Mystery Monday: Sébastien Buemi – Winning the Formula E title makes up – a little bit – for the Le Mans heartache

Le Mans was one of those moments when you don’t really know why you’re racing. I remember thinking when the Porsche pitted five minutes from the end that they’d given up on the win. I said to my team-mate Kazuki Nakajima, ‘you can take it easy’, and the next second he was saying he had no power. When you lose a 24-hour race just three minutes from the end, it’s very difficult as a team to accept defeat and even more challenging to get back out there and try to win it again. Thankfully, I had Formula E soon after, which was clearly something good! We were leading Le Mans this year, so we’re definitely going to look to win it next year.

Regarding the Formula E finale, what happened as a result of the incident with Lucas di Grassi on the first lap certainly wasn’t the way I wanted to win the title! I’ve had to answer a lot of questions about the incident over the past week but I pushed as hard as I could to exit in front of him because, this way, I knew he’d have found it difficult to keep following me.

Instead, I looked in my mirror and he was coming very quickly – there was no way we were going to avoid an accident. Then, once we were in the barrier together, I just had to keep thinking about the fastest lap – that was the only thing we had to think about after that. I think it’s a shame, especially considering all we had and how well the car was performing but that’s motorsport and you have to move on – things like this happen.

Despite what happened, Formula E is a great race series, but it’s difficult to compare it to any others. With the format of the weekend, the differences in the cars and the new race circuits, it’s not easy as a race driver in Formula E! During a race, we – as drivers – have to save a huge amount of energy, much more than Formula 1 and WEC. Yes, it’s a bit different but it certainly deserves a place in motorsport and it’s a pleasure to be part of the Championship.

Looking to the future of the series, we’ll start to see changes. Regulations are pushing how batteries are used with more power and more breaking regeneration. This means we’ll only have one car – not two like before. The future looks very interesting and, unlike in other race series, we’re not spending money, time and effort on developing technology that’s not bringing the world much benefit! We’re using the engineers and all the money to produce something that will one day translate into normal road cars.

Images courtesy of FIA Formula E