The redemption of a 'destroyed' F1 outcast

Many different story lines made up the 2017/18 Formula E season, but none stole the show quite as much as the redemption of Jean-Eric Vergne.

The Teechetah racer claimed his first FE title at last weekend's New York finale, following it up with a walk-off win by holding off Audi's Lucas di Grassi in the second race.

Vergne's triumph was his first since he won the 2010 British Formula 3 title. In the intervening years, he'd climbed the junior ladder all the way to Formula 1 as part of Red Bull's famously cut-throat junior programme. He found out just how ruthless the energy drinks giant could be, as, after three seasons at Toro Rosso, during which he compared well against future grand prix winner Daniel Ricciardo on occasion, Vergne was shown the door.

It was messy, too. First Ricciardo was promoted to Red Bull's senior team following Mark Webber's retirement at the end of 2013. Then, when Sebastian Vettel departed for Ferrari at the end of '14, Red Bull picked Vergne's rookie team-mate - Daniil Kvyat - for promotion. Any chance of him remaining alongside the incoming Max Verstappen for '15 were dashed when Carlos Sainz Jr was given his F1 bow at the Frenchman's expense.

"I wouldn't call what happened to me in F1 unfair," he says now. "Whatever the decision of Red Bull, justified or not justified, it's not the point. The point is that Kvyat got the Red Bull seat and I didn't. While I was clearly better than him - I mean with the points, Toro Rosso had all the data.

"They knew how many DNFs I'd had [in 2014] because of the engine and so on. From that point when I left F1 I was highly frustrated, I had a lot of anger, a lot of sadness - I was full of bad emotions. And I think everything I attracted was negative.

"I had no faith or trust in Red Bull the day they took Kvyat when I had a lot more points than him. It really hurt me and destroyed me, and I was very lost after that."

Feeling full of terrible emotions, Vergne shot out of the F1 exit door and went straight through another entrance at FE. He arrived in that paddock for the third round of the inaugural season in Punta del Este, just three weeks after his final F1 race, to drive for the Andretti squad.

"I got help from good people and I was able to slowly climb back to become a better version of what I was before I arrived in F1" Jean-Eric Vergne

By most accounts he was difficult to deal with, and initially struggled with the unique demands of the electric championship, particularly when it came to energy management. But he made an instant impression. Pole on his debut in Punta was followed by a wild race that ultimately ended with suspension failure.

Vergne finished the season with Andretti - securing two more front row grid spots in Miami and Moscow - and then moved to join (his 2017/18 title rival) Sam Bird at Virgin, which had just entered into a partnership with French manufacturer DS, for season two.

Although Vergne took one more pole, his relationship with the team reportedly soured after a disagreement with its management at that season's round in Buenos Aires and he clashed with Bird on track in Paris.

As well as dealing with the fallout of his F1 exit, Vergne says he was surrounded by "all the wrong people" in his personal life.

"I guess I touched the bottom," he says. "Thought I was never going to recover from it. [But] I got help from good people and I was able to slowly climb back to become a better version of what I was before I arrived in F1."

FE's third season brought a third new seat for Vergne, this time at the Techeetah squad that had risen out of the former Team Aguri outfit. He took a stake in the team, too, and set out helping to build it up. From there, things picked up massively.

Although he had to wait until the Montreal season finale to take a breakthrough FE win, Vergne was a regular contender for victories and finished a then-best fifth in the drivers' championship. A new 'JEV' began to emerge.

"Coming into Techeetah is what really changed me," he says. "Being in both sides of the team, building of the team and driver, really taught me to step back and look at what a team really wanted from a driver. And I guess I learnt a lot - I learnt a lot of how to be inside a team with the mechanics, with the engineers - up to which point you can push them, and to always be easy on them when it's a good time to be. It taught me massively. I'm a lot more settled - private life, professional life."

Vergne's 2017/18 campaign was a masterclass. Not only did he score the most wins of any driver this season, he did not finish lower than 10th and did not have a single retirement.

