Mitch Evans had low expectations coming into the Berlin E-Prix weekend. Using the two races as a chance to learn as much as possible ahead of next season, with his focus already on the next year despite then putting his Jaguar on pole.
Despite being in contention for the Formula E title last year, Season 11 has been far from ideal with one win in the first round of the season. However, since his time on the top step in São Paulo, Evans has failed to score points.
With just two rounds left in the season it was clear that Evans eyes are already on the next year. He told FFN ahead of the weekend, “That’s what I’m going to use the last four races for, is just get a better platform that I’m comfortable with, hopefully find a lot more performance to go into next season with a better package.”
“We’ve been on the back foot all season. In basically all conditions, especially the dry. We’ve been consistently a few tenths off the top guys. We’ve been trying a lot of things to try to bridge that gap. We haven’t been able to quite hit it the way we want, but we’ll continue to experiment even this weekend.”
Evans wasn’t shy in telling us how much of a ‘disaster’ this season had been for the Kiwi. He said, “Obviously, this season for me has been a disaster for all different reasons. Performance, reliability, getting caught up in stuff, sometimes quite a bit of bad luck. Try not to dwell on it too much, but my main focus now is just making sure we’re good for next year.”
Hope for the rain
With the rain coming down in qualifying and delaying the day Mitch Evans was honest on what effect or benefit the rain could give Jaguar with mixed results in the past.
“Honestly, every time we’ve had wet conditions. It’s been a real mixed bag on performance. I think up and down the grid. You see some guys super strong at one track in the wet, and then the next weekend they’re towards the back.”
“Every time I’ve been good in the wet, in Tokyo I had to contact with debris. It’s hard to predict. Yes, it throws chaos. But it just makes it very unpredictable.”
Evans largely benefitted from the chaos in qualifying taking pole with a huge margin. He found himself surprised at the performance behind the wheel of the Jaguar. However, even with the rain benefitting him, before the weekend he admitted that the dry race will take the role of experimenting time.
He told FFN, “I think for our learnings, we prefer it to be dry, because some of the stuff we’re trying to experiment with, but you can’t control it. I think Saturday looks pretty certain it’s going to be wet. Sunday looking more dry, but the forecast seems to be changing quite often. So we’ll see what we get tomorrow.”
Before qualifying
Ahead of qualifying, Evans was reminded of his win around Berlin two years ago and if it gave him hope for the performance he could find on track.
However, he remained pessimistic, “Other tracks this season that I’ve won at in the past, we were not so competitive. It’s always nice to come back to races or venues that you’ve won at before, but since we came here in Season 3, it’s been a track that’s been so up and down for us, so it’s really hard to predict anything.”
“But on the basis of how we’ve been going this year. I think it may be a little bit trickier than other years. But yet again, we’re trying to find ways of getting more pace from the car. Honestly, I’ve got no idea. It could be great, it could be horrible.”
The Kiwi joked that he was ‘hoping for the best’ which turned out to play in his favour. Despite all his pessimism the Jaguar driver took pole with the wet conditions not only working with the car but putting him one second clear of the rest of the field.
With the rain still coming down for the race, if he can carry the performance from qualifying into the race he’s in with a good chance at having his best result of the calendar year. Far from the pessimistic picture he painted on Friday.
