Two very different races played out in Jeddah as Formula E staged its first double-header weekend of the 2025-26 season.
Who extracted the most from them and who might as well not have bothered turning up?
Here's Sam Smith's pick of winners and losers.
Winner: Jaguar
There was a milestone win for Jaguar newbie Antonio Felix da Costa in the second 2026 Jeddah E-Prix, one that came with a neat sequencing quirk.
Winning on his fifth start for Jaguar was exactly what he did at previous teams DS Techeetah (in Marrakesh in 2019) and Porsche (in Cape Town in 2023). But there was much more to his Jeddah weekend than just coincidental statistics.
After being taken out of contention in each of his first three starts - having clearly been the innocent party in two of those incidents - the 2019-20 champion took a solid fifth place on Friday then followed it with a conclusive win on Saturday, to push Jaguar up to second in the teams' standings.
Consider that after the first two races Jaguar was point-less and propping up the standings, the last two race weekends have been a remarkable turnaround. Now momentum is with this team and a nicely fizzing fuse is starting to burn into Porsche's healthy early lead as the European leg of the season approaches next month.
Da Costa's win was a result of strong pace and sound strategy, with two four-minute hits of the attack mode.
His team boss Ian James told The Race: "There was a lot of discussion going on in terms of what the right strategy would be and it was by no means clear-cut.
"That's why I think you saw different strategies playing out across the teams.
"It worked for us, and I think the timing of taking those attack modes was absolutely crucial, especially the second one. The gap that Antonio built up was super important just to protect us from what was going on behind."
Team-mate Mitch Evans drove an an aggressive and well-judged race on Friday race to go from 10th to third. But Saturday brought frustration in qualifying when he missed the duels again - he missed Friday's by 0.001s! - due to a peculiar incident as, according to James, an apparent small error might have triggered a glitch.
"I think he hit the kerb in Turn 6, and came down fairly hard," reported James.
"I think his foot just touched the brake. It's as simple as that, looking at the data. What we need to understand is whether the car then reacted in the way that we'd expect it to react, or whether there's any kind of other issue underlying this."
Evans's race was again strong from his lowly 13th on the grid. But he was unable to quite get into the group behind his victorious team-mate and settled for a fighting seventh place after getting stuck when the race went full tilt.
Winner: Porsche
Pascal Wehrlein's first win for 10 months came in emphatic style when he crushed the opposition with a devastating display on Friday.
The 2024 champion pulled off several crucial moves that had team boss Florian Modlinger and his wider engineering team in a kind of rapture.
"When we came closer and closer to the pit window, the moves he made to go into P2 and to overtake [Norman] Nato to be P1 there saw us react in changing the strategy," Modlinger told The Race.
"If he would have sat in P2 or P3, we would have done a different strategy than being in P1. And then the natural pace in 300kW [mode] was so strong, that we had time to react with pit boost and later with attack mode too. That is where everything paid off and it was impressive."
Nico Mueller took a solid fourth place, although this might have been third had the team reacted a little quicker to Evans exiting the pits and actually informed Mueller to push a bit harder.
That combined results, of 38 points, gave Porsche a 50-point lead in the teams’ standings midway through the weekend, and meant the 109 it accrued in the first four races was their best-ever start to a season since entering in 2019.
Loser: Also Porsche
If Friday was fertile, Saturday was much more on the barren side for Porsche - as only four points, for Wehrlein's dogged run to eighth, were forthcoming. The championship points leader never looked anywhere near as comfortable as he had just 24 hours earlier and his whole day was a struggle for gaining optimum grip.
Mueller suffered much more and starting a lowly 16th meaning he had to go for a risky, ultra-energy-saving strategy, "anticipating a possible neutralisation at the end of the race" according to Modlinger.
This didn't come to save Mueller, who lost his 100% points-scoring record at the start of the season and his factory Porsche career. Instead, he finished where he started amid a flurry of confusion and questions about where the pace had gone.
