Why FE's red-hot favourite is on the ropes

Formula E's script has not been torn up, but its main character has been rapidly rewritten.

Lucas di Grassi was penned as the title favourite, but the Audi Sport Abt driver's championship challenge has not so much stalled as failed to start completely. Conversely, Felix Rosenqvist has quietly assumed the leading role, with two wins from three races.

Rosenqvist and his Mahindra team's title credentials were not dismissed pre-season, they were just not as rock-solid as di Grassi's. Audi's testing performance convinced many, including this writer, that it was indisputably top dog. Up and down the paddock in Hong Kong last month the fingers were pointing towards Audi: 'That's who we're worried about.'

Now di Grassi has zero points and trails Rosenqvist by 54 after a third straight race scuppered by a reliability problem. Audi's pace has been good, right up there over one lap (and the quickest of anyone in Marrakech) and in race trim too (when the car has managed a complete stint). This is the opposite of the past two seasons, in which di Grassi has built championship assaults on a foundation of relentless consistency.

So, that begs the question: is the e-tron FE04, the first 'proper' Audi powertrain in FE, fast but fragile?

"When you say fragile, 50% of the garage ran faultlessly in Marrakech," team principal Allan McNish, referring to Daniel Abt's perfect reliability record, tells Autosport.

"And FP1 and FP2 in Marrakech everything ran faultlessly [on both cars]. It just happened to be in two of the key points, being qualifying and the race, that it impacted on Lucas's side of the garage.

"I disagree entirely with the 'fast but fragile' suggestion. We had two problems, which hindered a chance of pole and a potential race victory."

Di Grassi also disagrees with the assertion, pointing to Audi's phenomenal record in pre-season testing at Valencia, where the team racked up more miles than any other. But he admits "it's very weird that suddenly three out of three races we have reliability problems".

The bare facts are that nine remaining races mean there are 261 points up for grabs. But it's a bad enough situation that di Grassi declared post-race in Marrakech that winning the title this season "will be extremely difficult and a really, really big challenge".

Small details have crippled Audi's attempt to hit the ground running as a works force in FE. Whether it is human error, underperforming in qualifying, unreliability or sheer bad luck, little things are conspiring to mask the team's true performance.

Its present situation is stormy, but finding silver linings in the clouds isn't too tricky - although right now that just compounds di Grassi's ire.

"I disagree entirely with the 'fast but fragile' suggestion" Allan McNish

"We know that the car is fast and it's even more frustrating because the car is fast but not reliable, so we have to work hard to make sure this doesn't happen anymore," he says.

"It's easier to make a fast car reliable than a slow car fast, but in Formula E because of the regulations, limitations, and because everything happens in one day, if you have a reliability problem you're screwed.

"That's what happened in the last three events."

He's right. Audi's first three races have been "screwed" by a cacophony of misery.

In the opening race in Hong Kong di Grassi was in the mix until a bent suspension component from minor contact with team-mate Abt on the opening lap, and a subsequent scrape with Sebastien Buemi, developed into more significant damage. He limped back into the pits, swapped cars, but had dropped to the tail of the field.

Abt fell to the foot of the top 10 when he had a problem getting his second car started, though he fought back to fifth.

On day two in Hong Kong, di Grassi failed to score again after a "battery issue" caused him to stop just as he had emerged in his second car. The Brazilian had qualified poorly then ran 10th before pitting a lap later than most of his rivals, but that strategy never had a chance to play out.

Abt won the race but was disqualified because his powertrain's 'technical passport' contained the wrong information. The team had filled out the details incorrectly.

Then, Marrakech. Audi dominated practice, then di Grassi made it into the superpole but suffered a loss of power on his flying lap.

The team changed the inverter, hazarding a guess that was where the problem occurred (FE's demanding one-day schedule leaves little-to-no-time for in-depth analysis), but never got the chance to discover if it was - di Grassi suffered a loss of power in his other car early in the race, and retired in the pits. At the time, he had caught eventual race winner Rosenqvist and was joining the lead battle.

