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Jake Boxall-Legge

Jakarta E-Prix: Evans beats Vergne to win thriller in Indonesia

Evans broke the DS Techeetah stranglehold on the top two positions early on, helped by Antonio Felix da Costa's heavy lock-up on lap 4 - with the Portuguese driver's engineer telling him to adjust his brake balance afterwards.

This brought Evans into a battle with Vergne for victory, and the two traded places as they took their attack move activations, with Edoardo Mortara also in the mix as the Venturi driver elected to go later with his own doses of 250kW power.

As Evans tried to reel in Vergne, the Kiwi duly went longer with his second attack mode allocation and picked it up on the 25th lap, giving him the impetus to charge forwards.

Once Evans' attack mode had elapsed, he was within half a second of Vergne and continued to put pressure on the Frenchman, inching ever closer to his rear bumper.

The Jaguar driver then made an audacious move on Vergne on lap 32, lifting off later than his rival into Turn 7 and diving down the inside from seemingly nowhere, successfully emerging from the corner with the lead.

Evans then began to build a lead, but had to slow down in deference to both the 90-seconds added time tacked on after an early safety car - brought out for Oliver Rowland's missing wheel as the Mahindra driver retired on lap 2 - and his own ailing rear tyres.

This brought Vergne and Mortara into play for the lead, with the two-time champion arguably using his fanboost too early to try and leave Evans in his wake.

Start action (Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images)

But Evans crucially held on from that half-hearted assault, and absorbed late pressure from Vergne - whose energy consumption was worse off and eventually had to relent in the final corners.

Mortara hustled Vergne until the very end, largely matching Evans for energy, but wasn't able to get his lines right to shuffle the Techeetah driver out of the way.

Following on from his late attack mode strategies in Berlin, Mortara took a similar approach in Jakarta, despite many of the attack modes coming early while batteries were cooler to retain efficiency.

Although Mortara's final attack mode meant he lost a position to da Costa, he soon repassed the Season 6 champion to bring himself into victory contention - and ultimately slash his points disadvantage to championship leader Stoffel Vandoorne.

Da Costa thus missed out on the podium, over two seconds down the road from Mortara, as Vandoorne battled with him for fourth place.

Vandoorne had made his life more difficult with his second attack mode activation, where he failed to hit the timing loops and thus had to take the lesser-travelled line once more on the following lap.

He was nonetheless able to benefit from Jake Dennis ahead taking his second attack mode, and then put a move on Pascal Wehrlein to bring himself into fifth place.

Dennis collected sixth having been embroiled in multiple battles with the cars around him, and was only 0.6s shy of Vandoorne at the finish line.

Jake Dennis, Andretti Motorsport, BMW iFE.21 (Photo by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Images)

Lucas di Grassi collected more points for Venturi with seventh place, also on the back of the da Costa train, with Wehrlein three seconds adrift in eighth place.

Wehrlein had initially started brightly to recover from a five-place grid penalty, but lacked the legs in the final half of the race and dropped positions to both Dennis and di Grassi.

Sam Bird was promoted to ninth after Andre Lotterer was handed a five-second penalty for contact with Nyck de Vries, which sent the Dutch driver out of the race with a puncture to his left rear tyre.

Sebastien Buemi was thus elevated to 10th, after the Nissan driver had made his first duels appearance earlier in the weekend.

Formula E Jakarta E-Prix - Race results

Cla Driver Team Laps Time Gap Interval
1 New Zealand Mitch Evans United Kingdom Jaguar Racing 40 48'28.424    
2 France Jean-Eric Vergne France Techeetah 40 48'29.157 0.733 0.733
3 Switzerland Edoardo Mortara Monaco Venturi 40 48'29.391 0.967 0.234
4 Portugal Antonio Felix da Costa France Techeetah 40 48'31.774 3.350 2.383
5 Belgium Stoffel Vandoorne Germany Mercedes 40 48'32.462 4.038 0.688
6 United Kingdom Jake Dennis United States Andretti Autosport 40 48'33.059 4.635 0.597
7 Brazil Lucas di Grassi Monaco Venturi 40 48'33.677 5.253 0.618
8 Germany Pascal Wehrlein Germany Porsche Team 40 48'36.615 8.191 2.938
9 United Kingdom Sam Bird United Kingdom Jaguar Racing 40 48'41.772 13.348 5.157
10 Switzerland Sébastien Buemi France DAMS 40 48'43.190 14.766 1.418
11 Germany Andre Lotterer Germany Porsche Team 40 48'44.513 16.089 1.323
12 United Kingdom Oliver Turvey United Kingdom NIO Formula E Team 40 48'49.346 20.922 4.833
13 United States Oliver Askew United States Andretti Autosport 40 48'51.444 23.020 2.098
14 Germany Maximilian Gunther France DAMS 40 48'53.608 25.184 2.164
15 United Kingdom Alexander Sims India Mahindra Racing 40 48'57.944 29.520 4.336
16 New Zealand Nick Cassidy United Kingdom Virgin Racing 40 48'58.297 29.873 0.353
17 Netherlands Robin Frijns United Kingdom Virgin Racing 40 48'59.278 30.854 0.981
18 United Kingdom Dan Ticktum United Kingdom NIO Formula E Team 40 49'00.251 31.827 0.973
19 Brazil Sergio Sette Camara United States Dragon Racing 40 49'06.642 38.218 6.391
  Italy Antonio Giovinazzi United States Dragon Racing 35 43'02.568 5 Laps 5 Laps
  Netherlands Nyck de Vries Germany Mercedes 29 35'36.933 11 Laps 6 Laps
  United Kingdom Oliver Rowland India Mahindra Racing 1 1'25.403 39 Laps 28 Laps
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