With Gen3 dawning, riders Edoardo Mortara and Maximilian Günther gained invaluable insight in the Season 9 opener, showing promising initial pace after an encouraging pre-season test.
Edo moved up to 15th on the first lap by passing McLaren’s Rene Rast, although the race was quickly halted when a collision by Robin Frijns brought out the safety car.
The action resumed on lap five, but was stopped again a lap later when Jaguar’s Sam Bird had a technical failure. In lap nine the field went green again.
Edo and Max passed a penalized Dan Ticktum at the restart, while the latter also passed Rast, who activated Attack Mode to take 15th place.
On lap 18, an unfortunate spin and collision caused by understeer forced Edo to retire, leaving Max the team’s sole driver for the remainder of the race.
With a late activation of Attack Mode, the German pilot made good progress to threaten for points in the final laps, passing DS Penske’s Jean-Eric Vergne on the final Tour to take 11th place.
formula EThe ninth season of continues on January 27th and 28th with a double header event at the Riyadh Street Circuit in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Diriyah.
In her words
James Rossiter, Team Principal, Maserati MSG Racing
“It was a difficult day, but in motorsport you learn the most from your bad days, not your good ones. Bad qualifying put us behind but in the race we were able to come back strong with Max battling from 17th to 11th, finishing just outside of the points. Edo showed really strong pace throughout the race and his turn one incident was unfortunate. It’s a shame because his pace was great. We have a lot to learn and process a lot of data from this weekend to be better prepared for the next race in Diriyah.”