Winner: Cupra Kiro
It was all about Saturday for Cupra Kiro in Jeddah.
The first half of the weekend was one to forget as the team failed to utilise the attack mode on Dan Ticktum's Porsche because it didn't pre-empt the four-minute rolling average procedure.
That largely consigned Ticktum to a frustrated 12th, while team-mate Pepe Marti had a scrappy time of it, including swiping Zane Maloney out of the race and only being able to take a distant 14th.
A day later and Kiro was a much sharper proposition, with Ticktum just missing out on the duels by 0.060s to Jean-Eric Vergne's Citroen. But he built a very strong challenge in the race, in which he was a genuine contender for a podium until being usurped by the energy-rich Rowland and Mortara and settling for fifth.
Ticktum told The Race he felt the team could have taken a bit more "risk" with its attack mode usage but that he was "pretty happy with my performance".
"I also got some cheap overtakes done in the [energy] saving phase which was helpful and managed to save a little bit to others around. And it was just overall a well-managed race for myself and the team," he added.
Marti had a strong run too and came through from 14th to sixth, just behind Ticktum, despite telling The Race he was "a bit too naive in the saving phase" which meant he was "passed by many, many drivers".
Loser: Also Kiro
Apart from its abject Friday, Kiro also had a lot of internal mopping up to do when it came to Marti lunging at Ticktum and causing several Kiro hearts to flutter in the final laps.
Team principal Russell O'Hagan reckoned the incident was "70/30" Marti's culpability, although there were some serious caveats too to consider on that.
"We talked it through very briefly in the debrief," Marti told The Race.
"He [Ticktum] had no knowledge that I had more energy, and I had no knowledge that he didn't know. I just went for a move which I thought was OK and obviously he defended, which was fair from him.
"No hard feelings from my side. The last thing you want is to end the race of your team-mate."
The question that was clear to all who witnessed it was could the team have managed the final laps much better? The answer appeared to be a resounding yes they could and should have been.
"You can always manage situations better," was Marti's opinion. "You can manage situations like walking down the stairs better.
"It's very hard to know how much energy each car has. Are you really going to have a chance to overtake cars in front? It's very hard to quantify everything in two minutes, which is two laps around here.
"Obviously, we can talk things through, but it was the first time we've encountered each other on track and nothing bad happened."
That was a lucid enough argument but it also felt a bit on the flimsy side. There have been suspicions that Kiro is way too short on resources to be a regular and consistent frontrunner in Formula E.
This incident felt like more fuel to that theory, as it was a failure in just simple and effective and clear communication. Team principal Russell O'Hagan didn't disagree on that and was happy to take any flack in the fallout.
"It's something we knew was coming, we were discussing and then it just reached a point before we'd expected it to," O'Hagan told The Race.
"The buck stops with me; we've got to make sure that can never even get close to happening again. It's a new problem, it's not a problem we've had before, a good one to have, but not one we can ever afford to have again."
And Ticktum? He is known to have torn a sizeable strip off his team-mate immediately after the race but appeared not to let it fester when he spoke to The Race an hour after the altercation.
"I did have a pop at him, but it's all resolved and water under the bridge," said Ticktum.
"I get it, but look, if it was the other way round, I wouldn't have done that, even if it was not my team-mate; it was just too risky. At that stage of the race, I think he thought he had a bit more energy than me but we were all nearly at full push anyway, or very close to at that point.
"I've just warned him to not do that again."
Loser: Pepe Marti
Marti has been the major pleasant surprise of the season so far with several eye-catching performances. That they have come after his spectacular aerobatics on his debut in Sao Paulo makes them all the more noteworthy.
Although he drove a very strong race in Jeddah on Saturday, it will be overshadowed to an extent by some needless comments on his radio immediately after his hopeful lunge on Ticktum.