To compound the woe, the flying Abt picked up a drivethrough penalty for a needless Turn 1 clash with Alex Lynn on the second lap, then had an alternate strategy mauled by a full-course yellow.

Abt had committed to running a lap shorter than his rivals, so used up more energy and pitted just after Andre Lotterer stopped on track. He resumed in his second car, and the full-course yellow was thrown. The rest of the field pitted as Abt trundled round at minimum speed - half a minute lost to his rivals in an instant.

He recovered to 10th after other drivers had penalties, leaving Audi joint-seventh in the teams' championship with just 12 points. It should have at least 50 - wins went begging in Hong Kong and Marrakech - but as McNish says, "it doesn't matter if you don't put it together".

"That's the story of the first three races: we've had potential we haven't been able to realise," he continues. "To win here you've got to realise it, because the competition is too strong, it's too tight and it's too short a season not to.

"You can be quick, you can have all the different things go against you - if you deliver.

"Lucas won the championship [last season] but we weren't always the fastest combination on the circuit. Sebastien delivered that on quite a few occasions. But we won the championship.

"You've got to maximise what you can, when you can. We've got good potential. We've also got two drivers who are comfortable with the car, and that's something I don't think many people have up and down the pitlane."

McNish reiterates that "we're not at the end of the season - we're not even at the middle of the season", and he is right. Time is on Audi's side, particularly when its chief title candidate, di Grassi, is a man who does not know how to quit.

Rosenqvist points out that, "as you saw last year, he seems to be able to perform miracles when it's needed. It just takes us to score a double zero in a weekend and him to win two races and he's back in the game."

The master opportunist will need a bit of fortune again to get things back on track. Di Grassi is already facing an unprecedented challenge; nobody has come back from this big a deficit and won the title, but then he did overturn the biggest deficit in FE history (43 points) to win his maiden championship last season. And he only had six races left to manage that, although Buemi missed two of them.

Audi will hope that the fightback has already started. It extracted every crumb of use from having its cars active on Sunday after the Marrakech race for the rookie test, even when they were stuck in the garage.

Nico Muller was tasked with race stints in the morning and afternoon, and in the pursuit of performance set a new lap record at the end of the day. His team-mate Nyck De Vries spent almost the entire morning in the pits as Audi tried to replicate the Saturday problems that hit di Grassi's cars and identify a solution, although he was only able to use one car for the second half of the afternoon.

"Di Grassi seems to be able to perform miracles when it's needed" Felix Rosenqvist

"Because we go to Santiago next, which is important, that's what the morning was about," McNish says. "Nyck lost more time than we wanted but unfortunately that's what it was.

"We need to get deeper into it back at home, that's going to take a wee bit of time to get a complete overview of everything."

Getting that understanding will be crucial because Audi needs to work out how much work is required to get di Grassi's cars running properly.

Abt's problem-free races, on the mechanical side at least, clearly indicate the powertrain design is not fundamentally flawed.

But does di Grassi have faulty components? Is something wired badly under the skin? Or is it just a series of unfortunate events?

Whatever it turns out to be, Audi will hope the transition from Saturday disappointment to record-breaking performance on Sunday in Marrakech will represent a more significant turning point in its season. It is clear the car is quick enough and the team competent enough to steer the ship back on course.

That said, each race that has ended in a zero will have injected a little more doubt and frustration, and that's not a great environment to be in. No wonder McNish calls Santiago "important", and why di Grassi's targets for next month are so simple.

"We need to sort out these problems, we need to start scoring points, we need to start having consistent results," di Grassi says. "We have the pace, we have the speed, we showed in Marrakech we are mega fast. Now, we need to start scoring points, not only me but also Daniel."

Di Grassi doesn't need to execute the seasonal equivalent of his shock last-to-first turnaround in Mexico City a year ago. Not yet, at least. If the FE season could be represented by an hour-glass, there are still plenty more grains of sand at the top than at the bottom.

Still, FE's red-hot pre-season favourite needs to stop blowing cold sooner rather than later. Otherwise it'll feel like those grains are falling a lot faster as time begins to run out.