Mortara turns up the heat on Formula E title rivals in Marrakech scorcher

Formula E wasn’t even supposed to go to Marrakech this year. The championship, instead, was looking forward to its first trip to Vancouver – and its return to Canada for the first time since 2017. Intended to be the centrepiece of an e-tech festival on the bank of Vancouver’s False Creek, the race instead proved to be a false dawn. Organiser OSS Group was unable to secure the necessary permits to stage the race, and it was thus postponed to 2023. And then quietly cancelled entirely.

Marrakech hence had to sub at short notice. Formula E CEO Jamie Reigle remarked that the circuit was left pretty much as-was at its last event pre-COVID, with the old signage still hanging around the semi-permanent facilities. The only real difference was the time of year; races in Morocco’s fourth-largest city were usually held in January or February, assuring that the cars would get far milder climes compared to a scorchfest at the top of July. Helpfully, the teams had already plenty of data from a hot and humid Jakarta. 

Before race day, Mahindra’s Oliver Rowland suggested that battery and tyre management would be even more drastic in Morocco than last time out in Indonesia. “You’ll see a really different race,” he predicted. As it turns out, Rowland might have a career in soothsaying if the racing stuff doesn’t work out long-term. It came to pass that the race played out with varying and surprising strategy picks – but ultimately, it yielded a very familiar winner in Edoardo Mortara.

Practice offered very little insight into how the competitive order would shake up, as FP1 – uncharacteristically held on Friday morning – was nothing more than a glorified track cleaning session. FP2, meanwhile, proffered that DS Techeetah pair Antonio Felix da Costa and Jean-Eric Vergne would once more be involved in some shape of form among the frontguard action – but there was very little else to draw from it. There was certainly little to indicate that the championship leader would hit strife that morning.

As it happened, Stoffel Vandoorne had a nightmarish qualifying with a severe braking problem. Vandoorne estimated that, usually, a driver pushes between 60-65 bar of pressure on the pedal to stop the car ready for the corner. He was managing about half that and the brakes were beginning to lock at every conceivable opportunity. “It wasn’t a nice car to drive in qualifying, let’s put it that way,” the Belgian rued, saved only from the back row of the grid by Andre Lotterer losing his lap times in the qualifying group for failing to do a time in the first six minutes. 

Vandoorne suffered continual brake trouble during practice and qualifying

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

To make matters worse for Vandoorne, his three key title rivals all claimed places in the duels. Mortara topped Group A, while Mitch Evans and Vergne both made it out of Group B accosted by Pascal Wehrlein and da Costa. Mortara was drawn against Evans and managed to make a semi-finals spot, drawn against Wehrlein as the Porsche driver beat Envision’s Nick Cassidy to the punch in their duel.

The DS Techeetahs both had an Andretti to contend with in their quarter-final bouts; Vergne cleared Jake Dennis to make his way through, while da Costa ended Oliver Askew’s first appearance in the final eight to ensure one DS machine would get through to the final. It proved to be da Costa by a mere 0.024 seconds, booking his place in the final duel with Mortara – who had dispatched Wehrlein. 

On the Friday, da Costa had already admitted that “my championship is pretty much done” and was willing to play the team game for the rest of the year, albeit still targeting poles and wins to make up for a difficult season in the meantime. And so, da Costa’s first pole of the year was achieved by just 0.081s over Mortara, having built an advantage in the opening two sectors to hold off any late charge from the Venturi driver in the final sector. Naturally, the 2019-20 champion hoped to convert that into a first win of the year. 

"We thought we had it well under control, at least believed that we could win. I think ultimately, Edo and Venturi, they had a bit more than us" Antonio Felix da Costa

And it looked good – for the first eight laps, at least. Rowland’s prediction that a “different race” was in the offing proved to be right on the money, as there was none of the usual trademark rush to enter energy-saving modes at the start. Instead, the plan for many revolved around battery management: take attack mode early while the battery is at its coolest, try to get the moves done early on, and then delay the energy saving for the middle portion of the event. That way, the battery doesn’t ‘de-rate’ and slash the overall efficiency of the energy transfer.

Both da Costa and Vergne demonstrated DS Techeetah’s willingness to get the moves done early. Da Costa kept ahead of Mortara at the start and looked in command at the front, before taking an early first attack mode on lap five of 34, giving Mortara the lead. The Swiss responded on the following lap, returning da Costa to the front as Mortara retained second.