He did profit from Audi's reliability implosion at the start of the season and the off-colour campaign produced by Sebastien Buemi and his Renault e.dams squad, but a driver can only beat the opposition set before them. Another motorsport cliche, that titles are won on off days, also applies to Vergne's campaign thanks to his consistency and ability to recover from the occasional bad qualifying.

There were a few errors. 17th on the grid in Zurich was a down note - although when asked to clarify exactly what went wrong there he points to his position as the first driver to run first in group one - and he was extremely fortunate to take pole in Punta.

After he'd clattered the wall in superpole there and wound up fifth, three drivers in front of him were penalised for touching a bollard beyond track limits at the fast chicane and were demoted, while Mitch Evans was thrown out of qualifying for running a battery with incorrect weight distribution.

But Vergne still had to keep a determined di Grassi at bay for the duration of that race without destroying his energy levels. That he did so, with magnificent defensive driving as well, at the venue of his first infamous FE appearance demonstrated how far he'd come.

"One of my biggest weakness in the past in Formula E was energy management, and that has now become my biggest strength," he explains. "I have done it in the past in karting. I was absolutely terrible in the rain, but I was lucky enough to live by a karting track, so every time it was raining I would drive on slick tyres in the wet.

"We started from the worst team in Formula E. This team had no soul" Vergne

"And then, when you go on wet tyres in the wet, it changed my life and all of a sudden I became very quick and driving in the wet became my biggest strength. In Formula E, I guess I used the tools that are at my disposal, which [at Techeetah this season] was the simulator.

"I asked the team, before leaving for New York, how many days I have spent in the simulator this season, and [it's] 65. Starting from eight and sometimes finishing at 11. In the past, we were just doing race sim [preparation], but how I became better in energy efficiency was just [by] doing a lot of race simulation. And by trying, observing everything - how to regenerate, how to push hard to overtake - I guess I have done all the simulation possible.

"I'm very tired this year because I've put a lot of energy that I sort of didn't have in me into trying to be better as a driver. But also to help the team and build a confidence at every level inside."

The old Vergne is still very much there, if much deeper down, as evidenced by his swift exit, headphones-on, from the Techeetah garage after being thrown out of qualifying in New York. Both he and team-mate Andre Lotterer were found to have exceeded the maximum permitted power during the group qualifying.

Vergne stalked from the paddock, "very angry at first because my lap was the best I've done this year". He arrived at the team/FE crew catering unit in the Red Hook port ferry and cruise terminal where a friend made a joke. That distraction and laughter reset his perspective and Vergne was able to refocus and plan his charge from 18th on the grid to finish fifth in the race, clinching the title with a race to spare as Bird came home ninth.

He has learned how to stop the fog of fury from consuming him and how to banish it for good over a single issue. But Vergne has learned other qualities too, which have helped him in his successful quest to land the FE title. First, he learned how to be a leader - a fierce one, at times, if needed.

"We started from the worst team of Formula E," he says. "It is a lot of pressure on the guys and I am the first one putting pressure on them. This team had no soul - and what I was trying to put is the soul of motivated hard working [people], and the wanting to win kind of soul - that kind of mentality.

"It has been difficult - if you have to stay until 10 o'clock to work and some people are tired and want to go home then I have arguments. So sometimes it was a bit fractious but if at the end the day we win then everybody forgets and I will move forward and we are all happy."

Another tactic Vergne has adopted to improve Techeetah and boost his own performance has been his willingness to help Lotterer - an FE 'rookie', despite three Le Mans wins and a career going back to 1998.

"Every little [bit of] advice I had about Formula E I gave it to him, because I believed that one day, in any way, I would get it back," Vergne explains. "But I didn't do it for that, I did it also for the team, for the team spirit. I think 99% of drivers want to kill their team-mates. After this year, I don't think that's the way it should be."

Vergne's chemistry with Lotterer has been on display throughout the season - and they get on well, despite the risk of a falling out when they collided in Santiago. Vergne certainly did get his decision to help the German driver repaid.

