Buemi: Broken steering wheel paddle caused Santiago Formula E penalty

After he left the season-opening races in Riyadh without scoring, Buemi qualified sixth from the final qualifying group and finished seventh on the road after an up-and-down race in the Chilean capital.

But he a converted drivethrough penalty for breaching Article 3.1 of FE's sporting rules - because his "power out of [the battery did] not respect the homologated throttle pedal map giving the power (Pedal, RPM)", per the relevant FIA bulletin - added 30-seconds to his race time.

The penalty dropped him to 13th in the final results.

"[I was] disappointed to get the penalty because I finished seventh in the end," Buemi told Autosport.

"It was a bad race, we had lots of issues and one of the regen paddles of the steering wheel basically broke in two pieces.

"I lost three positions because the regen paddle got stuck. And because of that I power exceeded [and got a penalty].

"So, I lose three places, the steering wheel breaks, and I have to survive the rest of the race. "In the end I finished P7 and I get the 30s penalty. Tough one."

When asked what had caused the paddle to break, Buemi said: "I think it was maybe a bit old or maybe the stopper was maybe not there.

"So you pull it and you pull it and then the carbon was bending and bending until it broke."

Buemi led much of the 2019 Santiago race from pole position before he crashed out, and he says his lack of progress up the order in the '20 event was due to losing out at the start and the Nissan squad running "on an extra lap [energy target] compared to the others".

"So, once we decided to remove a lap, it kind of got better," he added.

"Until then we were very slow obviously."

Buemi recovered from a low-key start to his 2018-19 championship to eventually finish second in the standings behind Jean-Eric Vergne, but a year later he remains on zero points after three races - 15 behind his total at this stage last season.

"It's bad," Buemi said of his current championship position.

"I'm very disappointed because even P7 kind of had to be you know, to go away with six points.

"But it's like that. We move on, we go to the next one and we'll see."

In another cockpit-related issue, Jaguar's Mitch Evans says a lack of energy information on his dash display early in the Santiago E-Prix led to overconsuming and his eventual slide out of the lead.

Evans scored his first pole of the 2019-20 season - and the second of his FE career - and led the first 18 laps of last weekend's race in the Chilean capital.

But although his grip on the lead looked secure in the early stages, Jaguar's pre-mediated plan for Evans to take his two attack mode activations early - on laps eight and 13 of what became a 40-tour event - meant he was vulnerable to attack from eventual race winner Maximillian Guenther.

Evans ultimately finished fourth on the road, but was promoted back to third thanks to Nyck de Vries' immediate post-race penalty.

After the race, Evans explained that a "software problem" meant he was getting "no guidance from the energy software" during the race's initial laps.

"So I was going blind for the first few laps," he continued to Autosport.

"I was trying to do my best, but that made me overconsume. And then I was fighting that for the rest of the race.

"I was at one point 1.5-2% down on some of the guys. And I didn't really recover from that.

"And then yeah, I just couldn't get on top of the race and manage it. There were some software problems I have never experienced before."

After losing out to BMW Andretti driver Guenther and DS Techeetah's Antonio Felix da Costa (as well as de Vries), Evans says Jaguar has "got some hard work to do" on its race pace.