The TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team swept back into the lead of the teams’ championship with a superb double podium finish in atrocious weather in China.
Bouncing back from a difficult Saturday, Pascal Wehrlein finished second ahead of António Félix da Costa in Sunday’s race to retake the teams’ lead from Nissan with five rounds remaining.
Those results also put the pair second and third, with Wehrlein ahead, in the drivers’ world championship heading into the final stages of the 2024-25 season.
The story of the races
Sunday’s performance at Shanghai International Circuit was the boost the Porsche team needed after a disappointing opening day.
Race One was the first time the Pit Boost fast-charging pitstop format had been used at a track that also required the extreme energy-saving style known as ‘peloton’ racing.
This is where the field stays in a huge pack trying to slipstream from the cars ahead for much of the distance to ensure they have sufficient energy to charge later on.
The combination of pitstop timing, energy-saving packs and the two mandatory attack mode boosts created a highly complex strategic race that the Porsche drivers came out narrowly on the wrong side of.
Though defending world champion Wehrlein and da Costa were within four seconds of the podium, they were left 12th and 13th in the tight queue of cars after a bruising race.
But the duo more than made up for that in Sunday’s wet conditions.
Practice and qualifying were both delayed and truncated due to the appalling weather, but da Costa and Wehrlein coped superbly to secure second and third on the grid.
The usual duels format for qualifying was abandoned due to the delays, with the field split into two groups instead and each group forming one side of the grid, and da Costa topped his group while Wehrlein was second in group A.
The timetable had initially been brought forward by two hours in the hope of finding a clearer weather window but the ongoing rain and level of standing water then forced delays and a long period behind the safety car at the start.
Once racing began, the Porsche pair pulled away from the field behind, swapping places early on as their different attack mode strategies unfolded.
They handled the extremely slippery conditions masterfully to finish second and third with Wehrlein ahead.
Customer racing
Dan Ticktum of the Cupra Kiro team was again the standout performer in the Porsche customer ranks, producing an incredible drive on Saturday to come from 19th on the grid to run as high as second.
Having had a difficult qualifying session, Ticktum saved as much energy as he could early on to set himself up for a late surge up the field and pulled it off brilliantly.
He was running second approaching the final corner, before an aggressive pass by Jean-Eric Vergne sent him down to fourth.
Andretti’s Nico Müller fared best of the other Porsche drivers in the wet on Sunday, picking his way up the top 10 places to finish sixth having been 15th on Saturday.
His teammate Jake Dennis and Ticktum’s teammate David Beckmann both qualified in the top 10 for race one but were elbowed down the field in the frenetic race and finished outside the points in 14th (Beckmann) and 17th (Dennis).
Dennis had to settle for 17th again in race two, where Ticktum was 16th and Beckmann 20th, all having had a tough time in the extremely wet qualifying season then struggled to make up ground in the heavy spray.
Coming next
The last of the ‘flyaway’ rounds of the Formula E calendar is next up, with a single race on the streets of Jakarta on June 21 before the cars return to Europe for the title deciding quartet of races across Berlin and London in July.