"We need to have a serious talk, I don't accept that," said Marti. "I may be a rookie but I’m not a retard. That is a retard move."
That poor choice of language was followed by an immediate apology on the radio, publicly via the team's official press release, and then on Marti's social media too.
It was dealt with swiftly and rightly condemned by both team and the perpetrator, which was clearly the only course of action to take after a very poor choice of words by the usually well-spoken Marti.
Loser: Andretti
After a tough home fixture in Miami a fortnight ago, Andretti needed a big pick-me-up in Jeddah.
It didn't get it. Although it looked to be close when Jake Dennis qualified on the front row for race two, despite perhaps overdriving a little on his final qualifying lap versus Mortara.
In the first half of the race, Dennis looked very handy on energy, albeit perhaps a little exposed by getting shuffled down the order into the 'danger zone'.
Still, there was definitely the possibility of a podium - until, that was, he was inadvertently tagged by Maloney's attack-mode-weaponised Lola. Fate dealt Dennis a rotten and freakish hand as the contact just snagged the valve on his left-front wheel and caused a puncture.
Prior to that, Dennis had sent a mayday of sorts to the team in what was ultimately a vain attempt for the Porsche cars of himself, Ticktum and Wehrlein to work together.
"If we’ve got any brain cells with Kiro and Porsche, this is the moment we can actually save some energy. We've got three cars together," he told his engineer, Sean McGill.
That never really materialised and Dennis came away from Jeddah with another single point, knowing that is far from enough to even be considered good enough from a double-header.
In the background, Andretti struggled with understanding a perceived discrepancy in Dennis's tyre allocation and it seemed to set a tone for an irritable weekend. It was also one in which its other car barely featured, which was surprising considering what felt like some kind of breakthrough performance in Miami for Felipe Drugovich.
Winner: Edoardo Mortara
Mortara has been absolutely mighty this season so far. He looks like a driver who will definitely win races this season and at present that should come soon and quench the drought since his last win in Seoul in August 2022.
He was the undisputed qualifying king in Jeddah, bagging six points for a pair of sumptuous laps to defeat Maximilian Guenther and Jake Dennis respectively in the two finals with a car that looked to be in the tastiest of sweet spots.
A dodgy getaway in Friday's race, when he appeared to botch the start procedure a little after team-mate Nyck de Vries caused the start to be delayed, was overcome with a superbly collected drive to second place.
His Mahindra was handling excellently but it was also not as affected by the rolling average of power rule. This was brought in at the start of last season to help protect the battery and Mahindra seems to have adapted to it particularly well. Others around him had to manage this much more than Mortara, who clearly had some useful tools in his car to help manage his power delivery from the rear axle.
A crack at runaway leader Wehrlein was a step too far, though, despite slicing into the Porsche driver's lead when he got into second.
A day later and another pole; except this time the start was less crucial as a more pack-racing-orientated format played out. But Mortara had a strong race to fourth - though he felt it was "solid" and nothing more.
Loser: Nyck de Vries
As lost weekends go this was akin to John Lennon's infamous and epic 1974 Hollywood industrial drinking bender with Harry Nilsson, Alice Cooper and Keith Moon.
Yet for De Vries, the culpability within it was very slight. He struggled for pace in qualifying, yes, but his inverter getting cooked on Friday and the subsequent 60-place grid penalty for the replacement of two MGUs and a microcontroller ruined his Saturday, as no safety car came to his aid.
"We always needed a safety car and it didn't happen so what else can I say?" De Vries told The Race.
"Obviously Friday's troubles compromised the whole weekend. We’ve had quite a few setbacks from the start of the weekend and it was one of those [weekends] that didn't really work."
That's an early nomination for understatement of the season, right there. Mahindra now needs to manage the hangover if it is to avoid being complicit in De Vries being cut completely adrift of his team-mate from a championship-points perspective. (De Vries is 13th with 12 points, 50 behind Mortara - whose strong weekend elevated him to second overall.)
