how’s that for a happy hump day? —
The series will hold six races in Berlin beginning on August 5 at 1pm EDT.
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On August 5, Formula E returns to action with six races held over the next nine days, all at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. Here, we see Audi Sport driver Lucas di Grassi during qualifying. It wasn’t a great session for di Grassi, who lines up 21st for the first race.
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For the rest of the season, di Grassi will be partnered by René Rast, after his previous teammate Daniel Abt was dropped from the team due to an esports practical joke gone wrong.
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But Abt has rejoined the sport, now with the Nio 333 team.
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Mercedes-Benz has adopted a black livery in Formula E, similar to the one it uses in Formula 1.
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The drivers walk the track.
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Antonio Felix da Costa edged his DS Techeetah teammate (and reigning double champion) Jean-Eric Vergne to take pole position.
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At the other end of the grid, Jaguar driver James Calado had a rough day, incurring a 60-place penalty as a result of his team having to change the car’s electric motor-generator unit, inverter, and battery pack during practice. Since there are only 24 places on the grid, Calado will probably have to start from the pits and will have to serve several stop-and-go pitstop penalties.
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The sport has been in a bubble for the past two weeks, with regular SARS-CoV-2 tests and other precautionary measures.
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This is the 10-turn, 1.5-mile track for rounds 6 and 7, which will run clockwise.
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This is the layout for rounds 8 and 9, which is the same as previous years’ races in Berlin.
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For rounds 10 and 11, the series will use a new 16-turn, 1.6 mile version of the track.
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On Wednesday afternoon, Formula E returns to action in Berlin. And yes, you read that right—racing on a Wednesday. The electric racing series started its sixth season in Saudi Arabia back in November and managed to run a total of five races (out of a planned 14) before COVID-19 turned up and shut everything down. Tentative plans called for a return to racing in July in New York City, but with the pandemic raging out of control in the US, that turned out to be a non-starter.
Instead, the series got creative. Rather than continue to cross the globe, with all those attendant risks, it has decamped to Germany, a country where public health measures have largely worked to control viral infections. So it will wrap up this season with a total of six more races, held over the next nine days, all taking place at the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin.
To make things more interesting, the series will use three different track layouts in Berlin. For the first pair of races, which take place on Wednesday and Thursday (August 5 and 6), the cars will use a reversed version of the 10-turn, 1.5-mile (2.35km) track used in previous years. The second pair of races, which will be held on August 8 and 9, will use the traditional Berlin layout, the same 10 turns and 1.5 miles, but run counterclockwise, as in years past. And for the final two races, which take place on August 12 and 13, there’s a new 16-turn, 1.6-mile (2.5km) layout to contend with.
Currently, DS Techeetah’s Antonio Felix da Costa is leading the championship with 67 points. But it’s a fairly tight pack behind him, and the compressed schedule and the need to brush off the cobwebs that accumulated over the past few months of hiatus since the Moroccan race in February mean there’s every chance of an upset in the points standings. Particularly since the first 21 cars all managed to lap within just over a second of each other in qualifying on Wednesday morning.
That said, da Costa set a blistering lap of 1:06.799 minutes during the Super Pole session (for the fastest six cars), beating his teammate and double series champion Jean-Eric Vergne by more than three tenths of a second. “The first time I drove the car again I felt a little out of sync, but after a few laps it all just came back naturally. From then on, we just got our foot down and got on with our work. This team is amazing, and they’ll do whatever it takes at all hours to win. The result is clear to see with the one-two in qualifying for the team,” da Costa said after the session.
The first of these six races takes place at 1pm EDT on Wednesday, and in the US you can watch it live on Fox Sports 2 and Fox Sports Racing, or delayed at 7pm EDT on Fox Sports 1. Outside of the US, it’s also being broadcast on YouTube, and there are other ways to watch.
Listing image by Formula E
