On 14 January, the members of the DS Penske team had little time to congratulate themselves after Jean-Eric Vergne and Stoffel Vandoorne finished 6th and 8th respectively in Mexico City. No sooner had the race debrief been completed than the team's engineers left the circuit to catch the first plane back to Paris. Why such a rush?
"For some of our strategists, leaving Mexico on Saturday night was the only way they could be in the office on Monday morning," says DS Performance Director Eugenio Franzetti. "When two races are only a weekend apart, we have at best five or six days of work before we have to set off again for the next round. After Mexico City, the first race of the season, there was an incompressible time of around three days to analyse the data so as not to leave anything to chance. This work is vital if we are to improve our cars and make them even better in the future.
"At the same time, we needed to prepare for this weekend, which mobilised another part of our resources. Last week, our simulator was in constant use. Firstly with our test drivers to fine-tune the mapping, then with Jean-Eric and Stoffel, who worked flat out on Thursday and Friday to get to grips with the Diriyah track. After that, everyone had a weekend off, and then we had to fly to Riyadh at the start of the week.”
Drivers in good spirits
It's true that Vergne and Vandoorne showed in Mexico that the DS E-TENSE FE23s were up to the task, with good potential against the Jaguars and Porsches, the same enemies as last season.
"I'm very happy with what my car gave me in the first race, especially as I know we had the potential to do better," said Vergne. “In Mexico City, the way the day went meant that I wasn't able to exploit my car's full potential. But after all the work we put in last week, and given the configuration of the Diriyah circuit, we're arriving confident and very determined.”
This confidence may also come from a team composition that will be more usual for the two DS Penske regulars, with Vandoorne continuing to build his relationship with his new race engineer, and Vergne reuniting with his 'historic' race engineer who was absent in Mexico. Will this meticulous preparation and unfailing motivation enable the Franco-American team to get close to or even climb onto the podium this weekend? The first clues will come on Friday evening, at the end of the first of the two races.
In Diriyah, the temperature variations will certainly be smaller than in Mexico, but the fact that practice and qualifying will take place during the day, while the race will take place once the sun has set, is nevertheless a special feature. In both cases, the start will be given at 6.03pm local time, or 4.03pm in Europe.
