The change that could define the FE season

Four races into the 2018 Formula 1 season and Lewis Hamilton has not scored a single point. In fact, his Mercedes team only has a paltry 12 on the board, thanks to a fifth and a 10th from Valtteri Bottas, who was excluded from victory in the second race of the year. The W09s have been brutally fast, but at least one has broken down at every race too.

Other blunders, by either team or driver, have conspired against Mercedes when the car has actually made it to the flag. Its horrific run has pitched Ferrari, Red Bull, McLaren and Renault into a shock four-way fight for the title.

A pretty ridiculous scenario to envisage for F1, right? Probably, yes. But not Formula E: it was exactly the saga facing Audi's first season as a works team before it finally hit back last weekend.

It says a lot about the wastefulness that blighted the Audi Sport Abt FE team's start to 2017/18 that it went to Mexico City last weekend just three points off the bottom of the championship table, then won the race at a relative canter.

Despite finally earning a win it could keep, after Daniel Abt lost his Hong Kong victory to an administrative error, ominously Audi now has the opportunity for a "fresh start" according to its erstwhile beleaguered reigning champion Lucas di Grassi. It has a renewed confidence, a spring in its step - and, terrifyingly for its opposition, apparently it finally has a reliability fix, too.

"It's very easy to say what broke, but it's why it happened. It took a bit of time before we could nail it because it was in a tricky wee area" Allan McNish

Audi has been allowed to re-homologate its inverter design on reliability grounds after four terrible opening races. The problem was so severe that di Grassi failed to score in any of those races and the team had to keep replacing its inverter - the FIA only permits one penalty-free change of powertrain components (motor, gearbox and inverter) a season, so di Grassi had 10-place grid penalties in Santiago and Mexico. It's been so bad that he has been on the back foot for the last two races well before even worrying that his car would conk out.

A legitimate question is a simple one: why has it taken Audi so long to identify the fix? It's understood that requesting a homologation change on safety or reliability grounds isn't exactly uncommon in FE... so why will it not have this fix until round six of 12?

"If you just rewind, with a sealed homologated unit the first time you know or can inspect is when it breaks," explains team principal Allan McNish. "Then ideally you would want to go to your other ones to check them, but you can't. So, you've got to have a couple of them [fail] to compare to be clear what it is.

"Having a broken part it's very easy to say what broke, but it's why it happened [that matters]. Unfortunately, it took a bit of time before we could nail it because it was in a tricky wee area."

What complicated the situation for Audi was that it was only di Grassi who was suffering the failures. As Abt's side of the garage was trouble-free, it was put down to a faulty component, finger trouble, or plain bad luck, rather than a fundamental problem with the homologated part.

"The homologation and sealing I actually agree with, but it does make it super difficult to resolve it if you have a problem," points out McNish. "Considering you have one side of the garage that has it and one side that doesn't, you want to be able to look at the inverters there - but you can't because if you look at them then you automatically get a 10-place grid penalty.

"You're in a difficult position where you can't actually do very much until you have a failure."

Even after determining the problem and working out a solution, Audi and Abt still couldn't do very much. It was not able to implement it for last weekend's Mexico City race because the FIA's technical regulations demand a minimum of 30 days between a request to modify a homologated part and its presentation at scrutineering before an event.

That meant it went to Mexico with a fragility that di Grassi said boiled down to a "50/50 chance that the car would finish". The funny, or threatening, thing is that Audi won without the fix, and if the next race in Punta del Este validates Audi's decision to re-homologate the inverter then its rivals should be running scared.

McNish admits that going to Mexico crossing his fingers the cars would finish, when a reliability fix had been identified but barred from being used, was an odd experience. As will going to Uruguay next week, given what happens at a race that was never meant to be on the 2017/18 calendar (it has replaced Sao Paulo) will now be crucial to the rest of the season.

If the next race in Punta del Este validates Audi's decision to re-homologate the inverter then its rivals should be running scared

"The smooth circuit [in Mexico] probably helped us a little bit - with everything we had done in Valencia, we did so many kilometres without a problem, it was a surprise when it [the failures] did come," he says.

"We go to Punta with a solution. I always wait until the chequered flag drops though, I've been in the game far too long to know you can't predict things, but we go to Punta in a different frame of mind.

"That's the important thing. We know we've got a bit of fight left in us for the rest of the season."

That's a menacing prospect given Mexico was the first time we saw an Audi driver have an untroubled race from start to finish, and Abt won comfortably. So, if the re-homologation has worked, and Audi now has consistent reliability to match its impressive performance, there could be further repeats of the Mexico result. And that throws a fascinating curveball at the championship battle.

Audi's FE rivals have been trying to make hay while the pre-season favourite got its act together, with Techeetah and Jean-Eric Vergne leading Felix Rosenqvist (Mahindra), Sam Bird (DS Virgin Racing) and Sebastien Buemi (Renault e.dams). Their collective failure to stamp their authority in Audi's absence has made the championship battle open, but also not put as much daylight between them and the wounded giant as they would have liked.

Had Abt not lost his Hong Kong win, his Mexico victory would have vaulted him to third in the championship, 19 points from the lead - instead, he finds himself 44 points behind in sixth. With seven races remaining and 203 points up for grabs, that is not an insurmountable deficit given the commanding nature of Abt's Mexico win. And this is another element that makes Audi's decision to re-homologate to important - there's still time to salvage its season, but any recovery will rest on that move paying off.

Punta will be a key litmus test. Both Audis will go there without penalties, because the re-homologation doesn't mean an illegal change of part, and the expectation if it runs smoothly will be for both to make the superpole segment of qualifying and both to challenge for the podium.

"We are not breaking the seals, which would then impact on it [by triggering a grid penalty]," explains McNish. "It's quite a sensitive area of the car anyway and a difficult area to try to explain - I'm not going to go into details for obvious reasons. We went through the process and decided 'that's the right way to go forward'.

"There's a penalty of time, because ideally we'd have liked it in Mexico. As it turned out it has been OK, but that's just good fortune. We'll be able to do the fix for Punta and hopefully that will be it."

Unlike in Mexico, di Grassi will be in the picture to take points off the current championship frontrunners. At the very least, he'll head to an FE round without the early setback of a grid penalty, but really this should be di Grassi's chance to finally inject some life into his title defence.

He has at least got points on the board after a dramatic Mexico race in which he started from the back, rose to 14th while saving a lap's extra energy than those around him, took a five-second time penalty in the pits, half-spun after hitting Jose Maria Lopez at Turn 1, then grabbed his first top-10 finish of the season in a hectic final two laps that included more contact with Maro Engel.

"For me it's a fresh start in my mind and in the team," says di Grassi. "Now we have the possibility to push hard from Punta."

Di Grassi's chances of back-to-back titles are not mathematically zero, but the reality is his focus has now switched to racking up more wins than anyone else over the remaining races. That is a tantalising prospect in itself, but the consequence of Audi's re-homologation will be part of a much bigger picture.

Either Audi is about to catapult itself into contention for every race victory on offer, thrusting Abt into the title fight and putting di Grassi as a very unwelcome distraction for the other championship challengers. Or it will be another promise of a reliability fix unfulfilled, which will mean further frustrations and pressures for the team and its drivers.

Punta del Este will be fascinating whatever the outcome. The championship's substitute race now has much more significance than anyone could ever have imagined.