Vitantonio Liuzzi and Salvador Duran will miss this weekend’s season opener of the FIA Formula E championship at Beijing after their Trulli Formula E Team had an issue with the delivery of its powertrain to the venue.
The team had opted to transport the powertrains to China themselves rather than with the remainder of the Formula E teams in an effort to solve the issues that had caused them to complete no timed laps during pre-season testing, but delays in customs meant they were unable to make it into scrutineering in time, breaching the sporting regulations.
Trulli initially had until 3pm local time to bring their cars to scrutineering, and this was later revised until 8pm to allow them more time, but they have now been removed from the entry list after failing to make this revised time.
“We are very sorry to announce that we, unfortunately, won’t be able to compete in tomorrow’s race as our engines and inverters are still at the Beijing customs, which has made it impossible for us to complete our cars in time for today’s scrutineering and therefore we will not be able to participate in tomorrow’s race,” said a statement from Team Principal Lucio Cavuto.
“We would like to thank the FIA marshals for kindly extending the scrutineering deadline last minute. And we would also like to thank FEH and NEXTEV Team China for their support and help with the Chinese customs the last couple of days.
“We are now going to ask DHL Motorsport to handle our engines and inverters in customs, to be sent together with the rest of the team’s boxes so that they all get transported to Malaysia.
“Now we focus on Putrayaja and to ensure that this incident will never happen again.”
