Pascal Wehrlein took pole position for the Mexico City E-Prix on Saturday after coming out on top of a thrilling head-to-head battle with points leader Edoardo Mortara in Qualifying.
The Tag Heuer Porsche FE Team had shown pace all through Qualifying at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, with both Wehrlein and team-mate André Lotterer making it into the semi final stage, however Lotterer was eliminated by ROKiT Venturi Racing’s Mortara.
Mortara was gunning for his first pole position in the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship but came up just short, with his car appearing to be on edge on his final run, with the Swiss racer sliding across the line sideways after spinning.
This gave Wehrlein the chance to take pole position for the event that saw him lose the win on the run to the line to Lucas di Grassi after his energy ran out on the final lap back in 2019.
Wehrlein had dispatched DS Techeetah’s Jean-Éric Vergne in his semi-final, however, Lotterer’s time in his semi-final defeat to Mortara will see him line-up third on the grid ahead of the two-time champion.
Vergne had come out on top of his quarter final battle with team-mate António Félix da Costa, but the Portuguese racer’s time was good enough to see him qualify fifth, just ahead of Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team’s Nyck de Vries, who lost out to Lotterer in the first of the last eight battles.
Robin Frijns will line-up seventh for Envision Racing after being defeated in his semi-final by Mortara, while Stoffel Vandoorne was the slowest of the quarter finalists after coming off second best to eventual polesitter Wehrlein.
Nick Cassidy was the first of those to miss out on the knockout stages, with the second Envision Racing driver set to start ninth ahead of Nissan e.dams’ Maximilian Günther, while Jaguar TCS Racing’s Mitch Evans was disappointed to only be eleventh on the grid, although six places better than team-mate Sam Bird in seventeenth.
Oliver Askew was the best placed of the Avalanche Andretti Formula E Team drivers (and the leading rookie) in twelfth as Jake Dennis struggled to fifteenth, while Mahindra Racing duo Alexander Sims and Oliver Rowland were thirteenth and sixteenth respectively, the latter abandoning his final flying lap after locking up and running off track at turn one.
Another driver to struggle was di Grassi, with the Venturi Racing driver Qualifying only fourteenth, while another former champion Sébastien Buemi was only eighteenth in the second Nissan e.dams.
The field was rounded out by Dragon/Penske Autosport duo Antonio Giovinazzi and Sérgio Sette Câmara, and the NIO 333 FE Team pairing of Dan Ticktum and Oliver Turvey.
