The 28-year-old Briton struggled to make ground in the season-opener in what turned out to be something of a processional affair at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez circuit.
This in part was due to energy management not being as critical as on other circuits and meant Dennis’s starting position of 14th put him on the back foot at the beginning of his title defence.
“The front is always a bit easier to overtake because it’s a lot more spread out and everyone is a little bit more cautious but when you’re in the pack and there’s 10 cars together you can’t really do too much,” Dennis told Motorsport.com.
“Bit difficult but I think we made the best of a bad situation from qualifying. I think P5 was there for the taking if we got the strategy right but ultimately we didn’t.”
Issues with braking were the primary reason for Dennis’s struggles in qualifying as he finished seventh in his group after running wide at the Turn 5 hairpin on his final run.
But despite the error, he was only 0.235s off the fastest time and believes his true pace was masked in the race because of how difficult it was to overtake.
“Just not enough confidence under braking was our biggest issue,” said Dennis.
“We’ve been struggling with that since Friday FP1 and we’ve paid the price in qualifying.
“It was not so good and when you start that far back you’re always going to have a difficult race and ultimately a P9 was the maximum we could do.
“We had really good energy, really good pace but you just can’t pass so it was a pretty dull race for everyone I think.”
Porsche driver Pascal Wehrlein took a commanding victory in the Mexico City E-Prix, although both he and Dennis were investigated post-race for an allegedly ‘not respecting the homologated primary throttle pedal map’ before the stewards took no further action.
Despite his own poor result, Dennis was left confident that he and Porsche customer team Andretti could replicate the performance of Wehrlein and the factory team moving forward.
“We’re driving the same car to a certain extent,” he said.
“We just need to analyse where they were better than us this weekend but it’s obviously great to see a Porsche win because it gives us confidence that we continue the forward momentum of season 9 into season 10.”