In Paris, Lotterer pushed Bird hard in a bid to help protect Vergne's race lead during the early stages and then defended forcefully against a late di Grassi charge. In New York, he went a step further, fulfilling his promise to aid his team-mate's title bid by obeying a team order and letting him move into the fifth place that gave him the title in race one.

"I'm not Fernando Alonso. In my case, I have to work my way up into LMP1" Vergne

"It's a give and take and JEV helped me a lot at the beginning of the year to get up to speed," says Lotterer. "[He] gave me all the tips and so considering that and how the team has been nice to me and got me onboard and helped me with everything, it's a complete no-brainer for me to be a team-player. I come from endurance sport and it's what we do.

"If you are not winning a championship, it doesn't change my life much if I give a position up or down so I'm happy I could play my part. From the middle of the season on, the speed was pretty good and in Paris I defended quite strongly so he was having an easy life in front."

As well as boosting his chances in FE, Vergne had another reason to be seen as a team player.

After winning the Paris ePrix in April, Vergne won the World Endurance Championship LMP2 class at Spa with the G-Drive team one week later, then helped the same squad win the European Le Mans Series race at Monza the following weekend, and then finished third in FE's Berlin round.

He capped it all with a Le Mans LMP2 class victory for the G-Drive squad. He and team-mates Roman Rusinov and Andrea Pizzitola utterly dominated that race, but they were stripped of the result as the team had apparently used an illegal device to speed up refuelling stops - a decision it is currently appealing.

Vergne's desire to do well at Le Mans stems from the World Endurance Championship LMP1 test he took part in for Toyota in 2015. Reports suggest he was one of the quickest drivers the Japanese manufacturer ran at Paul Ricard but it apparently could not get past the problem of his attitude, which Vergne acknowledges and now wants to put right. He wants to win Le Mans outright in the future.

"The whole point for me to do Le Mans in a good team this year was to prove that I could win a 24-hour race," he says. "Especially Le Mans - quick in traffic, not doing any mistakes and being able to be a team player, which is probably not the image I have coming into endurance racing.

"I did it to buy myself an image and hopefully [can] get a good seat in LMP1 to try and be able to win the overall Le Mans, which is definitely a target.

"I'm not Fernando Alonso. In my case, I have to work my way up into LMP1 the same way I did to go to Formula 1 and that's the reason why I need to prove to the paddock that I can win in LMP2 and that I can be fast in sportscars - reliable and a team player.

"When I did my test with Toyota when I left Toro Rosso, I was definitely at the worst part of my career. I was mentally down and very depressed. And they probably felt that I wasn't going to be a team player and that I wanted to show the world that I had anger and wanted to prove that everybody was wrong.

"Maybe they were right - I don't know. It was even harder, not to get the Toyota seat in LMP1. Kamui Kobayashi got it.

"So, I took the lessons from losing F1 and losing the LMP1 seat and I had to restart, reset everything, and prove to people that I can change and prove that I can also work. I hope that's what I've shown."

"The last four months - racing every weekend, commentating on Formula 1... I'm not so sure I can do that again" Vergne

He certainly has. Outgoing champion di Grassi paid tribute to Vergne's performances over the last eight months following his triumph in the race won by the Audi driver last Saturday. Each FE season has finished with a new champion and with Vergne's triumph, the category's big three - Buemi, di Grassi, Bird (the only one without a title) - has surely now become the big four.

So, after all he put into winning FE in season four, can he do it all again?

"Now that the team is a lot more established, I guess I'm going to have less energy to put in the team and probably more on myself, so I will be fine," he says. "But the last four months - racing every weekend in the European Le Mans Series, WEC, Le Mans, Formula E, commentating on Formula 1... honestly I'm not so sure I can do [that] again.

"But maybe I will do it again, if I can win the WEC next year and [do] Le Mans in a good team and still be in the best Formula E team, yeah, then I will do it. Because I'm young, I have the physique to do it, and more importantly I have the motivation and the love for motorsport."

From hitting the bottom and rising to redemption in three-and-a-half years. That's quite a journey.