While the points gathered in by Mortara were strong, De Vries' nightmare meant an overnight slip from second to third in the teams' standings.
Loser: The Stellantis teams (again)
For a second successive event, the quartet of Citroen and DS Penske cars flattered to deceive.
Between them, they scored just 16 points. To put that into perspective, the four Jaguar-powered cars scooped 80.
DS Penske had pace, particularly with Guenther, but through strategic missteps he couldn't translate that into points.
Meanwhile Taylor Barnard rued baffling inconsistency with his car, telling The Race: "If I'm honest, I don't think I've had much pace all week.
"I know I qualified P5 [on Friday] but to be honest that was a really good lap. I have not felt strong all week and the main issue has been that the car is not turning the same left and right.
"There is absolutely nothing we can do. We do as much testing, screening programmes - whatever you want to call it - for all the tyres. We do as much as we can, but still have these problems...It's out of our control."
The best tyre window Barnard got all weekend was a mix and match of Hankook sets. He effectively chased his own tail all weekend and it was little surprise to see him dejected and confused at the end of it all with just one point to show for his efforts.
Guenther had more obvious pace than his team-mate on both days but was rendered relatively inert on Friday when, despite being one of the quickest out on track, the aforementioned flawed strategy played out.
"With Max we anticipated that a lot of people would attack at the start of the window and we weren't aggressive, we wanted to be aggressive with the one car and it didn't work out," DS Penske deputy team principal and technical lead Phil Charles told The Race.
Basically, DS Penske was a victim of its own aggressiveness by splitting its strategy.
"It's as simple as that in Formula E, you just have a little hesitation for a second and it can bite you badly, and so in both cars' case we got out of position and then it was very difficult."
Citroen had mediocre pace all through the weekend, although it was at least able to salvage three point scores from four starts compared to DS Penske's one.
A furious Nick Cassidy let his team know just how wrong Saturday's strategy was as his attack modes were completely mistimed late on. A day earlier, it was a much less volatile post-race scene as he had at least been able to enjoy a clean race, where he probably achieved the maximum in seventh relative to the pace he had at his disposal.
Vergne took away a fighting ninth on Saturday, which followed on from a quietly efficient run to eighth the day before. But the double-champion will have been expecting much more than just peripheral points finishes in the first quarter of the season.
"We were in a good position to start the race, but we just didn't get it right," summarised team principal Cyril Blais.
"We were surprised by the pace of the race at the beginning. We were a bit in the no-man's land, where we don't want to be right at the front, you want to be right at the end, but we were in the middle and couldn't save energy, couldn't really make up positions."
Winner: Sebastien Buemi
Buemi's weekend got off to a fitful start as he and Envision became befuddled by tyre anomalies which left them scratching their heads to explain what they described as struggles with varying grip on their allocated sets of Hankooks.
His Friday race run was strong, especially on strategy, where he and his team managed rising battery temperatures towards the end of the race. This earned him seventh as he utilised a late attack mode to split the Citroen drivers.
But a more lucrative drive came on Saturday, when he qualified a strong seventh before going aggressive and taking the lead in the early stages, something which he looked comfortable doing in conjunction with his energy consumption and spend.
"I didn't necessarily want to lead, but the problem was as soon as I was not P1 or P2, it was a jungle out there," Buemi, who finished second, told The Race. "I would have easily got a puncture or removed half of the front wing.
"And at some point I was able to under-consume, not as much as da Costa, but I was able to under-consume nicely in the lead.
"So, I said, 'You know what, I'm going to the front because at least I'm out of trouble there'. Then at some point, Edo [Edoardo Mortara] kind of accelerated and it stretched a bit the field and then it was a lot easier."
Buemi is in excellent form just now. If Envision can help him sustain it then don't discount Formula E's wily elder statesman from becoming a surprise factor in the title race this season.
from The Race https://ift.tt/AEuTPNn
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