge\u2019 super sector.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, things were a little different, with no heat wins or super sector bests. The final result was the same though, including another last-gasp charge from Fraser McConnell, who \u2013 after bringing his team\u2019s car home 1.435s back on Saturday \u2013 ended the race right on Taylor\u2019s bumper.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a bit stressful!\u201d she tells RACER. \u201cI knew I had a gap and then I was trying to manage it. The track was quite rough and if you pushed too hard you could come unstuck, it wasn\u2019t as rough before so I was trying to find that balance of not backing off but just not do anything stupid.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen Fraser closed the gap down and I was like \u2018okay crap, I\u2019ve got to pull my finger out again and push again\u2019 so it was a little bit up and down and I probably made it a bit too stressful for myself at the end, but there was no way he was coming past. We were taking that win.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Taylor resisted the Jamaican, Hansen was watching on from the Command Center, having handed the car to his teammate with a 8.680s lead over Laia Sanz, who preceded McConnell. As McConnell took chunks of time out of Taylor, it\u2019s a miracle Hansen had any hair left, as he could be seen nervously looking on, feeding information to the team\u2019s engineer who was in turn passing it on to Taylor.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to trust that your teammate will do a great job and I really do trust Molly but I obviously want to give her the best advice I can there and I tried to look and give my (help) and use all our expertise, all without making a mistake,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is very stressful in those laps, especially when you\u2019re handing over, but she did a great job and to cover like that in the end was brilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was Hansen\u2019s thinking, as much as his driving, that gave Veloce an early boost in Sunday\u2019s final. After the Gridplay qualifying vote, he opted to choose the far left on the grid for the race \u2013 the trend for the weekend up to that point had been to go for the right, or as far right as you could, to sneak up the inside at the first Waypoint. It looked like a risk, but it certainly paid off as he swept round the outside and into the lead instantly.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw my brother (Andretti Altawkilat driver Timmy Hansen) go around the outside in qualifying and I thought when we got our selection after Gridplay that that was the only selection that was going to work so we bet on it, made a plan, we committed and it worked perfectly.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the four rounds that Extreme E has held in Scotland, including last year\u2019s Hydro X Prix, Veloce has won three of them. The team might be based in London, but it\u2019s made north of the border its own.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s nice when you say it like that!\u201d says Taylor, who moves to within one win of her former Rosberg X Racing teammate Johan Kristofferson at the top of Extreme E’s all-time wins list after Sunday’s victory. \u201cIt\u2019s been a good weekend. You\u2019re always chasing and trying to improve so it\u2019s been a lot of work to try and make sure when we go out we have the right package for the conditions that we face, some good strategy and a quick car.<\/p>\n
Confidence is high in the Veloce camp. Image by Dom Romney\/Extreme E<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been very much a team effort, to get all the execution in the right moments right is not easy in Extreme E so it’s very rewarding for it all to pay off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Veloce is not so much riding the crest of a wave, but a tsunami right now. The team\u2019s confidence has never been higher, and with two wins and three podiums from four so far this season, it has never been in a better place at the same point in a season. But up next is Sardinia \u2013 a place that has been a less than happy hunting ground for it over the years.<\/p>\n
Season 1’s result was eighth. That was repeated in the first race of Season 2, with it slipping to ninth during that year’s second visit to the island. Last year the results were sixth, seventh, third, and another sixth.<\/p>\n
The team\u2019s very much an early championship favorite, much like last year when it had two wins from the first four starts. But it was the trip to the Italian island where last year\u2019s challenge ultimately unraveled, and that\u2019s something that is still on Hansen\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re just trying to do our racing as good as we can,\u201d he stresses. \u201cWe\u2019re learning from last year that even if you\u2019re leading or things are looking great, things can turn around so we\u2019re really just trying to maximize every day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Taylor adds, \u201cWe did have a bit of bad luck last year in Sardinia so I think that\u2019s one for us to really focus on to get the monkey off our back there.<\/p>\n
\u201cSardinia\u2019s very different, but Scotland this year is probably closer to Sardinia than Scotland was last year. In any case, it\u2019s a new race, but we know we\u2019ve got the package, now we just need to get Sardinia to work for us because that\u2019s kind of the one we need to nail. So this is really good preparation for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
But while Extreme E\u2019s most visited venue is somewhere it has never quite managed to gel with until now, the overriding theme coming out of Scotland is that the team has got a confidence boost at the right time \u2013 and at a moment when the series had never been more competitive.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a massive confidence boost,\u201d Taylor says. \u201cEveryone is so quick so we don\u2019t take anything for granted. It\u2019s never been as hard to reach the final in this championship as it is now. You\u2019re scrapping from the first quali.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we definitely don\u2019t take it for granted, we know where we can still improve as well, but it\u2019s just about putting our best foot forward in every moment and if we get everything right, that should be enough to win.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for Hansen, he sees the challenge ahead, and he\u2019s relishing it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI enjoy a challenge. We\u2019ve had tough times in Sardinia, the team has had a long, tough history there which is just a more exciting thing to go there with two great wins here and focus on what we can improve,\u201d he says. \u201cWe like to change history. For sure we have a big mountain to climb and we have to keep digging deep. We want to get redemption in Sardinia.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
England might be reeling from another painful soccer final defeat last weekend, this time at the hands of the Spanish team, but on the race track the result went the other way. Not once, but twice. British team E.ON NEXT Veloce Racing came away from the Hydro X Prix with two victories, beating Acciona Sainz …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":72045,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-racing","has-thumb","has-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72044"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.timesamerica.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}