Formula E‘s home, Donington Park, saw the final test day finish with a familiar feel as Sebastien Buemi continued his dominance of the test timesheets, with four out of the five sessions topped by the Frenchman.
Not only did Buemi finish first with a 1min 31.792secs lap, but the e.Dams-Renault team were able to enjoy strong results across the team, with Nico Prost also finishing highly, his best time of 1min 32.117secs equaling second overall.
“We’re really happy with today, especially being the last test before Beijing,” said Buemi. “We still have a few issues with the car which we need to work on and also to better understand the limits of the car. Overall we’re feeling good for the first race but we’ll have to wait and see, a lot of teams are also looking quick.”
Outside of the French team, there was a fellow Frenchman in third, with Franck Montagny of the Andretti Autosport team rounding off the top three with a time of 1min 32.143secs.
Meanwhile, Bruno Senna ended the day fourth fastest for Mahindra Racing ahead of Virgin Racing‘s Sam Bird, who just edged ahead of Audi Sport Abt’s Lucas di Grassi into fifth place.
Karun Chandhok was next for Mahindra ahead of Dragon Racing‘s Jerome d’Ambrosio and Venturi’s Stephane Sarrazin. Nick Heidfeld rounded out the top 10 in the second Venturi car, with all of the top ten covered by less than a second.
While the day was yet again relatively fair weather, the drivers did have a new challenge in high winds which affected the series’ Renault-Spark cars.
“The wind was pushing quite a lot,” said Montagny. “But it’s the same for everyone and we can’t change it, we just have to work with it and try to find a solution.”
The weather was a challenge for the more experienced of drivers, but for Chinese racer Ho-Pin Tung he had one of his own as he made his Formula E test debut for China Racing.
Not only was there new challenges on the track, but there was the fruits of innovation too with Qualcomm announcing the Qualcomm Halo technology, a form of wireless charging that will aid the running of the course cars.
In a similar vein, the BMW i8 and i3 were tested by the technical teams as they evaluated them ahead of the yet to be announced final specification of the course car.
With the five test days complete, the next time the Formula E cars will be in action will be at the Beijing ePrix in September.