For Marrakech, the attack mode duration was only pegged at three minutes. Having just run out of his own 250kW mode at the start of lap eight, da Costa dipped off-line again for his second and final hit. This time, Mortara did not respond immediately. Instead, he hung it out until lap 10 before caving and grabbing his second activation. That proved crucial, as Mortara had built enough of an advantage to return to the racing line ahead of da Costa. 

Mortara's use of attack mode provided him with an early edge against da Costa

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Techeetah then had to brace itself from an assault from Evans, who had further delayed his second attack mode and picked his way past Vergne and subsequently da Costa. Evans’s job had been made harder at the start, as Wehrlein was particularly difficult to pass at the start owing to his Porsche inexplicably dropping into a low-power mode that rendered him a sitting duck in the opening phase of the race. Acknowledging that, he had to sink some of his tyre life and energy into catching up once he’d passed Wehrlein, Evans had hauled himself out of a tight spot. 

Once the Jaguar had leaped above the Techeetah cars, however, Evans failed to kick on and reel Mortara in. Last year’s championship runner-up has proven his class at managing a race while in the lead, and set to work stitching together a sequence of laps that Evans couldn’t match in the long-term. Thus, the Kiwi was left susceptible to a renewed charge from da Costa and Vergne once the two had decided to save a little bit of energy. Of the two black-and-gold cars, Vergne’s machine had more charge and, once Evans was dealt with once more, the team opted to employ team orders to get Vergne ahead, with the intent of using his extra energy to hunt down and pass Mortara.

Vergne complied with the first part, getting to within a second of the Venturi, but hit a brick wall in trying to make any further inroads. Thanks to Vandoorne’s qualifying misfortune, Mortara or Vergne were set to pick up the championship lead if either of them won, so the stakes were decidedly high. But try as he might, Vergne wasn’t able to put sustained pressure on Mortara and, with da Costa right in his wheel-tracks, Techeetah decided to swap them again. 

Under da Costa’s tenure, Mortara came under considerably more attack in the final stages, the gap brought down to just half a second in the final stages. But no attempt for a pass came. With Mortara resolute, da Costa had to lift off the accelerator to get to the end, conceding defeat in a race that he felt he could have won. Although he thought that Techeetah had approached the race largely in the right way, da Costa felt that the team kept giving Mortara “a breather” and allowed the Geneva native to ultimately consolidate the win. 

“We thought we had it well under control, at least believed that we could win,” da Costa said. “I think ultimately, Edo and Venturi, they had a bit more than us. My race was compromised by a few things here and there, with Rowland nearly hitting me and I almost lost the car there, and Edo went to the attack mode and came back in front, and then the switch of positions with JEV as well.

“So we always kept giving him a bit of a breather to control this race the way he wanted. At the end we wanted to make the race hard for him and see if we could pull the rabbit out of the hat.”

Da Costa felt Techeetah's race strategy gave Mortara too much of a gap to defend his lead in the closing stages

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

Techeetah also lost a double podium at the end, as Evans nipped past Vergne on the final lap on the run to Turn 3 after the Parisian lifted surprisingly early to try and manage battery temperatures. Admitting it was a “hairy” moment as Evans’s closing speed was significantly higher, the Kiwi was simply pleased to collect a podium. “I knew I was probably going to get him, it was just a matter of where, and he just lifted very early,” Evans said of his pass. “He thought I was going to go to the right, he covered a while and then I went to the left and it was a bit late for him. It was a bit spontaneous, a bit hairy but got it done – I’m still here, alive and breathing, so it’s all good.” 

Just 15 points separates returning leader Mortara and the fourth-placed Evans – and just six races remain

After a second consecutive horror show for Robin Frijns, who’d been well within the championship battle before Envision’s difficulties in hot weather came to bear, Formula E’s title fight remains a tightly contested four-way shootout. Just 15 points separates returning leader Mortara and the fourth-placed Evans – and just six races remain across the New York, London and Seoul double-headers. It’s the business end of the season now, and Mortara’s stock is now highest in a fluctuating market.

Mortara regained the Formula E championship lead with three rounds and six races to go

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images